In 1709, Samuel Bernard, the richest man in Europe, failed to pay his debts. His insolvency precipitated a small financial crisis at the Lyon faire, which was the main payments settlement mechanism that connected credit networks in northern Italy, Switzerland, eastern France, and the Netherlands. Bernard’s creditors were ruined, but he received immunity from prosecution and soon recovered his credit. This failure was a particularly dramatic instance of impunity in financial capitalism before the Financial Revolution created corporate forms, liquid capital markets, and constraints on sovereign violations of property rights. Bernard’s failure, and the many other crises of the same time, shows the parameters of impunity as a function of sovereign power. In 1709, as before, impunity was personalized: the prerogative of sovereign authority, granted individually on an ad hoc or arbitrary basis. Sovereigns governed finance through institutions like the chambre de justice of 1716, which was a special court for prosecuting all of the Crown’s creditors. The institutional changes of the Financial Revolution meant that by the time of the 1720 crisis, impunity was instead a characteristic of systemically important managers of capital operating in international markets with limited regulation, oversight, and enforcement.