Journal article: This paper aims at explaining the changes in the number of bankruptcies during the second part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We firstly study these changes in the perspective of the evolution of the French insolvency law; we then introduce a geographic dimension that we show to be very relevant. We indeed observe that the court of the Paris district is more tolerant than the others; however, this kind of use of the law will spread in the other courts until the reform in 1889 that creates the judicial liquidation. The spatial analysis permits us to show that the changes in the law do not explain the total variations of the total amount of bankruptcies. The local practices, the way judicial agents act and the changes in the firms’ strategies are also essential in the explanation.