Fiat Money Inflation in France
How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended
In April 1790 the French National Assembly issued four hundred million livres (old France's unit of account, renamed the franc in 1795) in assignats, secured on land confiscated from the Church, and promised there would be no more. Six years later the copper plates were broken and burned in the Place Vendôme, and something close to forty thousand million livres of paper stood in circulation. Andrew Dickson White — president of Cornell, later American ambassador in Berlin — told that story to a room of Senators and Congressmen in 1876, and it has been reprinted as a warning ever since.
This site is an introduction to the book rather than the book itself: what happened, in three movements; the chronology and the figures with the printed page they came from; the men who argued in the Assembly and what they actually said; the paper as an object. And one page that asks the question an intelligent reader asks first — how much of White's explanation has survived a century of monetary history.
Secured on Church land valued at two thousand million or more, and voted alongside a promise of no further issue. p. 7
The exact figure at the suppression, by Dewarmin's count. p. 54 n.
At the last quotation of all: one franc in gold for six hundred in paper. p. 54
Three movements
I · How it came
1789 – June 1791
A deficit, a minister who resisted, a Church estate worth more than the debt, and two votes eleven months apart. The second one broke the limit set by the first.
II · What it brought
1791 – 1794
Prices rose and wages did not. Manufactures closed, a debtor class formed with an interest in the fall, and price control arrived with the guillotine behind it.
III · How it ended
1795 – 1799
A gold coin priced at fifteen thousand paper francs, the plates burned in a public square, a successor currency that failed in six months, and a two-thirds bankruptcy.
Or start sideways
The numbers
Every issue with the limit pledged beside it, the gold price, and what a bushel of flour cost before and after.
The paper itself
Notes from ten thousand livres to a quarter of a sou — twenty sous made a livre — sixty-three kinds of private substitute in Paris, and cargoes of forgeries from London.
Reading White
Where the book is strong, where it overreaches, and what Sargent and Velde, Eugene White, Rebecca Spang and others have made of the same episode.
The book
A lecture at Michigan, a paper read in Washington during the greenback craze, and a publication history that runs to the present.
Timeline
1789 to 1799, dated, with the amount attached to each step.
The cast
Necker, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Cambon, Danton, Bonaparte — and who changed sides.