Abatelement, [1] a commercial term used among the French in the free ports of the Levant. [2] It signifies a judgment in Council depriving merchants or traders of the nation [3] of the right to conduct business when they have broken deals or refused to pay debts. The ban is so strict that those against whom it is pronounced may not even seek judgment for payment of what is due to them unless they have first submitted to the Council’s ruling and had the abatelement lifted by payment and execution of its terms. Dictionnaire du Commerce → , tome I. page 548. [4]

Notes

1. The term abatelement is rare in English; it does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary and has rarely been used, but it appears nonetheless in an entry of The Dictionary of Trade, Commerce → , and Navigation: Explanatory of the Objects, Terms, Statistics, Laws and Regulation of the Excise, Customs, Public Affairs, Banking, Monies, Weights, Shipping, Fisheries, Imports, Exports, Book-Keeping, Commercial Geography, National Flags, and the General Affairs of Business, Corrected up to the Latest Period (London: Brittain [Paternoster Row] & Berger [Holywell Street], 1844), where its definition, evidently inspired by the text translated above, is as follows: “ABATELEMENT. A sentence of prohibition from trade, issued by the French Consuls against those who will not stand to their bargains, or who refuse to pay their debts. It must be taken off before they can sue any person for payment.” Note that in Littré’s dictionary, one definition of consul may be translated thus: “Formerly, a judge taken from among the merchants to take cognizance of commercial matters. A judge consul. The merchants’ consuls. Judge-consuls. ‘Commercial tribunals have replaced judge-consuls,’ Dict. de l’Acad. ’” Consuls are thus, it would appear, the individuals who belong to the “Council” referred to above. In De la juridiction française dans les échelles du Levant et de Barbarie (Paris : A. Durand, 1859), pp. 296ff., Louis-Joseph-Delphin Féraud-Giraud gives an account of the law giving to “the consuls of the Échelles du Levant et de Barbarie ” jurisdiction over “crimes committed by French persons within the said Échelles. “

2. Les échelles du Levant (the term used in the text; échelle is the French translation of the Latin scala, ‘port’) were eastern Mediterranean or North African ports of the Ottoman Empire (which was known at the time in France and elsewhere as the Sublime Porte ). The principal échelles du Levant were Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Cyprus, Cairo, Alexandria, Tripoli (in Libya), Tunis, and Algiers. The Ottoman sultan had renounced various legal prerogatives over business conducted in these ports in favor of French merchants, and the French king had jurisdiction over these merchants and granted them various privileges. (One might compare this arrangement to status of forces agreements that are used today to govern nationals who are agents acting on the territory of an allied state.) The documents instituting this Franco-Ottoman relationship were called Capitulations, the first of which were signed in 1536 by Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent. This arrangement was a source of enrichment for the city of Marseille until the British came to dominate Near Eastern trade.

3. The expression négociant de la Nation appears frequently in 18th-century documents and refers to an administratively accorded status. An abatelement withdraws these privileges.

4. This famous dictionary was the posthumous work of Jacques Savary des Brûlons (1656-1716), prepared for publication by his brother, Philemon-Louis Savary (1654-1727). Both were sons of Jacques Savary (1622-1690), the author of Le parfait négociant (1675). The text above constitutes its entire article on Abatelement . The sixth edition of the dictionary was published in 1750 and is presumably the edition cited above.