ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a published moment of truth that, when the bankrupt companies are the banks themselves, the articulation of the financial and political logics emerge in the analysis of consular work carried out by the professions of finance. It presents consular justice in France as an institution involved in the joint regulation of markets and identifies a variety of pragmatic and political logics related to bankruptcy work carried out by consular judges. The chapter shows how their decisions focus on eliminating "zombies", that is companies that should be dissolved based on the principles of market economics, but that are "artificially" kept alive by various kinds of support. It uses as an analyser a document, written by a former president of the Tribunal de Commerce de Paris, jointly with a former minister of finance, that describes the discreet political strategy that they jointly designed and used during the financial crisis of 1992–1997 when the French banks themselves were the zombies.
