Other Lives But Mine

by Emmanuel Carrère

  That autumn, I went twice to Vienne to wander around the courthouse. It’s a handsome seventeenth-century building that dominates a small square featuring the Roman temple of Augustus and Livia, the pride of the city. When I was not “in court,” as I caught myself saying one day, I met with judges, clerks, and lawyers to whom Étienne had spoken on my behalf. I questioned them about what exactly a juge d’instance does, about the way in which Juliette and Étienne had done it, and they asked me about what exactly I was planning to do with all that. A pious homage to my late sister-in-law? A report on French justice? A diatribe about debt management? I didn’t know what to tell them. I did feel they were touched to see a writer take an interest in the tribunaux d’instance, which don’t intrigue many people, but they were also wary. Étienne’s name wasn’t opening doors as widely as I’d hoped. When I called (at his suggestion) the woman who’d replaced him when he later left his position, I told her I hoped to spend a week or two closely observing the court in session. She replied that an internship could not be set up just like that. I hadn’t mentioned any internship and was simply being polite, informing her I would be attending sessions generally open to the public, but as often happens when one foolishly requests an authorization one doesn’t need, I got a whole song and dance: she couldn’t assume responsibility for such approval, I had to contact the president of the court of appeal. And why not the keeper of the seals? joked Étienne, using a title held by the French minister of justice, and not surprised at all. I realized that the shadow of her predecessor loomed large over the new mistress of the premises, who must have seen me in some way as his spy, an emissary from the emperor come to stir up ghosts amid the Restoration.

  I wound up doing something like an internship anyway and confirmed what Étienne had said: that a juge d’instance is the judicial equivalent of a neighborhood doctor. Overdue rents, evictions, garnished salaries, guardianships for handicapped or elderly people, lawsuits involving less than ten thousand euros (anything above that belongs in the tribunal de grande instance, which occupies a more elegant part of the courthouse). Anyone frequenting the court of assizes or even the criminal court would admit that the civil matters handled by the tribunal d’instance are meager indeed. Everything is petty there: the wrongs, the stakes, the reparations. Most people there are poor, true, though their poverty hasn’t yet slid into criminality. The judge is mired in daily life, with struggling people whose difficulties are both ordinary and insurmountable, people who don’t even show up in court, as a rule, and neither does their lawyer because they don’t have one, so the judge simply sends them the verdict via registered letter, which half the time they don’t dare go get at the post office.

  The daily fare of the sentencing judge in the North was the delinquency of seropositive drug addicts. For the civil magistrate in Vienne, it’s disputes over expenditures and debt. Vienne, as I said, is a bourgeois city, and Isère is hardly the poorest of French départements, but in just a few weeks Étienne realized he was living in a world where people were collapsing beneath their debts with no way out. In civil courtrooms, a little matter of a party wall or water damage was even welcome because it provided a break from the monotonous procession of lending institutions—banks and specialized credit companies—hauling debtors into court.

  Neither life nor his studies had prepared Étienne for this form of social misfortune. The only time one of his professors at the ENM had spoken of consumer protection law, it was with ironic disdain, as if it concerned idiots who signed contracts without reading them and whom only a popularity-seeking politician would try helping. The foundation of civil law, the textbooks say, is the contract. And the foundation of the contract is the free will and equality of the parties involved. No one should enter into a contract unwillingly; those who do must accept the consequences—then they’ll be more careful the next time. Étienne hadn’t needed eight years up in Béthune to learn that people are neither free nor equal, but he remained attached to the idea (otherwise he wouldn’t have been a jurist) that contracts should be respected. Raised in a middle-class environment, he had never known financial hardship. He and Nathalie had a joint checking account, a savings passbook, life insurance, and had taken out a loan to buy their apartment (repaid via monthly automatic deductions), a loan large enough so they could always afford to take a vacation. All Étienne knew about revolving credit was that his Fnac card, he’d been told, allowed him to charge items and pay for them the following month, but he preferred to pay cash for his books and records, treating himself to a few more of them thanks to his bonus points. Sometimes, but rarely, since he didn’t leave much of a paper trail, he would receive in the mail brochures from consumer credit companies. “Dip into your cash account whenever you like,” said Sofinco. “Treat yourself today,” offered Finaref. “Need money? Fast?” asked Cofidis. “Take advantage now,” urged Cofinoga. Étienne just threw them away.

  Now that he’d seen people who signed such offers passing through his courtroom, Étienne took a good look at those brochures. He discovered how easy it is to persuade the poor that, even though they’re poor, they can buy themselves a washing machine, a car, a Nintendo console for the kids, or simply something to eat, and to persuade them that they’ll be able to pay the money back later and that it won’t cost them anything more than if they’d paid cash up front. Unlike the more regulated and less costly loans issued by traditional banks, these contracts are concluded in an instant: just sign at the bottom of the brochure, which is labeled a “preapproved offer.” You can do the same thing at the cash register. The card you get is valid right away and automatically renewed; you withdraw what you want, when you want—which gives the agreeable impression of receiving free money, an impression the wording of the terms does nothing to dispel. Nothing is said about a loan, it’s a “cash account”; credit isn’t mentioned, only “ease of payment.” Example: “You need three thousand euros? How does three thousand euros for one euro per month sound? Well, chère Madame, you’re in luck, because as a loyal customer—of our store, of our mail-order department—you’ve been approved for an absolutely exceptional offer. As of today, you can request a credit reserve for up to 3,000 euros.” The exorbitantly high cost of this loan appears in tiny print on the back of the offer, whether you notice it or not (mostly not), and anyway you sign because when you have no money this is the only way to buy what you need, or maybe even just want, because even when you’re poor you want things, that’s the tragedy. In a situation where banks would have the prudence to say no, the consumer credit companies always say yes; that’s why bankers always obligingly send them any customers in the red. The agencies don’t care if you’re already deep in debt. They don’t check anything: sign the offer, spend, that’s all they ask. Everything’s fine as long as you make your monthly payment, or rather, payments, because the nature of this kind of credit is to multiply, so you wind up with a dozen of these cards. The day inevitably comes when missed payments overwhelm you and the credit company takes you to court, demanding collection of the sums owed, plus the interest stipulated in the contract, plus the late fees also stipulated in the contract, and it adds up to much more than you’d ever imagined.

  One trial, that year, garnered lots of attention. A couple was earning 2,600 euros a month, he as a construction worker, she as a health care aide. They tried to kill themselves and their five children because after twelve years of their living on credit, with six bank accounts, twenty-one revolving credit accounts, fifteen ATM cards, and debts of almost 250,000 euros, their creditors had turned on them. Reminder letters for payment had replaced the engaging offers, and since everyone was attacking them at once, it was impossible to play one loan against another or open a new account to buy some time. The jig was up. One last card, not yet refused, bought new clothes so the children would arrive properly dressed in the next world, which their father imagined with sinister candor as “the same, but without debts.” The collective suicide failed; only one of the girls succumbed. In
the court of assizes, the father got fifteen years and the mother ten. The affair upset the entire nation. It’s a pathetic case, Étienne tells me, but not really a good example, because the Cartier family essentially used credit to live beyond their means. They bought a television and a game console for each child, top-of-the-line appliances; they kept buying new cars, new furniture, new appliances; they signed up for and subscribed to everything—in short, they were obviously suckers for any salesperson who walked through the door. Sociologists call such people “active” compulsive debtors, and the hard times brought on by the recent financial crisis have meant that they are now outnumbered by a flood of “passive” debtors, who cannot be accused of excessive consumption and carelessly managed credit because their extreme poverty simply means they have no choice: they must borrow, to fill their shopping carts with noodles and potatoes. They’ve lost their jobs and are barely surviving on benefits, or they’re single mothers with no qualifications and no prospects beyond perhaps—in the best of cases—finding part-time work that is precarious, poorly paid, and, perversely, financially less advantageous than scraping along as before on whatever help can be found. These people have only debts and no money to pay them. The desk of any juge d’instance is stacked high with their files.

  And what does he do, the juge d’instance? In theory, he doesn’t have too much leeway. He can certainly see that on one side there’s a poor guy in a stranglehold, on the other a big business with no feelings, but it’s not the job of big business to have feelings and it isn’t the judge’s, either. Between the poor guy and the big business, there’s a contract, and the judge’s job is to enforce this contract, either by making the debtor pay or by attaching his assets. The problem is that the debtor is usually insolvent and not even attachable, since he possesses what is absolutely necessary for survival. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this impasse sent the delinquent to debtors’ prison, an institution abandoned not for humanitarian reasons but because the upkeep of the prisoners fell to their creditors, not the state, and economic interest eventually outweighed the satisfaction of seeing the guilty punished. Today there is another solution, the overindebtedness commission.

  Étienne was still at the ENM in 1989 when the Neiertz Law created these administrative commissions throughout the country to resolve the problem of runaway consumer debt. For Étienne’s professor, who equated consumer protection law with undeserved assistance for imbeciles, this was mind-boggling, unheard-of, and judicially scandalous: a law granting the right not to pay one’s debts. That was not the object, in theory; the idea was to determine what the overindebted could pay if they tightened their belts as far as they could and to offer them, and their creditors, a debt management plan. In reality, after all the juggling with grace periods, reports, and restructuring, the result was inevitably debt write-off, and this recognition was reaffirmed by another law, passed fifteen years later, when the situation was even worse. Named after its sponsor, the minister for employment, social cohesion, and housing, the Borloo Law of January 2005 instituted a “rehabilitation plan” that extended most of the terms and protections of commercial bankruptcy to individuals, meaning that if upon review of their dossier their situation is deemed “irremediably compromised” (a diagnosis that is fiendishly difficult to determine), their debts are simply written off, and tough luck for their creditors.

  Although this development was still in the future when Étienne arrived in Vienne in 1997, consumer associations and some legislators on both the left and the right were actively fighting along those same lines against the lobbying of consumer credit companies, citing the example of Alsace and Moselle, where such provisions had long been the law without the world coming to an end. Their cause was strengthened in 1998 when the Aubry Law legalized partial debt write-off in certain cases, a procedure increasingly favored by the overindebtedness commissions. Were these decisions implemented by the judges? That depended on the judge and on his philosophy of law and life.

  I attended a few hearings on overindebtedness in Vienne, presided over by a judge named Jean-Pierre Rieux, Juliette’s predecessor, who also filled in for her in the interim after her death. Étienne had worked with him for two years and spoke of him with affection: You’ll see, he’s the opposite of me, but he knows where he is. “He knows where he is” is the highest compliment Étienne can pay. At first I didn’t really get what he meant, but now I understand better, probably because I better understand where I am. Fiftyish, sturdy, a former rugby player, a teacher who became a magistrate late in the game and entered the profession by the back door, Jean-Pierre likes to remind people that until 1958 a juge d’instance was called a justice of the peace. That’s how he sees his job: conciliation, helping people come to an arrangement among themselves. One of the things Jean-Pierre loved, which is fast disappearing because no one has time for it anymore, is the court’s visit to the premises. A plaintiff tells you that the electric gate installed by the Whatsit Company doesn’t work. What do you do? You go look at the gate. You get your car, take along your clerk, call up the Whatsit Company so they’ll be there too, and with any luck you work out an agreement, get it signed on the spot, then everyone goes off for a drink. This direct approach was not Étienne’s style. He was not fond of visiting the premises. What he loved, or rather, what he came to love, was pure law, the subtlety of judicial reasoning, whereas Jean-Pierre describes himself as more of a pragmatist. The law, he says with a shrug, I don’t know; I just don’t want people to get too badly screwed.

  Hearings on overindebtedness, unlike other civil hearings, take place not in the main courtroom but in a small room dubbed the library because a few law books sit around on a shelf there. Formal decorum is not observed; the clerk wears a robe and the traditional white neck cloth, but the judge is in shirtsleeves. You might think you were in the office of the National Employment Bureau or some other social service agency, and what you’d see and hear there would seem to fit that bill.

  The situation has only a few variations. A dossier has been submitted to the overindebtedness commission, which may have declared it inadmissible, and that decision is being contested. Or the dossier may have been declared admissible, the commission may have put together a repayment schedule, but one or more creditors may be contesting the schedule because it diminishes or even annuls their claim. Or the commission has found the dossier admissible, there is no disagreement about the repayment plan, and the juge d’instance has only to give it final approval.

  Before the clerk brings in the debtor, Jean-Paul glances at the cover of the file, which lists the creditors. The length of the list allows him to gauge the extent of the problem. In Mme A.’s case, he nods: he’s seen worse.

  Forty-five, obese, stuffed into a green and mauve tracksuit, her short hair plastered to her forehead, wearing large fantasy eye-glasses with fluorescent accents, Mme A. is obviously in a tight spot. Questioning her, Jean-Pierre does his best to be reassuring. Cordial, friendly, he says, We’ll see what we can do, and his attitude alone indicates that something will indeed be done. Mme A. earns 950 euros a month as a hospital aide; she has two children of four and six in her care; she receives child benefits and a rent subsidy, but since she’s started working the subsidy has been reduced and now covers only a third of her rent. Her situation became critical three years earlier when she got divorced, because her expenses then doubled. When Jean-Pierre asks if she has a car, she senses danger because a car’s an asset that can be seized, and she hurriedly explains that she absolutely needs her car to get to work. Jean-Pierre replies that her car will not be touched, it’s over ten years old anyway and pardon him for saying so, but it’s worthless. And child care—do you pay someone to watch your children? Yes, admits Mme A., as if she were ashamed.

  On the basis of the information gleaned, the commission has calculated the percentage of her earnings that can be applied to the repayment of her debts: 57 euros a month. The debts in question, what with taxes, the Public Housing Company of
Vienne (her landlord), the Crédit Municipal de Lyon, and the credit companies of France-Finances and Cofinoga, amount to 8,675 euros. The commission has done the math: she can, in ten years, repay 6,840 euros at the most. The commission offers to write off the remaining 1,835 euros. The problem is to determine who will suffer the loss. The income tax authorities have priority, that’s the law. Next comes the public housing office in Vienne, a social welfare creditor there’s no point in ruining. And so Crédit Municipal, France-Finances, and Cofinoga will take the fall.

  The commission has informed all three of its decision; two have not replied, which means they agree. France-Finances, however, is contesting the decision, and Mme A. is very worried because they’ve sent her a nasty letter telling her that they know she can pay even though she says she can’t. You have the letter? asks Jean-Pierre. Sniffling, Mme A. rummages through the plastic folder she has clung to desperately since she arrived. She hands the letter to Jean-Pierre, who glances at it, then asks her if anyone has been to see her neighbors or phoned her at work. Yes. Right, says Jean-Pierre. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to hand down my decision in two months, that’s the rule, but you I’m going to tell today. I will follow the commission’s recommendation. That means I’ll write off your debt to France-Finances and they will no longer have the right to send you letters or call you at work or talk to your neighbors. If they do, they’ll be the ones breaking the law and you can come see me about it. Your end of it is that you have to pay 57 euros a month to the income tax and public housing people and you must pay it, religiously, every month. As long as you do that, as long as you scrupulously follow the schedule, you won’t have any problems. The other thing is, you must not take out any new loans. None. You understand? Mme A. understands and goes away relieved.