Pierre Boucher and the 1803 edition of La science des négocians: accounting in the Republic

Abstract

In 1803, Pierre Boucher of Bordeaux, France, published the second edition of an accounting textbook, La science des négocians et teneurs de livres, with sections on agricultural, nautical, and merchant accounting, an extensive commercial dictionary, discussions of accounting terminology and corrections, and numerous journal entries. Boucher's books appeared at a time of enormous change in French accounting, tracking momentous economic growth. Using the framework of new institutional economics, we argue that Boucher's work contributed to technical improvements in business records that permitted the lowering of transaction costs, at a time when such improvements could bring high returns in the merchandising and agricultural sectors.

Keywords:

• Boucher
• La Porte
• French accounting
• French Republic
• agricultural accounting
• maritime accounting

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful comments of Jim McKinney and other participants at the April 2008 meeting of the Academy of Accounting Historians and the Public Interest section of the American Accounting Association in Arlington, Virginia, as well as the comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

The Banque de prêt sur Nantissement in Bordeaux; see his signature and title in his 1798 pamphlet, Banque de prêt.

See the catalogs of the Bibliothèque Nationale and WorldCat.

See, for example, the summer 2000 issue of French Historical Studies.

The author of this book is often mis-identified as Anselme Payen, son of Jean-Baptiste. Anselme was eight years old in 1817 when the book was published (Nikitin 1996, 123).

According to Degos and Prat (2007, 15), such copying was not a crime in Boucher's time.

Note that this title echoes other well-known books available in Boucher's day, such as Le Parfait négociant (Savary 1675), Le Parfait Ingénieur (Deidier 1757), and Ferrière's 1682 work, commonly known as Le parfait notaire.

See, for example, Institution au droit maritime (Boucher 1803a).

Bibliographic entries sometimes date this work as 1764. We use the 1771 date determined by McWatters and Lemarchand (2006, 9).

See Reymondin (1909) and Vlaemminck (1956) for exceptions. Stevelinck (1970) is more typical; he makes only passing references to Boucher when discussing other authors.