A French history written as an American pamphlet
Michigan, 1860s · Washington, 1876 · Cornell, 1912 · Toronto, 1914 · and a bank's giveaway edition in 1933
The book began as a piece of pure antiquarianism, and White says so with a candour that does him credit. Just before the American Civil War he assembled in France a large collection of Revolutionary documents — newspapers, reports, speeches, pamphlets, and specimens of nearly every issue of the assignats this book is about, from notes of ten thousand livres down to a single sou, the twentieth part of a livre. He built a lecture course around them, first at the University of Michigan and later at Cornell, and one lecture in it was on paper money inflation in France. He recalls, as if it were yesterday, his regret at spending so much care and labour on a subject to all appearance utterly devoid of practical value.
Neither he nor his Michigan students, he writes, imagined it could ever bear on their own country. It certainly never entered their minds that any such folly as the French documents exhibited could find supporters in the United States.
Then it did. Demands for large issues of paper money began at home, White worked some of his material into a speech in the New York State Senate, and in 1876 — during what everyone involved called the greenback craze — General Garfield and S. B. Crittenden asked him to read a paper on the subject to an audience of Senators and Representatives of both parties in Washington. He read it there on 12 April and to the Union League Club in New York the next day. Editions followed, two or three of them explicitly for campaign purposes.
It is a French history whose target is American. The 1876 version argues against the greenbacks; the 1890s editions argue against the unlimited coinage of silver; and White says plainly why he thought silver and paper were the same argument — politicians logical enough to see that if you may issue unlimited silver dollars that cost something, you may as well issue unlimited paper dollars that cost nothing. Read as history it is a narrative with a thesis. Read as what it is — a pamphlet in a live monetary fight, by a historian with the sources at his elbow — its shape makes sense, including the parts that overreach.
What White was
Not a monetary economist. Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) was a historian, the first president of Cornell, United States Minister to Russia and later Ambassador to Germany, and the author of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom — a book whose argument, that dogma obstructs inquiry, is recognisably the same reflex at work here. His authority in this subject rests on two real things: the documents, which he owned and read, and the nineteenth-century scholarship, which he worked through carefully. His footnotes lean on Levasseur, von Sybel, Thiers, Louis Blanc, Taine, Storch, De Nervo, Challamel, De Goncourt and Caron’s depreciation tables, several of which are still cited.
He is also, on the evidence of the footnotes, a scrupulous man. He says he has taken all pains to be exact, revising in the light of the most recent publications and giving his authority for every important statement, and the text bears this out — the assertions that matter carry a reference, which is why a site like this one can attach a page to every figure.
The revision, and the Canadian edition
At the request of a Canadian friend who wanted the work brought down to date, White restudied the subject and revised it at Cornell in September 1912. The additions came mainly from Levasseur’s Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industrie en France — “one of the really great books of the twentieth century,” he calls it — and Dewarmin’s Cent ans de numismatique française, which is where the exact count of assignats outstanding at the suppression comes from.
The Canadian friend was John Mackay, who printed a small private edition in 1914 with a foreword of his own. That foreword repays separate attention, because it is more openly political than anything White writes, and it dates itself: Mackay is alarmed that the doctrine of governmental regulation of prices has made its appearance in embryo, that class dissatisfaction is increasing, and that the confiscation of property rights under legal forms tends to be condoned when directed against unpopular interests. He reduces the whole history to four facts, converts the French totals into dollars — an aggregate of $9,500,000,000 issued, $4,200,000,000 in face value outstanding at the repudiation of 1797, and $1,000,000,000 as the appraised value of the confiscated lands — and then notices a coincidence he cannot resist: that under the Peace of Frankfort of 10 May 1871, France agreed to pay Germany an indemnity of exactly that last figure.
Those dollar figures are Mackay’s own conversion, made in 1914, of livre totals whose purchasing power was itself collapsing across the period being totalled. They are useful as an order of magnitude and worthless as precision. The same caution applies to the price table on the numbers page, and that is why the page labels it three times. And the Frankfort coincidence is a coincidence: an indemnity fixed by Bismarck in 1871 has no causal relation to land confiscated in 1790, however satisfying the symmetry.
The editions, and why they keep coming
The essay has been reprinted more or less continuously for a hundred and fifty years, and almost always by people making an argument with it. The scan this site works from is a case in point: a 1933 D. Appleton-Century printing, issued as a special edition for the Bank of New York & Trust Company — a bank handing out a monetary-catastrophe pamphlet in the fourth year of the Depression, the year the United States left the gold standard. Later in the century it became a standard citation in Austrian-school and hard-money literature, where it remains.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1860s | A lecture in White’s course at the University of Michigan, later at Cornell, built on his own collection |
| Early 1870s | Material worked into a speech in the Senate of the State of New York |
| 12–13 April 1876 | Read to Senators and Representatives at Washington, and to the Union League Club, New York |
| After 1876 | Various editions, two or three of them for campaign purposes during the greenback craze |
| 1890s | Further editions aimed at the proposal for unlimited silver coinage |
| 1896 | Book edition, D. Appleton and Company (copyright notice in the 1933 printing) |
| September 1912 | Revised and extended at Cornell, with large additions from Levasseur and Dewarmin |
| 1914 | Private edition with John Mackay’s foreword, Toronto |
| 1923 | Copyright renewed in the name of Mrs. Andrew D. White; White had died in 1918 |
| 1933 | D. Appleton-Century printing, special edition for the Bank of New York & Trust Company — the copy behind this site |
| The full text of the 1912/1914 revision is freely available; see further reading. | |
How it signs off
“There is a lesson in all this which it behooves every thinking man to ponder.” That is the last line, and it tells you what kind of book you have been reading: an argument that hands you a duty on the way out rather than a monograph that stops when its evidence does.
Which is also why the 1933 printing is the right copy to work from. A bank gave it away in the fourth year of the Depression, the year the United States left gold — a hundred and forty years after the Assembly voted its four hundred millions, and still being handed to people as an instruction.