French Accounting History

New Contributions

Yves Levant, Olivier de la Villarmois, Yves Levant, Olivier de la Villarmois

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317984863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

French Accounting History: New Contributions illustrates the lively research activity in the field of accounting and management history in France, thus contributing to the dissemination of French research on an international scale. Based on a collection of diverse papers by French historians in this field which have been presented at various congresses, contributing authors give an overview of French accounting, the advent of the auditing profession and management control in France. This book aims to further strengthen the development of the community and knowledge base of accounting historians, not only in France but also internationally.

This book is based on a special issue of the journal Accounting History Review.

‘Lady Accounting’, an analogy using blood circulation to popularise an accounting view of the health of the firm

Marie Catalo^a and Nicole Azema-Girlando^b

^aLEMNA, Université de Nantes, France; ^bLARGO, Université d’Angers, France

This paper examines the attempt by Deuwez in 1933 to explain accounting concepts and ideas to non specialists through the analogy of the process of blood circulation within human beings. It comprises two main sections. The first section comprises two reviews: first, of accounting ideas of the period 1900–33 and developments therein; and, second, an examination of contemporary knowledge of blood circulation and the operation of key human organs in relation thereto. In the second part of the manuscript, the analogy is examined in more depth, with some limited attempt made to consider whether or not the blood circulation system is an apposite analogy.

Introduction

Access to accounting is reputedly difficult because its vocabulary and concepts are often linked to learning about how the accounts work. This may discourage people who want to understand accounting without developing a detailed knowledge of bookkeeping. For example, people such as administrators have to understand accounting documents. In such circumstances, the issue of popularising an understanding of accounting becomes crucial. This problem is far from being new. In the booklet, La dame comptabilité, printed in 1933, H. Deuwez dealt with this question, using blood circulation in a female body as an analogy with accounting.

The use of analogy is common practice in the domain of social sciences (Weber 1981, 139) and in the domain of economic sciences (Ménard 1981, 139). Theoretical renewal is supported by an analogy which permits conceptual transfers. For example, according to Denis (1904, 91) and Thompson (1998, 308), Quesnay (1694–1774), who was a French doctor and king’s councillor, proposed Le tableau économique, the first attempt to formulate a model of economic circulation, taking as his basis the model of the system of blood circulation. In the theory of evolution, as Diani (2003) shows in his PhD, there are many mutual exchanges of ideas between economics and biology. As far as accounting is concerned, the use of analogy is unusual, although not entirely unheard of. This paper analyses the analogy drawn in La dame comptabilité in order to demonstrate the interest, the contribution and the limits of this analogy in the specific context of teaching and of popularising accounting, in French, between 1900 and 1933.

Our perspective is restricted to accounting techniques and concepts and their use for the purpose of disseminating accounting knowledge even if we are aware that a gender-studies-focus could have been another choice for this paper.

Preconditions to analysis

The use of analogy in accounting

During the period covered by this study (1900–33), we have identified four popular generalist guides to accounting (see Table 1), the intention of which was to make the subject more accessible to the non-specialist reader. Of these four works, only two books made use of analogy: La dame comptabilité (Deuwez 1933) and Les concepts fondamentaux de la comptabilité (De Fages 1933). Both authors declared that they were writing for a specific public: De Fages for engineers and Deuwez for administrators and members of the boards of companies. Neither author searched for credibility, but rather for an efficient way – i.e. one which would be understood by their intended target readership – in which to facilitate the understanding of basic accounting ideas and concepts. Whereas De Fages based his analogy on calculation theory and fluid mechanics, Deuwez based his on the general public’s knowledge of anatomy.

Deuwez’s 33-page booklet, La dame comptabilité, was printed in 1933 by a Lagny printing house in France. Three copies of the booklet are known to have survived, one is available at the French National Library, and of the others, belonging to private collections, one was shown at an exhibition of accounting textbooks held in Lyon in 1994 (Bérard and Lemarchand 1994). It has proved impossible to find out anything about the booklet’s author,¹ but on the title page his intentions are made clear: ‘This small work, written for administrators and board members, aims at giving, through humour, the right ideas on the role of modern accounting and the services which can be expected from it’.

Table 1. Analysis of four non-specialist books

Author and date	Targeted readership	Features
Bunau-Varilla (1924)	Traders, members of council, lawyers	Explanation of the balance sheet using the personification of the accounts approach, revisited with stock accounts
Caquas (1924)	People concerned with business	Explanation of the balance sheet and operation of the accounts by the balance sheet approach
De Fages (1933)	Engineers	Accounting explained as the science of the enumeration of the movement in values
		Analogy in terms of flow accounts and stock accounts
Deuwez (1933)	Administrators and board members	Accounting explained by analogy with blood circulation
		Analogy leading to company health: true health and manipulated health

The text is divided into two parts. In this paper we limit ourselves to the first part, qualified by the author as ‘the accounting’. The second part, on the ‘prix de revient’² will be the subject of future research. The first part of the booklet is divided into six sub-parts whose titles indicate readily the tonality of the author:

● ‘Accounting as the crow flies’(La dame comptabilité, hereafter referred to as Ldc, 2–5) presents the definition of accounting, of the accounting organisation and of the various accounts, but without indicating their operating mode. The figure, ‘Lady Accounting’ (Ldc, 6, reproduced as Appendix 1), provides a visual representation of the accounting system using a complete woman’s body, together with hat and accessories.

● The organs correspond to the accounts previously mentioned in the text, and they are connected to each other by blood vessels. The comments specify that blood circulates here. This creates an analogy between accounting and blood circulation which we propose to analyse subsequently in this paper.

● ‘The role of the stomach and of the intestines’ (Ldc, 7 – reproduced as Appendix 4) presents these organs as inventory accounts (warehouse and work-in-progress) and operational accounts (labour, overheads and sales). This page shows their role in the evaluation of costs (simplified version) and the determination of the net result.

● ‘Lady Balance Sheet’ (Ldc, 8 – reproduced as Appendix 2) corresponds to ‘Lady Accounting’ accessorised with a basket ‘for contingencies’ and a small cask entitled ‘for profit’.

● ‘The make-up of Lady Balance Sheet’. A vademecum for the perfect ‘book cooker’ (Ldc, 9 – reproduced as Appendix 3) underlines the operations which improve the aspect of Lady Balance Sheet before she is presented to the board members.

● ‘Old Lady Accounting, former method, annual inventory’ (Ldc, 10) depicts an alternative method of recording the inventory accounts and sales accounts.

The eye of the reader is attracted by the illustrations of a woman. Multiple interpretations as to why this choice was made are possible. One explanation would be that the words ‘company’, ‘management’and ‘accounting’are all feminine words in French and, by extension, this facilitates and/or would make it appropriate to use a woman as an analogy for how a company is viewed from an accountant’s perspective. A second explanation from a gender studies perspective is that, given the historical context, women were still largely viewed by men as objects, not subjects, to be dressed, made-up, fed and doctored by men, being denied the role of actors. Therefore it seems more likely that a woman would be chosen for the analogy rather than a man. A third possible explanation is that women have a natural open blood cycle unlike men. Since the analogy refers to an open blood cycle for accounting as well, this fact may have guided the choice of the author. A fourth possible explanation reflects the fact that researchers in accounting (e.g. Gardey 1995, 415) have shown that women have been very present in bookkeeping tasks in the field of accounting since the nineteenth century. This fact may have been known by the author. A fifth possible explanation is that since the intended target readership was largely going to be made up of men, the author may have wanted to catch the reader’s eye with illustrations of women. Since details relating to the author are not known to us, we cannot extend further these investigations. Nevertheless, the text itself is rich with material for our study focused on accounting.

An overview of the state of accounting knowledge c.1900–c.1933

Before analysing Deuwez’s analogy in the second part of the paper, we first of all provide an overview of the state of knowledge and thinking, as it was presented in different types of books published in the French language during the period 1900–33, regarding accounting and the system of blood circulation in the human body.

The sources

In order to study the state of accounting knowledge, we examined documents contained in the Stevelinck collection available at the library of the Université de Nantes, which contains almost 1,000 references. For the period 1900 to 1933, a period sufficiently long to permit us to appreciate whether the knowledge conveyed in each studied text was standard or not, we selected handbooks³ and boo...