Glossary

Fifteen terms, each with the place it first matters. Nothing here is technical for its own sake — these are the words that make the difference between following the story and watching it go past.

Assignat ah-see-NYAH

The paper note at the centre of the story: a state note secured on land confiscated from the Church, and later from émigré nobles, which the holder could use to buy that land from the nation.

The first issue of April 1790 bore interest at 3 per cent and the king's portrait. Later issues bore neither, and by 1796 the whole stock was worth almost nothing.

Confidence bills

Privately issued notes of hand that filled the gap when small coin vanished — sixty-three different kinds in Paris alone, guaranteed by nobody.

Their confusion and fraud is what pushed the Assembly into issuing the small notes it had sworn to avoid.

The Consolidated Third

What was left of the national debt after the settlement of 30 September 1797 paid two-thirds of it in land-purchase bonds: a remaining third written into the Great Book, to be paid as the government thought best.

This is the step usually called the bankruptcy of the two-thirds. The bonds sank to three per cent of their value.

Émigré

A noble or officeholder who left France after the Revolution began. Their estates were confiscated by a law that took effect against anyone who had gone after 14 July 1789 and not returned.

An 1793 estimate valued those lands at three thousand million francs — fresh security for fresh issues.

The Forced Loan

A compulsory levy on incomes, decreed 22 June 1793 and secured on émigré land; progressive, reaching one half of income at the top, with little provision for repayment.

Set first at incomes above 10,000 francs. So many of the rich had fled or hidden their wealth that only a fifth of the target could be raised, so the threshold dropped to 1,000.

Greenbacks · free silver

The American monetary controversies White was actually arguing in: the wartime paper dollars of the 1860s, the “greenback craze” of the 1870s, and the campaign for unlimited silver coinage in the 1890s.

Every edition of the book after 1876 was aimed at one of these fights.

Irredeemable / fiat money

Money that cannot be exchanged for metal at the issuer's counter, and circulates because the state says it does. White's title uses “fiat” in the sense American politicians used it in the 1870s, not as a neutral description of modern currency.

White's argument is about paper issued without limit by an assembly, not about central banking as it exists now.

John Law

The Scottish financier whose paper-money scheme collapsed in France in 1720, seventy years before the assignat.

Everyone in the 1790 debate knew the story, and both sides used it: the opponents as precedent, the supporters as the contrast — a despotism's error that an enlightened nation could not repeat.

Livre

The unit of account of old France, divided into 20 sous. Renamed the franc in 1795, at very nearly the same value — which is why the book's figures slide from one word to the other without changing scale.

Every issue figure on this site is in livres or francs; treat them as the same unit.

Louis d'or

The gold coin, face value twenty-five francs. Its metal content did not change, so its price in paper records the paper's fall directly.

It cost 920 paper francs in August 1795 and 15,000 at the last quotation.

Mandat (mandat territorial)

The replacement currency of 1796, decreed “fully secured” and “as good as gold”: any holder could take possession of set-aside public land at a price fixed by two valuers.

It stood at 35 per cent of face value before it could even be issued from the press, and at 3 per cent six months later.

The Maximum

The Law of the Maximum of 29 September 1793, which fixed the legal price of necessities at their 1790 price plus one third, plus fixed transport, plus 5 per cent for the wholesaler and 10 per cent for the retailer.

Farmers brought in less, cities went on ration tickets, and the names of men who broke the law appear on the daily lists of the guillotined.

National Assembly · Legislative Assembly · Convention · Directory

The four successive governments of the period: the Constituent National Assembly (1789–91), the Legislative Assembly (1791–92), the National Convention (1792–95), and the Directory (1795–99).

Each inherited the paper of the last and issued more. The Convention's two great Committees began decreeing issues in secret session.

Sou

One twentieth of a livre — the small coin of daily life, and the unit in which a labourer's day was counted.

The day's wage in the summer of 1792 was fifteen sous — unchanged in four years.

Specie

Coined metal money — gold and silver — as against paper. “Redeemable in specie” means the issuer will hand you metal for the note on demand.

The assignat was irredeemable: nobody was obliged to give metal for it, which is the whole of Talleyrand's objection.