The cast

Twelve men, and the interesting thing about several of them is that they changed sides. Each card gives the position the book records, one line in the man’s own words where the book quotes him, and the printed page. What they are arguing about is the assignat — paper secured on confiscated Church land — and whether a state can make it stand beside specie, meaning coined gold and silver. Two of them go on to enforce the Maximum, the price-control law of September 1793.

Six of the twelve carry a paraphrase mark instead of quotation marks. White reports those men in his own voice, so there is no line to quote: half the cast of a book like this speaks only through its author. Putting quotation marks round a historian’s summary would manufacture one.

Jacques Necker

1732–1804 · Minister of Finance to 1790

paraphraseSome principles of finance bind a government whatever the political weather — White's summary of what he stood for.

against Held out for a year, was worn away by degrees, and left France for ever when the second issue passed. Not the statesman France needed, White concludes, but a man who could see the simple principles at stake. pp. 2, 14

Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau

1749–1791 · The Assembly's great orator; the popular idol

“I would rather have a mortgage on a garden than on a kingdom!”

for The one man who could have stopped it. In January 1789 he called paper money a debauch of authority; twenty months later he carried the 800-million issue with a speech that the most sober and conservative of his modern opponents calls prodigious, comparing the scheme to rain falling, running to the sea, and returning as fertilising showers. When the iron chest of the Tuileries was opened it held evidence that he was at this very time a regularly paid servant of the court. pp. 11, 17–18, 29

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

1754–1838 · Former bishop; carried the confiscation of Church property

“You can, indeed, arrange it so that the people shall be forced to take a thousand livres in paper for a thousand livres in specie; but you can never arrange it so that a man shall be obliged to give a thousand livres in specie for a thousand livres in paper,—in that fact is embedded the entire question; and on account of that fact the whole system fails.”

against Voted for the first issue and against the second, on the narrowest and most durable ground anyone found in the debate: a legal tender law can force a seller to accept paper but cannot force a buyer to give metal for it. p. 16

Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours

1739–1817 · Physiologist of the Physiocrats; deputy

paraphraseWhite's figure for his argument: using one paper both as circulating money and as the means of selling the national land is like using one blade as an oyster knife and a razor.

against Voted against every emission and said sturdily that he always would. He wrote the anonymous pamphlet read aloud in the Assembly, then stood up and claimed it. His alternative — notes for the floating debt that would not circulate as money — is the plan White thinks would have worked. pp. 15, 44

Pierre-Joseph Cambon

1756–1820 · Directed French finance under the Terror

“Will you, in a moment when stock-jobbing is carried on with such fury, give it new power by adding so much more to the circulation?”

for Asked in 1791 whether an Assembly should feed a stock-jobbing fury with more currency, and then spent the Terror defending the assignat with what White calls the audacity of desperation — closing the Exchange, suppressing the metal trade, and counting future war indemnities as assets in the treasury. White rates him among the most expert financiers of any period, which is why his failure is the book's strongest evidence. pp. 32, 43, 46–47

Jean-Paul Marat

1743–1793 · Journalist, L’Ami du Peuple

paraphraseWanted death for the citizen who hid his coin.

for Attacked Necker, then proposed death as the proper penalty for citizens who hid their coin, and told the people that hanging shopkeepers and plundering stores would remove the trouble. pp. 2, 24

Georges Danton

1759–1794 · At the height of his power in 1793

“Imitate Nature, which watches over the preservation of the race but has no regard for individuals.”

for Answered every argument against repudiating the king's-portrait notes by saying that only aristocrats could favour them, and gave the sentence with which a government explains why the loss must fall on somebody. p. 40

Bertrand Barère

1755–1841 · The Convention's orator; “the tiger monkey”

“The needs of the people will no longer be spied upon in order that the commercial classes may arbitrarily take advantage.”

for Carried the Law of the Maximum with a speech contrasting a monarchical commerce that only sought wealth with a republican commerce of moderate and virtuous profits, and poured contempt on political economy as a science quacks had corrupted, pedants obscured and academicians depreciated. pp. 41–42

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

1767–1794 · Robespierre's associate on the Committee of Public Safety

paraphraseWould have prices established by law, at a rate proportionate to working-class wages.

for Proposed as early as November 1792 that prices be set by law in proportion to working-class wages — the idea that lingered in men's minds and culminated in the Maximum ten months later. p. 40

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

1755–1826 · Deputy; later the author of The Physiology of Taste

paraphraseIf the second issue were made, he told the Assembly, there would come a depreciation of thirty per cent.

against Told the Assembly that natural laws work as inexorably in France as elsewhere and predicted a depreciation of thirty per cent if the second issue passed. White notes the injustice with visible feeling: the man who stood against the tide of unreason is remembered only as the most brilliant cook that ever existed. p. 13

Nicolas Bergasse

1750–1832 · Deputy from Lyons; pamphleteer

paraphraseArgued that the evils certain to follow such a currency were already on record, and needed no gift of prophecy to foresee.

against His pamphlets against the issues had, White thinks, a wider influence than any others, and read afterwards like prophecy — though the prophetic power was only a knowledge of what history had already shown. His pamphlets so vexed one enthusiast, M. Sarot, that the man publicly offered his house, garden and furniture for sale against paper money alone. pp. 2, 9

Napoleon Bonaparte

1769–1821 · First Consul from 1799

“I will pay cash or pay nothing.”

against Inherited a bankrupt treasury, armies long unpaid, and assessments in hopeless confusion. He arranged the assessments, funded the debt, and paid in cash; from Marengo to the Peace of Tilsit there was one suspension of specie payment, and that for a few days. White ends the book on him, which is also the book's least examined judgement. p. 67

The men who never spoke are also part of the story: the holders. Before the end of 1795 the paper was almost exclusively in the hands of the working classes, employees and people of small means, whose property was too small to be moved into goods or land p. 52. Everyone with the means to convert had converted.