This article examines perceptions and practices of habitual usury, a crimeconsisting of lending above the legal rate of interest on multiple occasions, inearly nineteenth-century France using descriptions of usury trials found in thepopular legal periodical the Gazette des Tribunaux. Followingthe French Revolution, French law legitimized lending at interest in principle,but punished ‘habitual usurers’ who ‘made aprofession’ from lending above the legal limit. The decades that followedwitnessed striking growth in banking, joint-stock companies and other financialinstitutions. Highlighting the connections between cultural constructions of theusurer and the actual processes deemed usurious, this article seeks tounderstand a paradox: that usury was deemed omnipresent in French society yet itwas rarely prosecuted. By examining how habitual usury was defined andprosecuted in French courtrooms, this article shows how habitual usurers bothvalidated and undermined stereotypical notions of predatory lending behaviorfound in popular culture of the time. Habitual usury trials also reveal theactual practices that allowed those excluded from formal financial networks toparticipate in the growth of capitalist relations. This article argues that thenineteenth-century obsession with the usurer can be explained by the crucialrole played by usurious practices in the credit economy of the period. As such,prosecution of usury tended to focus on the character of the usury rather thanthe actual practice of illegal lending. This article suggests that byoccasionally prosecuting particularly egregious ‘immoral’moneylenders, the legal system and journals like the Gazette desTribunaux worked to keep credit accessible to the‘underbanked’.