About this site

This site is an introduction to a book, made almost entirely by a machine. Both of those facts change how you should read it, so they are stated first and in full rather than in a footer.

Who wrote this

Every page of prose, every data record, and every illustration on this site was produced by Claude (Anthropic) running a pipeline called the dark website factory — a set of instructions for building a website with as few human checkpoints as the work can bear.

Two gates were held by a person, Jörn Dinkla:

  1. The brief, at the start. He decided what the site is for, who it is written for, what stance it takes toward White’s argument, and what every page must show. He also asked for the generated illustrations over the machine’s recommendation to leave them out.
  2. The publication, at the end. Before this site went online he reviewed a packet — a contact sheet of every page, the outstanding questions, and a list of exactly what had not been checked — and approved it.

Everything between those two points was judged by other machines. The visual identity was graded by one language model, the prose by another, the rendered pages by a third, each looking at evidence it regenerated itself rather than at claims made about it. A record of who held which gate, on which model, in which round, and what each one caught is committed in the repository as specs/gate-ledger.md.

What that means concretely: nobody read this site line by line before it was published. The machine checks are real — they caught a chart label printed on top of another label, a theme icon leaking out of its button, prose faults a human reader would have found tiring — but they are not a proofreader. If you find an error here, that is the reason.

Where the words come from

The source is Andrew Dickson White’s Fiat Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended, in the 1933 D. Appleton-Century printing — a special edition for the Bank of New York & Trust Company, itself a reprint of White’s own revision of 1912/1914. The essay is in the public domain in the United States, and the full text is freely available.

That printing was scanned and read by optical character recognition, and the extracted text is committed in the repository as specs/source-ocr.txt, so any claim on this site can be checked against the same words the site was written from.

The rules this site works under

These were fixed in the brief before any page existed, and the machine judges were instructed that they could not be waived.

Every figure carries its source. Any number about the world — an amount authorised, a date, a price, an exchange rate — carries the printed page of the 1933 edition (p. 34) or a named modern work. The provenance marks in the margin are that rule made visible: where the first assignats — the state notes secured on confiscated land — printed their daily interest in the margin of the note, this site prints the page. One place carries no page mark: a glossary entry’s closing line echoes a figure already sourced on the page it sends you to, and inherits that source instead of repeating it.

Figures come from data, not from prose. The amounts live once, in _data/*.json and _data/*.yml, each record carrying its page. The tables and charts are generated from those records, so a number in a caption and a number in a table cannot drift apart. The charts are built by tools/build_charts.py; the files it writes are never edited by hand.

Quotations are verbatim. Passages in quotation marks are transcribed from the 1933 printing. Because the scan is imperfect, a closed list of obvious repairs was permitted — Prance → France, assig¤ats → assignats, MACEAY → Mackay, Digeson → Dickson, damaged accents — and nothing else. Where the correct reading was uncertain, the passage is not quoted. Wording, spelling and punctuation are otherwise White’s, including his em-dashes and his nineteenth-century usage. Several quotations were additionally checked against the Project Gutenberg text of the same revision; where the two differ, this site follows the 1933 printing.

A paraphrase is never dressed as a quotation. On the cast page, where the book summarises a man’s position instead of quoting him, the card carries a paraphrase label and no quotation marks.

Dollar amounts are White’s, not yours. Every dollar figure in the book is a conversion made for White’s revision — or by John Mackay in 1914 — of a table published in 1795. They are labelled wherever they appear, and are never re-converted, adjusted for inflation, or presented as modern money.

Contested claims are attributed. Where White’s causation is disputed, the site says “White argues” and points to Reading White, which sets out what modern scholarship makes of the same episode. Statements of dated fact are made plainly.

Nothing was invented. No quotation, name, date or figure on this site was composed for it. The modern works cited on Reading White were checked against journal and publisher records; that page also states plainly that their arguments are characterised from abstracts rather than from full readings.

The illustrations

Six plates are AI-generated aquatints: one on the home page, one on The Book, one on each of the three narrative pages, and one on The Paper. Their captions set the scene only; the disclosure that they are generated lives here and in the footer of every page. They come from a separate, deliberately manual step outside the automated pipeline — they were made after the build loop had closed, and inspected on their own rather than as part of it. They exist because the brief asked for them; the machine’s advice was to leave them out, on the ground that generated pictures on a history site are a credibility hazard. Three rules were written in as the condition of including them:

  1. Nothing documentary. No plate depicts a real document, artefact, place or event. There is no picture of an assignat anywhere on this site, and if you think you see one, that is a mistake worth reporting.
  2. No portraits of real people. No plate shows Mirabeau, Necker, Talleyrand or Bonaparte. Human figures are anonymous, turned away, or absent.
  3. No writing inside the images. Every sheet, note and label depicted is blank, and no mark anywhere in a plate forms a letter, a numeral or a word.

The full style record, including the prompt rules, is in the repository as specs/image-style.md.

Colophon

The design system is called Copper Plate. The assignat was an engraved object; its plates were copper, and on 18 February 1796 they were broken and burned in the Place Vendôme. So the site is built as a plate impression on laid paper, with a margin rail that carries the sources.

Three accents, each tied to one substance and used nowhere else: vermilion is paper money and its collapse, blue-grey is the state’s promise and all provenance, brass is specie — gold and silver. After two pages you can tell what kind of thing a number is by its colour.

Type is Bodoni Moda for display — Bodoni cut his neoclassical romans in the 1790s while the Didots were printing them in Paris, so it is the period’s own letter rather than a costume of it — Spectral for reading, and IBM Plex Mono for every figure, date and source mark. Light and dark are the same press room by day and by one lamp at night; the theme follows your system setting and remembers what you choose.

Built with Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages, with no build step and no JavaScript that the site needs in order to be read. The source — including the brief that defines the site and the ledger recording every gate, who held it and what it caught — is kept in a private repository. The record exists and is quoted from throughout this page; it is not published alongside the site.