The paper itself
Engraved notes, church bells, parchment sous, sixty-three private substitutes, and cargoes of forgeries from London
It is easy to read this history as a story about quantities and forget that every one of those quantities was a physical object that somebody had to design, engrave, print, carry, and eventually refuse. The most concrete pages in White’s book are about the paper as a thing, and they are the pages nobody quotes.
Start with the first issue of assignats in April 1790, which was made to be admired. Unlike the notes of John Law’s time it was engraved in the best style of the art. Louis XVI’s portrait sat at the centre, to stimulate loyalty. Patriotic legends and emblems surrounded it, to arouse public spirit. The first issue paid 3 per cent, and the interest the note would yield its holder each day was printed in the margin, to stimulate public cupidity — a frank piece of design, and the model for the margins of these pages. The whole was garnished with stamps and signatures to show that it was carefully registered and controlled.
The problem of smallness
The Assembly’s first instinct was right and it lasted about a fortnight. Notes of 1,000, 500 and 200 livres — twenty sous to the livre — were deliberately too large for ordinary purchases and convenient for buying an estate; the smallest authorised assignat was fifty livres, on the theory that small paper would drive silver out of circulation.
Small paper was driving silver out of circulation — the theory was correct and the sequence was already running. The cheaper currency drove out the dearer, small silver and copper largely vanished, and into the gap came sixty-three different kinds of privately issued “confidence bills” in Paris alone, guaranteed by nobody and productive of endless confusion and fraud. Districts began issuing their own small assignats. Which is how the Assembly came to break its own pledge twice over: of the 160 million livres received into the treasury for land — which the September 1790 act said would be burned on arrival — the greater part went back out as small notes.
Then everything metal was hunted. Citizens were spurred by law to send silverware and jewels to the mint. The king sent his gold and silver plate. Churches and convents were required to surrender all vessels not absolutely necessary for public worship. Church bells were melted down for copper coin. In November 1790 a single silver standard was decreed and the ratio between the metals altered. Silver and copper went on becoming scarcer, because none of this addressed the reason they were leaving.
So: one hundred millions in five-franc notes. Then, obedient to the universal clamour, parchment notes for various small amounts — twenty-four sous down to five — and at last pieces of one sou, of half a sou, and even of one quarter of a sou. White notes that the little parchment notes in his collection are very dirty and much worn, but being printed on parchment remain perfectly legible, which is a sentence about survival written by a man holding one.
Four hundred men, six in the morning until eight at night
By 1793 the printing itself had become an industry, and its labour history is a small joke at the expense of the whole scheme: four hundred workmen were added to those already engaged in producing the paper money, they were pressed with work from six in the morning until eight in the evening, and they struck for higher wages and won. Later, under the Directory of 1795–99, the constraint was arithmetical — complaints were made that the army of engravers and printers could produce only sixty to seventy millions a day while the government was spending eighty to ninety.
The rival presses
Two other kinds of assignat circulated, and both belong to the story.
Forgeries, in quantities that beggar the official ones. They came from within France and from nearly all the surrounding nations, but the main source was London, whence Count Joseph de Puisaye shipped cargoes of false paper — excellently engraved and printed — through Brittany and other disaffected ports. One seizure by General Hoche was declared by him to exceed ten thousand million francs in nominal value. Detection, White says, was exceedingly difficult even for experts and for the vast majority of people impossible.
Royalist issues, printed by the insurgents in the Vendée and elsewhere: notes bearing the Bourbon arms, the fleur-de-lis, the portrait of the Dauphin as Louis XVII, and the legend De Par le Roi. Large parts of the population in the insurgent districts were forced to take them. They were still appearing in 1799 — the last of them, photographed in Dewarmin, carrying Pro Deo, pro Rege, pro Patria and Armée Catholique et Royale, for a hundred livres.
A conscientious reader should notice that the counterfeits complicate the book’s accounting rather than confirming it. If forged paper circulated in nominal billions and was indistinguishable to ordinary users, then the quantity of paper actually in circulation was never what any official total says, and neither the Assembly nor White could know it. This is a point in White’s favour in one sense — no legislature could have controlled the quantity even had it wished to — and against his precision in another. It also means the exactness of Dewarmin’s 39,999,945,428 measures the state’s records, not the money supply.
Where the paper is now
White’s own specimens — including several of John Law’s notes, some numbered with enormous figures, the confidence bills, the forced-loan certificates, the ration tickets issued under the Maximum, the officially published lists of the condemned, and specimens of nearly every Revolutionary issue — went to the President White Collection at the Cornell University Library, and the footnotes send the reader there over and over. For the complete series he refers instead to Dewarmin’s Cent ans de numismatique française, which photographed everything, forgeries and royalist notes included.
That is where the book’s authority comes from. Whatever one concludes about White’s causal argument, he had the objects on his desk — from a ten-thousand-livre note down to a quarter of a sou printed on parchment — and he had counted them. Very little else in this literature was written by someone who could pick the currency up.