Further reading

Three groups, deliberately kept apart: the book itself, the sources White used, and the scholarship that has revisited the episode since. Mixing the second and third groups is how a reader ends up thinking that 1890s authorities are the current state of the question.

The book

Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended. The full text of the revised (1912/1914) version is freely available from Project Gutenberg as ebook 6949, in plain text, EPUB and HTML. It is short — an hour and a half of reading — and this site is no substitute for it.

The copy behind this site is the 1933 D. Appleton-Century printing, issued as a special edition for the Bank of New York & Trust Company. Where the two differ in wording, this site follows the 1933 printing and says so on the about page.

What White worked from

These are nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works, cited here because his footnotes send you to them and because two of them are still used. They are not the modern literature.

• É. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industrie en France, 1903 edition — White’s principal authority in the revision, and the source of most of the added material. He calls it one of the really great books of the twentieth century.
• P. Caron, Tableaux de dépréciation du papier-monnaie (Paris, 1909) — the depreciation tables. Still the standard reference for the day-by-day value of the assignat.
• A. Dewarmin, Cent ans de numismatique française — photographed the entire series of issues, including the forgeries and the royalist notes; the source of the exact figure outstanding at the suppression.
• Heinrich von Sybel, History of the French Revolution — “that thoughtful historian” whom White quotes at every turn, including the passage on who held the paper at the end.
• Adolphe Thiers, Louis Blanc, Hippolyte Taine, Buchez and Roux’s Histoire parlementaire — the parliamentary and narrative histories behind the debate scenes.
• The Moniteur — the record of the debates themselves, and the source of the quotations from Mirabeau, Talleyrand and the rest.
• The President White Collection, Cornell University Library — White’s own specimens: assignats of nearly every issue, John Law’s notes, confidence bills, forced-loan certificates, ration tickets issued under the Maximum, the 1793 law that fixed what necessities could legally cost, and the published lists of the condemned.

The modern scholarship

Four works, with what each contributes. The characterisations are drawn from abstracts and publisher descriptions rather than full readings — see the caveat on Reading White.

• Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, “Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution,” Journal of Political Economy 103:3 (June 1995), 474–518. Reads the Revolution’s monetary experiments through government budget constraints: fiscal exigency drives the sequence that ends in hyperinflation. The standard starting point for anyone who found White’s dismissal of the war unsatisfying.
• Eugene N. White, “The French Revolution and the Politics of Government Finance, 1770–1815,” Journal of Economic History 55:2 (June 1995), 227–255. Treats the assignat as asset-backed money whose value rested on the government’s commitment to liquidate the expropriated property — which reframes the failure as one of credible backing rather than of paper money as such.
• Bryan P. Cutsinger, Louis Rouanet and Joshua S. Ingber, “Assignats or death: The politics and dynamics of hyperinflation in revolutionary France,” European Economic Review 157 (2023), article 104510. Identifies two money-demand shocks tied to collapses in political support for the assignat, the first cutting demand for real balances by up to 70 per cent — a quantitative case that politics determined the currency’s backing and therefore its value.
• Rebecca L. Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015). A history of money and of the Revolution together, taking the assignats seriously as “circulating land” and money as a social and political mediator; locates radicalisation in the gap between political ideals and daily life. The book to read if the economics papers feel bloodless.

If you only do one thing

Read White’s essay from Project Gutenberg, then read the Sargent and Velde abstract. The distance between the two is the whole of what has happened to this subject in a century.