Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution 0674047036, 9780674047037

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Money and Stuff
Chapter 1. The Time of the Debt
Chapter 2. The Money of Liberty
Chapter 3. Making Money
Chapter 4. Liberty of Money
Chapter 5. Civil Wars in France
Chapter 6. The Revolution That Would Not End
Chapter 7. Taking the Old Regime out of Circulation
Conclusion: Money and History
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

STUFF and MONEY in the Time of the French Revolution

STUFF and MONEY in the Time of the French Revolution Rebecca L. Spang

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-0-674-04703-7 (alk. paper)

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction: Money and Stuff

vii 1

1 The Time of the Debt

19

2 The Money of Liberty

57

3 Making Money

97

4 Liberty of Money

135

5 Civil Wars in France

169

6 The Revolution That Would Not End

210

7 Taking the Old Regime out of Circulation

247

Conclusion: Money and History

271

List of Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index

279 281 341 345

Illustrations

1. Jean-Antoine Houdon, “Bust of a Young Girl, Identified as Anne Audéoud of Geneva” (ca. 1779–1781), plaster, photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Art Resource, NY. 25 2. French écu (1789), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 38 3. François Quesnay, Tableau Oeconomique (1759), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 41 4. Model for the first “assignats” from “Proclamation du Roi . . . du 7 mars 1790,” in Collection générale des décrets rendus par l’Assemblée nationale et sanctionnés ou acceptés par le Roi (Paris: Baudouin, 1789–1794), vol. 4, 42, photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 70 5. Money-assignat, 200 livres (1790), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 78 6. “Assassins of the Clergy” (1790), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 91 7. “The Triumph of Patriotism” (1790–1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 95 8. Augustin de Saint Aubin, “Louis XVI, King of the French” (1790), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 106 9. Assignat, 1,000 livres (1790), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 108 10. Map, number of known, discreet issuers of billets de confiance in 1790–1792, compiled by the author on the basis of Jacqueline Pilet-Lemière and Claude Jigan, Les Billets communaux de la France révolutionnaire, 1790–1793, vol. 1, of Collections monétaires du musée de Normandie (Caen: Musée de Normandie, 1989). 114 11. Bill issued by Caisse Patriotique de Niort, Deux Sèvres (1791?), Musée de Normandie, Caen (Calvados); photo by author. 118 12a. Bills issued by the district of L’Aigle, Orne (1791–1792), Musée de Normandie, Caen (Calvados); photo by author. 120 12b. Bill issued by the city of Toulouse, Haute Garonne (1792), Musée de Normandie, Caen (Calvados); photo by author. 121

viii

Illustrations

13. Assignat for 300 livres and a counterfeit of same; author’s collection; photo by P. David Polly. 126 14. “Louis XVI arrested while eating pigs’ feet” (1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 141 15. Sheet of five-livre assignats (1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 155 16. “The money seller beaten in the Palais Royal” (1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 160 17. “No trea sure, just a few fat sous” (1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 163 18. Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, “The farmers sold their crops for huge sums and then exchanged their assignats for silver” (ca. 1793), opaque watercolor on cardboard. Musée Carnavelet (Paris). Scala/White Images/Art Resource, NY. 173 19. Assignat for 250 livres (1793), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 196 20. “Corset,” or assignat for five livres (1791), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 204 21. Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, “The Shortage of Bread in Year Four” and “A Money Seller Buys Final Effects” (ca. 1795), opaque watercolor on cardboard. Musée Carnavelet (Paris). Scala/White Images/Art Resource, NY. 212 22. “Promises for territorial mandats” (1796), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 235 23. Trompe l’oeil with assignats and other papers (1797?), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 242 24. Philippe-Joseph Maillart, “Moneys and Other Papers of the French Republic: A Picture-Table Showing Variations in the Value of the Assignats” (1797), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 244 25. Detail of Maillart’s “Moneys and Other Papers of the French Republic” in Figure 24. 245 26. “Use of the New Mea sures” (1800?), photo courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 251

STUFF and MONEY in the Time of the French Revolution

Introduction Money and Stuff Money in its significant attributes is, above all, a subtle device for linking the present to the future. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)

Stuff. The substance or “material” (whether corporeal or incorporeal) of which a thing is formed or consists, or out of which a thing may be fashioned. . . . [as in] Shakespeare, Tempest (1623): iv.i. We are such stuffe As dreames are made on. Oxford English Dictionary

T

of the French Revolution begins with an event that never happened: the opening of the Estates- General on April 26, 1789.1 For the first time in 175 years, the king of France had called on his subjects to send delegates to a representative body that would convene in Versailles. On the scheduled opening day, tin commemorative tokens (made to be sold as souvenirs in the streets) were ready but the representatives were not: bad weather, poor roads, and protracted electioneering combined to delay the assembly’s first session by a week. Planned for April, the king’s formal welcome of the Estates actually happened in May. The first coin described in Michel Hennin’s Histoire numismatique de la révolution française (1826) is one of those tin tokens proudly “recalling” the events of “April 26, 1789.” While it is not chronologically accurate, it teaches us about history nonetheless. For this object reminds us that history rarely happens in accord with people’s anticipations. The now HE NUMISM AT IC HISTORY

2

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

anonymous manufacturer of that token no more expected to contribute to the history of something called “the French Revolution” than Louis XVI intended to convoke a group of men who would pronounce themselves a “National Assembly.” And yet they both did those things. Individuals’ expectations—even, their best laid plans for remembering—often have little in common with what actually transpires. As Marx notes in the opening lines of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”2 Or, as one might say in the less eloquent vernacular of our own moment: stuff happens. By approaching the history of the French Revolution through coins, medals, and tokens, Hennin claimed to be avoiding politics. “A book of this nature,” he wrote, “cannot be a work of political controversy. It must present only the facts relating to each of these monuments.”3 In imagining that money’s history could be divorced from controversy, the nineteenth-century diplomat shared more with classical and neoclassical economists than he chose to admit. Antiquarian numismatists and orthodox economists alike treat money as politically, socially, and economically “neutral.” The latter, for instance, maintain money has no effect on the “real” economy in which goods are produced and consumed. In contrast, this book treats money as politically, socially, and economical ly charged. It argues that money mediates relations between individuals and that its quantitative functions always and only have value within specific social and cultural contexts. Money, in other words, is not only a mea surement or an aspect of economic life. Money is also a part of history. It both has a history itself and is one of the tools through which people know the past and imagine the future (as the epigraph from Keynes suggests). That these latter forms of mental activity are rarely fully conscious simply means they are all the more entrenched. It often takes a dramatic upheaval, something on the scale of what we today call “a revolution,” to make these thought processes more evident. In the eighteenth century, men of letters routinely thought of money in historical terms. If few went so far as the Jesuit scholar Jean Hardouin (1646–1729)—who concluded from the numismatic evidence that nearly all “so-called ancient” texts (including Thucydides’ History and Augustine’s Confessions) were actually thirteenth-century forgeries—most nonetheless agreed that minted metals provided uniquely reliable access to historical truth. As the entry Médailles (medals) in Diderot and D’Alembert’s

Introduction

3

Encyclopédie concluded, Greek and Roman coins “seem to have survived . . . only to transmit facts to posterity; facts of which we otherwise would have no knowledge.”4 For the article’s author, as for many others in his era, it was axiomatic that the materials used in producing “metallic history” were unalterable and incorruptible, unlike paper or parchment. Bearing the unmistakable signs of public authority, such evidence was assumed to be free of the personal pettiness that distorted so much of the historical record.5 Money, some scholars hence concluded, was actually a form of “monument.” Along with inscriptions, charters, and tombs, money could “enlighten us about Antiquity.”6 Historians of the modern world, in contrast, have rarely found money to be so illuminating. As Hennin acknowledged in the Histoire numismatique, “The invention of printing made such monuments much less useful.” 7 No longer enlightened by it, scholars instead see through money—they both treat it as something transparent (on the other side of which, real values reside) and allow it to structure what they see (as one might speak of a place or topic “seen through travelers’ eyes”). One goal of this book is to look at money, rather than through it, and thereby to make it both less invisible and more historical. While many historians have recently developed the history of economic thought as a version of intellectual history, this book follows a different path.8 Since money features in any market transaction and in many family arguments, it seems wrong to limit “economic thought” to the work of a comparatively small set of canonical authors. Surely if David Hume, Adam Smith, and the marquis de Condorcet had ideas about money, so too did any woman who bought bread, sold fish, or pawned her wool blanket every summer. That the thoughts of these latter individuals have largely gone unrecorded makes them more difficult to trace but no less real or meaningful to consider. Wherever possible, therefore, I shift attention from the enunciated theories of philosophes to the enacted practices and everyday conduct of ordinary people. In doing so, some of the questions asked in this book are deceptively simple looking: What did people do, physically, with money? How did they handle it? When did they need money and when could they do without it? The answers to these questions are not easy to come by. Especially around such apparent human universals as food, sleep, or money, regularly repeated behaviors can often be the most difficult to perceive. This book therefore combines individuals’ personal reflections with policymakers’

4

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

formulations and occasional casual quantification in order to make visible as many viewpoints and attitudes as possible. If this approach rarely offers the sort of biographical richness found in a work focused on a single thinker, it nonetheless has the advantage of allowing us to understand money and its history as social phenomena. For while money is unquestionably an intellectual and cultural construction, its functioning is never a matter of what any one individual—even if he be Adam Smith!— happens to think. When we use money, when we think about money, we are always (consciously or otherwise) thinking of what other people will think or do. The distinction between “what I think” and “what I think others think” could easily become specious, but it serves to remind us that money works only as a relation between people. It is fi ne to stockpile Confederate dollars, but at the point when nobody will accept them as payment, they cease to be money and become historical curiosities (“monuments,” in Hennin’s terms) regardless of the holder’s own thoughts about them.9 Of course, it is not always easy to know what other people think. The immediate can often be the most opaque. The obvious, daily, and routine demand of their would-be analyst sustained attention and theoretical sophistication. In the sense that Roland Barthes once gave to the term “myth,” money is easily mythologized—its value and importance treated as both natural and self-evident. It is the essence of myth, Barthes argued, to transform history into nature, to strip reality of its historical determinants. If it “goes without saying” that money matters, money is the bottom line, and money makes the world go round, then we are probably dealing only with the myth of money. The “obviousness” of money’s importance marks it as a myth structure or, in Louis Althusser’s formulation, as an ideological effect.10 While focusing on currency can often collapse into fetishism, into the fantasy of value inhering in money itself, my intention here is to accomplish the reverse. By looking closely at money, I hope to make it less familiar and that its value and qualities will become less “obvious” rather than more so. My goal is to estrange and denaturalize money, thereby restoring it to history. In looking at money, rather than through it, I repeatedly return to its material form. My emphasis on materiality should not, however, be read as endorsing the idea that money has, or ought to have, intrinsic value. If a long tradition has insisted that the physical properties of certain metals make them inherently qualified to serve as money, the proponents of

Introduction

5

that viewpoint have nearly always imagined those properties as much as they have observed them. After all, it was in confronting ample physical evidence to the contrary that the founding works of modern political economy—texts such as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) and his Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money (1691)—identified money with gold and silver on the basis of the latter’s durability. Locke had been a Fellow of Christ Church College (Oxford) and later lived in the household of Lord Ashley, one of the richest men in England; he inhabited a prosperous world in which silver often appeared in the form of a teapot and gold might be shaped into teeth or crucifi xes. Though others argued “the ease with which these metals move from money to the melting pot” gave them value, Locke saw the coins made from them as having a fi xity lacking in other substances.11 In the face of an emerging consumer culture, of political turmoil, of worn and clipped coinage, and of constant (but erratic) inflows of gold and silver from the Americas, Locke aspired to establish an immutable physical basis for money. Locke’s fantasy has itself proved amazingly long lasting, but we must not mistake its properties for those of material objects. Silver, as a metal, may be highly durable; coins, as things, most generally were not. Money is material, but it is not its matter that gives it its value. An analogy may be useful here: ballots are (or, at least, historically have been) pieces of paper that people mark with ink or in pencil. Ballots have a material form; even an “immaterial” electronic vote depends on the physical technology of touch pads and semiconductors. While voters sometimes worry that one or another technology may be more or less easily tampered with, none would say the value of voting resides in the material form of registering votes. Rather, it is the electorate’s willingness to abide by the vote’s announced outcome—voters’ trust in the electoral system—that gives those ballots their worth. When people doubt the system’s legitimacy, when they suspect fraud or corruption, the ballots lose value: voters stay away from the polls (they consider voting to be useless), and they find other ways (or not) to make their voices heard. Dropping ballots and ballot boxes into an Afghan village from an airplane is not, after all, the same as establishing long-term democratic institutions. The material support may bolster the institution but it is not equivalent to it. So, too, with money. A community may value copper disks or cowry shells, or it may value green pieces of paper printed with

6

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

portraits of dead presidents. People who trea sure one form often see no worth in another. In all cases, it is human beings who make stuff into money. While it is always human beings who make physical objects and social relations into money, only rarely is this a conscious choice or the immediate outcome of legislative action. Currency may or may not circulate legally, but its legal status alone does not automatically confer value in the eyes of those who use it. (Consider, for example, the skeptical way many Americans react to two-dollar bills or the response of English shopkeepers to bills printed in Scotland.) Rather, money’s value is conventional and socially based. Learned in early childhood and made visible whenever a certain sort of transaction is made, trust in a currency manifests itself most often in actions rather than in words.12 Like the alphabet, money is something we learn when we are young and rarely question afterwards. Dimes, nickels, and quarters continue in our lives as do the letters A, B, and C. All become automatic from being repeated in the same fashion, over and over and over again. The shared cultural work of giving money value is both constantly being done and very rarely recognized as such. In this way, money is like the category of gender as explicated by the critic and philosopher Judith Butler: not fi xed or made once and for all but something that exists thanks only to its repeated enactment (not one interpellation but a whole series of them).13 The process is historical and ongoing, but its effects are most often misrecognized as natural and static. In most cases, monetary transactions are therefore characterized by what we might call “involuntary trust”—a trust itself resulting from involuntary, even unconscious, memory. Following Michel Aglietta and André Orléan’s formulation in their La Monnaie souveraine, we can identify at least two interrelated registers of monetary trust.14 When it functions in an unremarked-upon fashion, money both reveals and depends upon a “hierarchical,” or vertical, organization of trust (between those who use it and the issuing entity) and a somewhat more horizontally structured “habitual” trust (between buyers and sellers, for instance). Based in repeated actions and regular expectations, these hardly conscious forms of trust sediment into an understanding of how the world—and, crucially, the other people in it—naturally work. In this way, money is also an institution, or microtechnology, for the production and reproduction of shared norms and social cohesion. (Of, in Althusser’s terms,

Introduction

7

“obviousnesses.”) History offers examples, of course, of times when this reproduction breaks down and the repetition ceases to be automatic: heated controversies over spelling reform, anxiety at the possible switch from pounds sterling to euros.15 This book is about one such break.

The people who used money in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France are as central to this book as are the institutions that created it. Since money has usually been state issued, its use cannot be completely separated from the history of law and legislators. Yet the entanglement of lawmakers’ plans with other people’s claims and reactions is as significant as the formers’ specific policy goals, discursive logics, or legal genealogies. My reservations about the history of economic thought (as usually practiced) hold true for narrowly conceived histories of political ideas or political culture as well. The French Revolution was an era of intense popular politicization, a time when many ordinary people became actively engaged in multiple aspects of public life. Their involvement took many obviously political forms (such as signing petitions, staging festivals, or donning patriotic garb) but it also included issuing their own currencies, stopping shipments of gold and silver, and protesting high prices. When they marched in the streets of Paris in spring 1795, working people called for “bread and the Constitution of 1793”—it is a mistake to imagine one of those demands was economic, the other political.16 The monetary history of this period needs to be understood as a dialogue of sorts, albeit one in which some voices were much louder than others and some interlocutors proved almost completely deaf. Power differentials limited individuals’ access to this debate and the forms their actions could take. A centrally placed public figure like the comte de Mirabeau could, with the help of half a dozen ghostwriters, author pamphlets and speeches that would be widely reproduced. In contrast, Simon François Delamarche, the French Republic’s first central director of paper-money manufacture, experienced making money as extended work hours, midnight meetings, and an effectively insurmountable mountain of paperwork.17 The workers Delamarche employed literally made money and simultaneously protested their low wages; their labor, in turn, was mirrored (reproduced in reverse) by émigré priests in London who printed nearly identical objects. Petitioners who argued money

8

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

should be taxed, Jacobins who swore oaths of loyalty to the Revolution’s currency, women who waited in line for small change—all in their own way shaped the making of money in 1790s France. This book, therefore, treats money as central to and constitutive of the politics of everyday life. We often treat power and status distinctions mea sured monetarily as merely quantitative differences: common sense says some people have more money than others and diamonds cost more than milk. Such perceptions are not fundamentally wrong but they are also hardly exhaustive. For while the Latin adage may hold pecunia non olet (“money does not stink”), Mirabeau nonetheless found the “verdigris smell” of copper coinage “very disagreeable.”18 It is a central contention of this book that money has qualities as well as quantities. Different people have different kinds of money. Being attentive to money’s qualities and treating it as a political and social, as well as an economic, mediator lets us ask new questions and see old answers in a changed light. From Max Weber and others, for instance, we know the modern state can be characterized as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.19 States can declare war, incarcerate individuals, and mobilize troops; when nonstate entities do this, we call it terrorism. For much of history, states have also monopolized the production of currency (when others produce money, we call it an “alternative payment system” or counterfeiting). These two attributes of the state are not unrelated: states punish counterfeiters, stipulate the legal form in which taxes can be paid, and use collected moneys to build armies and pay soldiers. What happens, then, if we reconsider the French Revolution—a crucial episode in the formation of the modern nationstate—not from the perspective of the use of violence but from that of the regulation of money? Throughout the 1790s and beyond, the state’s power in this domain (as in many others) was under construction, and other forms of authority—religious, local, or family—often proved equally effective.20 In the first year of the Revolution (1789–1790), the French Constituent, or National, Assembly created a supposedly national paper money, the assignats.21 As we see in Chapter 2, the assignats were meant to resolve a crisis but they had the effect of triggering new ones. Moreover, elaborate anticounterfeiting mea sures and artisanal production values meant the notes entered circulation only slowly and their large denominations made them useless for most daily transactions (see Chapter 3).

Introduction

9

In this context, literally thousands of entities (municipalities and manufacturers, charitable ventures, and for-profit banks) began to issue their own small-denomination paper moneys. This non-national small change circulated à volonté: voluntarily, no one was forced to accept or give it. The Assembly—many of whose members were deeply attached to the idea of a “free” and unregulated economy—repeatedly expressed its gratitude to those who issued these “patriotic bills” and thereby helped address the country’s severe shortage of small change. Only the state’s paper enjoyed forced circulation; it was only the assignats that people had to accept, yet this difference in legal status hardly sufficed to establish the state’s ultimate authority. Try though they might, successive revolutionary governments never enjoyed a monopoly on the legitimate issue of money. The weakness of the state, as much as the so-called laws of economics, accounts for the failure of national paper money in 1790s France. Yet nearly all existing scholarship on the subject ignores questions of sovereignty or governance and instead treats the assignats as a test case for economic policy. Be it Andrew Dickson White—founder and first president of Cornell University—commenting on the gold-standard debate in the United States in the 1870s or Marcel Marion, writing the Revolution’s “financial history” in the context of the German and Austrian hyperinflations of the early 1920s, the assignats have repeatedly been treated as a barely coded message for future lawmakers: a warning to keep expenses low and stay away from the printing press. Such accounts bear an unacknowledged debt to Edmund Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the founding work of modern conservatism. In that text, Burke described the Revolution as a systematic and brutal reversal of the Old Regime—“laws overturned; tribunals subverted”—exemplified (“to crown all,” wrote Burke) by the state’s issuing of paper money. Paper in France, Burke argued, had reversed both the social and the natural order. Much as the assignats had driven gold and silver coins to “hid[e] themselves in the earth from whence [sic] they came,” thereby undoing the human labor of mining, other papers (“paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man”) had taken the place of the “real hearts of flesh and blood” formerly beating in Frenchmen’s bosoms. The nightmare that was the Revolution unleashed many demons, but few were so “violent an outrage upon credit, property, and liberty, as this compulsory paper currency.”22

10

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

For Burke, as for White and Marion, “paper” necessarily signified worthlessness. Paper was light weight, fl imsy, perishable; it could be blown away by the wind or set on fire in an instant. Compared to parchment, paper was new; compared to silver, it was cheap; compared to rocks, paper was nothing on which to found a church. All paper, these authors implied, partakes of the same characteristics: be it white or green, printed with text, or cut into silhouettes, paper should not be trusted. Men and women in eighteenth-century France, however, saw things differently. They paid good money for imported Dutch stationery and could be highly discriminating in their assessment of papers. As one economic historian has noted, consumers judged a sheet of paper on multiple characteristics, including its “thickness and opacity . . . resistance to tears, scratches, and folding; whiteness, or a bluish or creamy tint; the absence of foreign particles, stains or discolouration, air bubbles or water drops, ripples, fingerprints, holes or stretch marks.”23 In other words, all paper was not created equal. Even in their most radical efforts at egalitarianism, French revolutionaries included twenty-six different kinds of paper in their tally of government-regulated necessities.24 Many economists and monetary historians, this suggests, have so far been insufficiently materialist. By privileging the simple binary distinction of paper versus metal, they have blinded themselves to the qualitative differences between papers. Moreover, many have focused overmuch on the theory of how things might or ought to work and thereby have lost sight of how people regularly function. Take, for instance, the shift from substance to abstraction central to nearly every history of money: from barter, we have been told, societies moved to exchange based on some agricultural commodity (heads of cattle, stores of wheat) and from there to lumps of precious metals, then to minted coins, and eventually to paper.25 Appealing and easily intelligible because it moves in one direction from the palpable to the intangible, a tale like this is the sort of progress narrative that delighted Enlightenment authors and facilitates textbook writing even today. In practice, however, monetary abstraction and physical coins had long coexisted (much as pennies and bills coexist today with checkbooks, wire transfers, and debit cards). Their difference had (and has) more to do with social context than with historical change: a merchant in eighteenth-century Bordeaux conducted his transatlantic business with book debt and bills of exchange, while the working poor in the same city rarely saw any money other than copper coins.26 The

Introduction

11

faux-materialist framework structuring so many histories of money represses this social difference and marks it, wrongly, as change across time. In our own day, neoconservative pundits and left-leaning cultural critics think of themselves having little in common but they actually agree on this point. They share a sense that over the centuries currency has been dematerialized (that the coins of the past were somehow more physical than the debit cards of the present).27 This book rejects that framework. Instead, it insists even abstractions manifest themselves in a material or corporeal fashion and our perception of an object’s concreteness always depends on culturally shaped expectations.28 The distinctions drawn by any culture between the solid and the insubstantial (the material and the immaterial, the lived and the ideological) are important for understanding that society but should not be mistaken for transhistorical truths. Consider, for example, the status of money in prerevolutionary France. To make sense of it, one must understand that “money of account” (also called “imaginary” money) and “money of reckoning” (or “real” money) did not necessarily coincide.29 “Imaginary” (or “fictive”) money referred to the units in which accounts were kept; in most parts of France, these were livres (pounds, not books), sous, and deniers. These units were “imaginary” insofar as there were no physical objects in the world to which they directly and consistently corresponded. “Real” money, on the other hand, meant the coins people held in their hands or kept in their purses. While people most often quoted prices and made sales in terms of livres, there was no such thing as a livre coin (or a two-, five-, or tenlivre coin). Instead, there were many different coins, all known by names derived from their appearance. An écu, for instance, depicted the royal shield, or écusson, while a liard was so called because of its yellowish gray (liart) color. For most of the eighteenth century, a large French écu (a silver coin, 40– 41 millimeters in diameter—about twice the size of a oneeuro coin) was worth six livres tournois; a smaller écu (half the weight, 80 percent of the width), three livres. This, however, did not have to be the case; coins bore no numerical markers (other than the year of their production), and it was a monarchical prerogative to set the “exchange rate” between coins and the money of account. A ruler might cite wars, coin clipping, or international overproduction of silver as an urgent motive for altering the rate; in the last twenty-six years of Louis XIV’s reign, 1689–1715, the official value of the écu was changed forty-three times.

12

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

Custom also entitled the king to adjust the money at the time of his accession, when the first coins bearing his image were issued.30 Within France, the livre tournois (the livre originally used in the city of Tours) as money of account was widely familiar but hardly universal in its application. Accounting did not keep pace with territorial gains: Valenciennes and the surrounding countryside had been part of France since the 1678 Treaty of Nijmingen, but contracts throughout the eighteenth century continued to be written there in terms of the livre de Hainaut (which was worth about three-fifths of a livre tournois); elsewhere in the North, people still calculated on the basis of florins and patars.31 The Duchy of Lorraine was formally incorporated into France in 1766, but the livre lorraine remained the local money of account through the 1790s. In other words, eighteenth-century metallic currency alone formed part of an abstract system of considerable complexity. This is what Voltaire was getting at when he quipped, “ ‘Silver [argent]’ is a word used to refer to gold”—coins might be made of metals but their semiotic heft far transcended their material presence. 32 Moreover, coins circulated alongside, albeit rarely in the same networks as, a great mass of private and public papers. Much of any merchant’s business, especially in the flourishing luxury or import-export trades and in the realm of high fi nance, depended almost completely on various credit instruments: private promissory notes, obligations (formal IOUs), or bills of exchange drawn on banking houses in Amsterdam, Genoa, and elsewhere. 33 These papers moved freely in eighteenth-century France, but their circulation was not forced (no one was obliged to take them). Rather, familiar and distinct, backed by the signatures of individuals who could be tracked down and held responsible if necessary, these papers stayed within specific networks and channels.34 In a sense, it would therefore be appropriate to say Old Regime paper was concrete, coinage was abstract. The coin of the realm was legally good for any and all transactions but, in practice, many were made without it. When we refer to the Old Regime’s money consisting traditionally of coins, we are therefore talking much more about the politics of state building than about the habits of daily life (a distinction too rarely noted).35 Required most importantly for the paying of taxes, coin mediated individuals’ and communities’ relations with central authority but it played a much smaller role in commercial transactions. The mode of payment obligatory for interactions

Introduction

13

with the state only sometimes served individuals as a means of exchange. In fact, by one recent calculation, coins made up barely 20 percent of the money supply in eighteenth-century France while various papers made up the rest.36 The official public definition of “money” extended only to coins produced by the king’s mints, but that absolutism did not penetrate very far into many sectors of the economy. Instead, even the royal household ran a debt for most of its purchases and even the state issued a bewildering variety of circulating short-term papers. The political category of money and the credit mechanisms actually at work in the economy regularly diverged. Relations of debt and credit were therefore structural, largely unexceptional features of Old Regime life (as Chapter 1 further demonstrates). They made daily life livable; they contributed to individuals’ understandings of the past; they helped shape expectations for the future. All but the truly destitute were entangled in credit, in webs of social obligation that both served as safety nets and turned occasionally to nooses.37 In the aftermath of France’s humiliating and expensive losses in the Seven Years’ War, however, critics condemned credit (and especially the monarchy’s reliance on it) with growing vehemence. Credit, as Clare Crowston has recently shown, was denounced as insubstantial, as founded merely on appearances themselves too easily manipulated. Attacking court society’s networks of patronage and seeming promotion of style over substance, writers such as the baron d’Holbach and the marquis de Mirabeau were making political claims. Yet their arguments centered on what we would today call economic categories—debt, credit, taxes, money—and culminated in demands for balanced budgets, hard money, and transparent accounting.38 In the name of putting France on a solid financial foundation, critics of the absolutist monarchy inadvertently provoked what we now call “the French Revolution.” As Tom Kaiser, Michael Kwass, and Michael Sonenscher have made clear, it was titled aristocrats and high-placed magistrates who spearheaded the attack on the Crown’s monetary practices as despotic (not founded on anything real but on abuses of credit, not representing the nation but exploiting it). 39 These men had no intention of causing social upheaval or political uncertainty. Yet—and this is a dynamic we will see repeatedly in the chapters that follow—the notionally conservative measures proposed by these fundamentally conservative

14

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

actors ended up having truly revolutionary effects. Men and women, to paraphrase Marx, made their own revolution. But they did not make it just as they pleased.

This book is called Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. “Stuff ” in the title both gestures toward the significance of material culture for the book’s protagonists—many of whom hoped changes to the physical form of objects would enhance those objects’ value as currency— and marks those expectations as misplaced and founded in misrecognition. For value, as this book argues, is not in the things (which are, in fact, just stuff ) but in ourselves. Value is a product of humans’ interactions with objects and with each other. Rather than being understood as such, however, it is instead habitually predicated of things themselves. (Hence, in standard usage, “I value x” announces an idiosyncratic sentiment, whereas “x is valuable” states a social truth in the form of an apparently objective fact.) Despite—or, perhaps, because of—its imprecision and lack of scholarly pedigree, the word “stuff ” should remind us that the physical world helps shape social and psychological processes and is itself shaped by them. Though unthinking materiality may be the first connotation of “stuff,” it is not the word’s only meaning: when Prospero says, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” he refers to the immaterial residues of daily existence that fuel psychic life. These traces and perceptions, the objects and individuals we all have “in our heads,” rarely relate to their physical referents in a simple manner. After all, as objects, coins more closely resemble metal buttons than they do banknotes; yet, thanks to mental stuff, we keep the first in purses and pockets, the latter in sewing baskets. The misperception of value as a quality inherent in things (rather than as a product of relations between people) is central to this book’s analysis. Take, for instance, most revolutionaries’ commitment to the ideas of money as merchandise and of money as a good which should, like any other, have its price determined by supply and demand. Such an assertion only became plausible when the social trust and shared cultural norms of monetized exchanges were routinely mistaken for (and asserted to be) qualities of physical currency objects themselves. This confusion of the social for the material (this fetishism, in the Marxist sense) arose first as a form of political criticism: when they insisted value

Introduction

15

inhered in metals, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers from Locke to the encyclopédistes tried to limit the otherwise absolute power of a monarch who ruled by divine right. Transposed to a political context in which sovereignty resided “essentially in the people,” however, the idea of intrinsic value had far different and largely disastrous effects (explored at length in Chapters 4– 6). For it meant the means of exchange most commonly used by the great majority of the actual people (small change, personal paper, book debt) could easily be treated as worthless. Revolutionary lawmakers, nearly all of whom believed political liberty and economic deregulation to be inseparable, long refused to take any action that might have ameliorated the situation. A fundamental tension hence existed between the liberty of the metaphorical “people” and the increasingly precarious, lived existence of ordinary men and women. Neither the symbolic nor the material but the contrast between the two drove further radicalization. As Chapter 4 argues, national money was meant to create shared emotions but it had the effect of highlighting socioeconomic difference. Intentions and outcomes did not coincide. In short, “stuff happened.” This book traces the politics of money from 1789 through the 1840s. Constrained in imposing new taxes by accusations of “despotism” and with his regime’s borrowing ability at its limit, King Louis XVI called for a meeting of the Estates- General (the French parliamentary body, last convened in 1614). Rejecting centuries- old procedures and protocols, many of the elected representatives actively refused to meet as the “Estates- General.” Instead, in an episode of high political drama staged unexpectedly on an abandoned indoor tennis court, they called themselves the “National Assembly.” The French Revolution had begun. On July 13, 1789, the newly self-defined Assembly pledged “never to pronounce the infamous word, bankruptcy” and to honor the state’s debt as a “sacred obligation.” Depicted at the time as a “bottomless pit” or “immense void,” debt could well be a model for the vacuum in political legitimacy that historian François Furet so compellingly positioned as the start of the Revolution itself.40 Yet debt is a particularly interesting form of void, for rather than signaling the destruction or the disappearance of the past, it attests to its stubborn refusal to go away. Thomas Paine, in his The Rights of Man, famously argued that the dead could not make laws for those not yet born, but he said nothing about them leaving bills to be paid.41 The debt literally carried the old regime over into

16

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

the new: because most French government borrowing in the 1770s and 1780s had been in the form of perpetual or lifetime annuities, even conservative estimates had payments on the existing debt as a fi xed part of the French budget until 1822 at the earliest.42 Borrowing, observed the comte d’Antraigues in August 1789, “devours the future.”43 If this book is about the debt, it is also therefore about the many forms—immaterial and material—of the past’s presence in the present. It is about money and about the passing of time and about the relation between the two. Such issues are especially germane to the study of the French Revolution, for its is a story in which both debt and temporality have featured prominently. From Arthur Young and Charles Dickens to Ernest Labrousse and beyond, miserably impoverished peasants have been standard figures in most descriptions of prerevolutionary France.44 Juxtaposed with depictions of the monarchy’s corrupt, incompetent, or (at best) hopelessly complex fiscal mechanisms, the image of these commoners carrying grossly inequitable tax burdens is among the most immediately recognizable representations of the Revolution’s origins.45 Central to these depictions of socioeconomic injustice is a sense of time being “out of joint”: Young expressed dismay at peasant women whose hard lives had left them looking seventy years old when they were not yet thirty; roués and libertines meanwhile lived for the moment with never a thought for the morrow.46 While, ever since 1789, money problems have figured prominently in efforts to identify the causes of the Revolution, a new sense of time has been just as routinely cited as among its most significant effects. Schemes to convert clocks to a decimal basis went largely unrealized but the introduction in 1793 of a completely new, republican calendar was significantly more successful. Time began again at Year One; the ten-day décade replaced the seven-day week; church bells, melted down to make small change, no longer rang the time for prayers.47 Some historians have even suggested that the events of the Revolution transformed people’s very way of thinking about time. With the new political era in France, as with the new industrial order in Britain, came a newly regimented and linear sense of time.48 Continuity yielded to rupture. Time’s arrow replaced nature’s cycles. A yawning chasm appeared and the tradition of all dead generations fell into it. History as an academic discipline and, more profoundly perhaps, as an attitude toward the world, was born. Modernity emerged—or so we have been told.

Introduction

17

Though both are central to any history of the Revolution, indebtedness and temporality have rarely been brought into the same narrative framework. As history has been written, the topics run parallel: two lines of analysis that extend infinitely without ever touching each other. Or, rather, it might be more accurate to say that they are conceptually perpendicular, crossing at a single point—a juncture labeled “the French Revolution.” Daniel Mornet’s assertion from eighty years ago, “The Revolution’s origins are one history, the Revolution is another,” would appear to be confi rmed.49 What happens, however, if we take questions about money and indebtedness and push them through the history of the Revolution and beyond? For the debt did not go away. At political juncture after political juncture, orators warned their listeners that the very financial crisis that had killed the preceding regime still lurked at the bottom of the balance sheet. Tracing money and debt through the 1790s and into the nineteenth century should change how we think about the Revolution. For these questions invite us to turn our attention (at least sometimes) from the entrance of the new to the far slower and more laborious exit of the old. Over the past twenty years, many historians of the Revolution have been inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s assertion that the putatively “old” regime had, itself, already been fundamentally modern. According to his analysis, the centralizing absolutist state of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had already stripped the nobility of any real power and put men “of humble extraction” into the few positions of power. “Then, as today [wrote Tocqueville in the 1850s], the central power held all Frenchmen in tutelage.” The real revolution, he claimed, had taken place in the century preceding 1789. At the end of what is usually called “the Old Regime,” all that remained of the truly “old” was appearance and illusion. It took almost nothing to finish it off. Following Tocqueville, numerous historians have concluded that “the Old Regime fell apart overnight” in the summer of 1789. 50 Certainly it is true that the combination in those months of acts of popular protest (such as the storming of the Bastille) with a vocabulary of national sovereignty (as expressed in the Tennis Court Oath) profoundly shook many people’s understandings of the world in which they lived. Yet institutions and habits were not thereby immediately transformed. As John Markoff has compellingly demonstrated, it took years to get rid of feudalism after the National Assembly declared it “abolished.”51 Much had

18

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

changed, but the Old Regime did not literally crumble. Instead, it had to be taken apart and unpicked stitch by stitch: it took well over a year to demolish the Bastille and much longer to pay the workmen’s bills. When Bourbon absolutism “collapsed” in the summer of 1789, revolutionaries were left facing both political uncertainty and great piles of intractable, almost immovable, rubble.52 The presence of the latter shaped how they responded to the former. The men of the National Convention (1792–1795)—France’s most radically revolutionary government—have often been depicted as iconoclasts. They burnt feudal charters, tore down statues, and converted churches into altars of reason. Royal insignia had to be removed from the candleholders in the Convention’s own meeting hall and from the army’s battle standard; Bourbon fleurs-de-lis were to be painted over and transformed into naturalistic bouquets wherever they existed. 53 Yet the political, cultural, and social instability that was the Revolution meant that vowing to efface “all signs of the past regime” would always prove faster and easier than actually doing so. In 1791, the manufacturers Arthur and Robert furnished more than 450 yards of “Law and King” wallpaper to hang in the Legislative Assembly’s new committee rooms; after that same body voted itself out of existence barely a year later and a Republic was declared, a sign painter had to mix his pigments to match the wallpaper’s background color and obscure the word “King” 5,120 times—“in such a way that it seemed never to have existed.”54 When Paris city officials were told to remove “all signs of the Old Regime” from the city’s religious buildings, they quickly despaired of locating them all. “There are too many churches in Paris,” they reported. 55 Actually being an iconoclast turns out to take much more time than simply deciding to become one. The energy these revolutionaries devoted to destroying the stuff they could see gives us some indication of how heavily past traditions weighed upon them. Yet the presence of the past may often be most powerful when it is the least physical—as for instance in the case of the debt. Revolutionaries’ eagerness to start time anew owed at least something to their desire to wipe account books clean once and for all. A blank slate is also a clean one. Tropes of rupture, regeneration, and a complete break with the past may have been especially appealing to men confronted relentlessly with debts, debris, memories, and tax arrears.

1 The Time of the Debt Res mobilis, res vilis.

I

on Geneva’s most fashionable street, the French king’s representative counted girls. Sometimes, there were thirty of them; at other times, only twenty-nine. Some days, he counted sixty; some days, barely half that number. But always—as often as twice a week or even twice a day—he counted girls. On the first of July 1784, he began the day by ticking off the names of twenty-seven; a few hours later, he carefully noted the presence of over a hundred “ladies and young ladies.” In October of the same year, his formal reception rooms must have taken on a schoolhouse air, as twenty-nine little girls (all under the age of seven) gathered there one morning.1 On other occasions, the same space was transformed for a few hours into a sort of ballroom environment as dozens of young women—all educated and affluent and known to each other at least by face and name—were ushered onto the premises by their attentive guardians. During any of these sessions, the French diplomat’s only official interest was in determining whether these girls and young women—all of whose names were on lists before him—were still alive (still alive, a mere six months after the last time he had conducted such an exercise). If they were alive and present to be counted, France owed money to the girls’ fathers and uncles, cousins and brothers, many of whom were bankers who themselves owed money to investors all across Europe. If, by chance, one of them had died, the French state’s debt was slightly reduced. If, in some horrible conflagration, the entire female population of Geneva had perished simultaneously, it might have been as much as 40 percent of the N HIS SPLENDID R ESIDENCE

20

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

French monarchy’s short-term borrowing that was redeemed in an instant.2 As peculiar and unfamiliar as these regularly repeated headcounts may seem today, they were central to the workings of international credit in the final years of the Old Regime.3 We know that credit mattered in those years because highly charged debates about the size of the monarchy’s debt and the need for higher taxes dominated French public life throughout the 1780s. Yet credit’s day-to-day functioning—the contracts written, the goods acquired, and even the young women counted—is often overshadowed by our knowledge that those political debates ended in what we now call “the French Revolution.” Usually studied because they precipitated something so very unanticipated, our familiarity with those debates about the royal debt has made it increasingly difficult to see what people in the 1780s expected the future to be like. While many of those expectations came to little, we need to take them into account nonetheless, for they were the basis upon which the people of France borrowed money, lent funds, and lived their lives. This chapter therefore leaves aside the public, political debates to focus on how borrowing and lending, debt and credit actually operated. For as other scholars have argued, credit was the basic glue of early-modern societies.4 At the local level, as at the international; for artisans, as for princes; over months and years as over decades (and even longer)—relations of debt and credit united communities and gave individuals a strong sense of their own place in the world. Its politicization in the 1770s and 1780s has blinded us to how very routine, stable, and nonrevolutionary the king’s borrowing (and that of his subjects) actually was. It was not the size of the debt, per se, but the scale of political agitation around it, that increased dramatically in the final years of the Old Regime.

Thirty Girls from Geneva As of the mid-eighteenth century, it had become standard operating policy for the French government to raise short-term funds through a sort of disguised loan contract known as a rente viagère (“lifetime annuity” is a close, but not perfect, translation). 5 With such a rente, an investor made a lump-sum payment to the French state. In exchange, he or she received a certain percentage of that amount on a semiannual basis for as long as some individual specified in the rente contract remained alive. When that

The Time of the Debt

21

named individual died, the payments stopped immediately—hence the name “viagère” (from the root vivre, “to live”). In legal terms, a rente was not a loan and the state was neither repaying the money in increments nor paying “interest” on it; rather, it was a situation in which a creditor/ investor/“lender” (crédirentier) used a certain sum to purchase a future regular income from another party (the débirentier or “borrower,” in this case, the French monarchy through the intermediary of the Paris city government). Rentes of all kinds—whether contracted between two individuals or between individuals and corporate entities (such as states, cities, or monastic orders), whether contracted for a lifetime or forever—were debtcredit relations that emerged in the thirteenth century as ways of getting around religious prohibitions on usury.6 Since the heyday of the medieval commercial revolution, jurists and theologians had repeatedly drawn on an extraordinary variety of authorities (including Aristotle, the early Church fathers, and the sixth-century Justinian Code) to buttress their definition of usury—by which they meant any interest-bearing loan—as a sin against both charity and justice. Many of their arguments turned on claims about money’s inherently “sterile” and inert qualities. Unlike livestock, or even a plot of land on which new crops sprouted every year, money did not reproduce itself organically. Money, Thomas of Aquinas argued, was simply a “mea sure of utility,” and while useful things might become more or less available, the mea sure had to remain constant. “Whence to receive more money for less,” he concluded, “seems nothing other than to diversify the mea sure in giving and receiving, which manifestly contains iniquity.”7 (Think of it this way: if an individual went from slim to obese, we would think it fraudulent if he insisted that his weight in pounds was constant but the number of ounces in a pound had changed.) From this perspective, it was legitimate to expect a borrower to return a sum he had been lent, but there was no logical reason to expect that the money had somehow grown in the interim. Medieval law and theology hence considered interest-bearing loans to be unnatural—this was why usurers and sodomites occupied the same circle in Dante’s Inferno. Rentes, defined not as loans but as forms of sale, made it possible for cash-strapped borrowers and money-burdened lenders to arrange matters among themselves without sinning. With a rente, an individual did not legally lend money; rather, the would-be lender alienated a lump sum in exchange for a regular income stream at a fi xed rate. Since the

22

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

alienation of property was a final sale—that amount of cash was now the débirentier’s to do with as he liked and it, or the goods acquired with it, would pass to his heirs and then to theirs—many rente contracts guaranteed a perpetual income. For decades, or even for centuries, the right to collect and the obligation to pay passed to the descendants of those originally involved. Fixed, and in theory eternal, these perpetual rentes were classed by French property law as a form of immeuble, or immovable property. In contrast, a rente viagère was treated as a meuble, or piece of movable property. Of finite duration, a lifetime rente had none of the permanence predicated by jurists of immovable goods. Life, after all, was far from perpetual (especially in early-modern Europe, where high infant mortality rates made average life expectancy at birth under thirty). If, in legal terms, a perpetual rente was a “commutative” contract guaranteeing that each party received what he expected, a lifetime rente could offer no such assurance. French jurists hence classed rentes viagères as they did investment in long-distance shipping; both were “aleatory,” or subject to chance, both involved elements of risk impossible to predict. “In a rente viagère,” explained one legal dictionary, “the sum received . . . is not inherently the equivalent of what the recipient then gives, for the person on whose life the contract was based could happen to die a few days after the rente was constituted . . . and hence one party will effectively have given nothing for the money he received. . . . one cannot say that the trade was fair and equal.”8 Insofar as it seemed plausible for France to raise (rather than lose) money by selling them, rentes viagères belonged to a risk culture in which death was assumed to be as likely—in many ways more likely—than life. Crédirentiers in the eighteenth century nonetheless found ways to prolong the income they received from these rentes. Since the life specified in a rente contract (known as the tête, or “head”) did not have to be the person providing the funds, it became common for middle-aged or elderly people to invest their life’s savings while simultaneously picking a healthy, younger family member as the contract’s tête—this ensured that payments continued to be made long after the original investor had died and the initial capital had been repaid. With state-issued rentes viagères paying at least 6 or 7 percent, the sum alienated could easily be regained in sixteen years and if the rente had been issued on the “head” of a healthy teenager, many further years of payments could be anticipated. Very good money could be made by finding the right heads.

The Time of the Debt

23

In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and especially following its costly participation in the American War of Independence, the French state relied heavily on rentes viagères to raise funds. To ensure that they were fully subscribed—and hence that the monarchy had the money it needed to meet monthly operating expenses—these new rentes paid ever more attractive rates (up to 10 percent), and the paperwork involved in issuing them was simplified. Yet in order to collect the twice yearly payments, it still had to be established that the “tête” named in the contract was actually alive. Many rentes viagères were therefore issued on the head of the king or the life of the pope, but even more were issued on “thirty girls” or “thirty heads” from Geneva. In this latter configuration, wealth was divided across multiple rente contracts, thereby minimizing the chance of a dramatic loss. Individuals had made use of such strategies for years. For example, rather than investing 3,000 livres on just one of his many children, the Swiss pastor and librarian Antoine Josué Diodati could invest 500 livres on the “head” of his daughter Colombine and an equal amount on each of her five sisters. His total capital outlay would still be 3,000 livres and his revenue from the rentes would be the same, but by dividing his investment he would have greatly reduced the chance of losing his entire income overnight. In the 1770s, a group of Genevan bankers turned this family-based strategy into a business model when they began subscribing large sums of money on the heads (that is, on the lives) of their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and cousins—in short, any affluent young female they could find (including, in fact, Colombine Diodati and at least four of her sisters).9 Knowing from lifeexpectancy tables compiled by members of the local learned academy that women, on average, lived longer than men, and wanting to limit their potential losses as much as possible, the bankers pooled their investments: they consistently placed their money not on a single head, but spread across “thirty young ladies from Geneva” (trente demoiselles de Genève). Should one die, twenty-nine thirtieths of their investment would nonetheless remain intact. By 1789, rente contracts written on “thirty heads” made up a sizeable percentage of the French state’s debt. It was up to the French king’s representative in Geneva to keep track of those heads. The small and closed nature of Genevan society meant that participation—either as an investor or as one of the “heads from Geneva”— quickly extended far beyond any narrow circle of bankers and their children. Already in 1773, Voltaire commented testily that the city was soon

24

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

to be more famous for rentes viagères than for its printers “or even for Calvin.”10 Nearly every member of the city’s intellectual elite was involved: the mathematician and professor Louis Bertrand had four daughters, all of whom were numbered among the “girls from Geneva,” as were at least six of his nieces. So, too, were the daughters and nieces of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, rector of the Academy of Geneva, founder of the Journal de Genève, and renowned Alpine explorer; of the historian and one-time tutor to the crown prince of Denmark Henri Paul Mallet; of the pastor and Orientalist Gedeon Le Cointe; and of the publishers who partnered to reprint Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Gabriel Cramer and Samuel de Tournes. Ticking off names on the fi rst of July 1784, the French king’s representative noted the presence of Jeanne Cathérine and Elisabeth Anne Rilliet, daughters of the city’s former First Syndic; of Marie Thérèse Liotard, the portrait painter’s daughter; and of ninety-nine others—this in a city with a population of roughly 20,000.11 If the best known of Genevan bankers’ daughters, Germaine de Staël (née Necker), seems never to have been among the “heads” enumerated, many of her cousins most definitely were.12 Connected by ties of blood and marriage—the mathematician Bertrand, for instance, was married to a banker’s granddaughter and his brother-in-law’s brother was a partner in the Paris bank, Necker et Compagnie13 —these families also shared a patrician culture in which this scheme made intellectual, fi nancial, and even theological sense. While eighteenth-century Geneva remained profoundly Protestant, its Calvinism was neither as severe nor as ascetic (nor, indeed, as democratic) as it had been a century and a half earlier. No longer a faith that held human depravity as axiomatic, Genevan Calvinism had become “anthropologically optimistic.”14 The prominent midcentury theologian Jacob Vernet (also the editor of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws), maintained that man was born “to live in society . . . he is endowed with the faculty of reason [and hence] of reflecting on all sorts of subjects and foreseeing the future.” In the writings and sermons of Vernet, faith and rational calculation often coincided. Observing the world, establishing its patterns, and even “foreseeing the future” all belonged to a natural theology in which “there is nothing more beautiful for an intelligent creature than to study in Nature the ways of Supreme Wisdom.”15 It is therefore not surprising that at least three of Vernet’s own granddaughters figured among the “girls from Geneva.”16 A wide variety of

The Time of the Debt

25

Figure 1. Jean-Antoine Houdon, “Bust of a Young Girl, Identified as Anne Audéoud of Geneva” (ca. 1779–1781), plaster. Europeans in search of a steady income knew the “thirty girls [thirty heads] from Geneva” simply as a safe investment, but the heads nonetheless belonged to real people (some of whom were boys or grown women). Anne Audéoud, shown here at the age of six, was the daughter of a Genevan banker; she later married Gabriel Cramer, a childhood friend of Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache.

factors—from the impressive completeness of its vital-records archives and the insularity of its ruling oligarchy to trends in religious thought and attitudes toward child-rearing—combined to make the city’s culture and the bankers’ activities mutually compatible. While Vernet and others vehemently rejected D’Alembert’s controversial assertion (in the Encyclopédie article “Geneva”) that their religion amounted to a form of Unitarianism, they did grant considerable latitude to the human use of reason.

26

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

As a God-given faculty, reason existed to assist humanity in pursuing its equally God-given goals of happiness and perfection. If Genevan Calvinists used mortality statistics to calculate likely life expectancies or other data to determine optimum investment strategies, it was, in a sense, all part of some divine plan. While Providence continued to direct the universe and providential occurrences remained outside reason’s power to explain, more general patterns could—indeed should—be detected. Vernet’s “enlightened orthodoxy” largely converged with classical probability theory in how it understood the passing of secular time. As Lorraine Daston demonstrated in her analysis of the latter, the founders of the first life-insurance societies worried that every contract issued meant new uncertainties; they thought “in terms of cumulative risks, a growing sum over cases and time.” (That is, they believed the risks involved in insuring thirty people would be thirty times greater than those occasioned by a single individual.) In contrast, the proponents of probability theory saw large numbers and long time spans as tools for smoothing variation. “The [former] equated time with uncertainty, for time brought unforeseen changes . . . the [latter] equated time with certainty, for time . . . revealed the regularities underlying apparent flux.”17 Though unexpected events (such as the death of a single Genevan “head”) might call for recalculation, the overall picture was one of unvarying steadiness. “Rentes viagères,” wrote one Genevan investor, “are the tortoise. Everything else is a hare.”18 The “thirty girls from Geneva” were, that is, a means of managing uncertainty by converting it into mea surable risk. In their desire to do so, the bankers were hardly alone. Little books published across Europe promised to assist readers in identifying other unexpected regularities. Some of the ninety numbers composing the French Royal Lottery, for instance, had been drawn more times than others—success in the lottery was guaranteed it seemed, if only one could discern the underlying pattern. According to some authors, dream images were key to making sense of the apparently random draw of numbers. One who dreamt of anemones, libraries, cucumbers, or mustard was therefore guided to gamble on “11”; with a librarian in the picture, the dreamer knew to add “83” to his or her lucky list.19 Still other books presented little more than lists of winning lottery numbers. Though these latter look more like a printer’s exercise than a guidebook, their pages nonetheless offered a narrative of sorts for those who knew how to read it. They told a story in which “30”

The Time of the Debt

27

was far more active than “60,” while “3” was inevitably accompanied (over the span of six draws, at least) by “7,” “17,” “37,” “64,” “75,” or “83.”20 In both cases, be it the outcome of the lottery or the biographies of Swiss women, it was a matter of finding a way to take a series of mathematically unrelated but thematically connected events and turn them into history—a history useful not just for describing the past but also for predicting the future.21 Continuity was central to this mode of reasoning. If a state-run lottery offered ticket buyers the chance to gamble on being far wealthier tomorrow than they had been last week, it could do so only as long as the institutional structure of the Royal Lottery and of the monarchy, more generally, remained in place. Individuals’ willingness to take economic “chances” and their perception of political-social stability were directly correlated; people in 1780s Europe did not buy the French monarchy’s rentes viagères because they saw themselves dancing on a volcano’s edge. Rather, they contemplated the contingencies of their own existence against a background they assumed to be more or less stable. 22 So, while historians have generally described the “girls from Geneva”—along with the lotteries, various enterprising insurance schemes, the revived French East Indies Company, and a Paris building boom—as constituting a “speculative bubble” in the 1780s, we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from this description.23 The business had its speculative aspects: the Genevan bankers, sure both of the high interest payments to be earned and of their daughters’ collective longevity, themselves borrowed much of the money they lent to the French state. Moreover, these investments (like mortgages in the United States today) were then bundled together and resold to other investors. Yet both the calculation of risk and the diversification of investments depended on perceived stability. Across much of Europe, individuals who had never met a “girl from Geneva” felt certain nonetheless of getting an annual payment based on the French state’s sale of rentes viagères. The comte de Mercy-Argenteau, an Austrian diplomat and Marie Antoinette’s advisor at Versailles, had more than a million livres invested on “the Genevan heads,” as did numerous other aristocrats and financiers.24 In other social milieus, the sums involved were smaller but the perception of stability was equally great: officers in Saxon regiments, merchants in Bordeaux, and physicians from the Paris Faculty of Medicine all bought fractions of rentes, as

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did Swiss pastors, Dutch spinsters, and even French household servants.25 Some of these individuals, no doubt, had little clear idea of why they were earning 7-, 8-, or 9-percent returns on their money. For all of them, the specific young women named in any given rente contract mattered not at all. And, at the other end of the chain, it is certain that many of the actual “heads” had no idea how much their continued existence mattered to strangers across the continent.26 As official tallies of their status (alive or dead?) made explicit, the demoiselles de Genève had “no interest” in the rentes on their heads, and so the documents that issued regularly from the French diplomat’s office in Geneva never required their signatures. (Intuitive as this assumption became there, it evidently was not so clear elsewhere: a Strasbourg official, attesting to the life and good health of three children who had recently moved from Geneva noted that the little girls “not knowing how to read or write, have not signed,” as if, otherwise, they necessarily would have done so.27) For many investors, the “Genevan heads” were no more real individuals than were the people central to that other great eighteenth-century investment opportunity, the slave trade. Unlike the rentes, however, the slave trade was notoriously high risk. Even the sturdiest ships were unlikely to withstand more than four Atlantic crossings; mortality rates were high among both the human cargo and the ship’s crew; and a successful slaving voyage culminated in sales to colonial planters whose accounts were always badly in arrears.28 In contrast, high-yield rentes viagères on the Paris Hôtel de Ville were generally considered both lucrative and safe investments. While the slave trade required that unwilling humans be transported thousands of miles by sea, success in the “Genevan heads” business depended only on affluent European families keeping their daughters safe within the confines of domesticity. In fact, in nearly all significant respects, the two ventures were diametrically opposed. Their geographies were different: one was dangerously international, while the other was exclusively Eu ropean. Moreover, the latter was not just Eu ropean, but to all appearances based in Geneva, that most staunchly homey of major banking centers. And while abolitionist voices in the 1770s and 1780s denounced the slave trade as utterly immoral, little comparable polemic was directed at investing in “Genevan heads.” Rather, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau being widely referred to as “the citizen of Geneva,” the city and all associated with it had, for many, explicitly moral connotations.

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If their individual biographies were of comparatively little concern, it hence nonetheless mattered very much that the girls and women were “from Geneva.” Over the previous decades, travelogues had celebrated the city’s nature (“the most charmingly variegated landscape that ever delighted the eye”) and its culture (“there is perhaps no city in Europe, where learning is more universally diffused”) while writers as different as Rousseau and the Bavarian antiquarian Johan Keysler had praised its women for their rare combination of charm and modesty.29 At the same time, the success of the city’s merchant-bankers meant that many across Europe immediately associated Geneva and Genevans with international finance and fabulous wealth. While these various connotations did not form a necessarily coherent picture—the intellectual historian Helena Rosenblatt has very persuasively argued that they more obviously contradicted and challenged each other—they were all nonetheless simultaneously available.30 Even though no one developed a comprehensive explanation of how clear mountain air and beautiful vistas combined to promote an educational environment in which the sciences prospered, women became sweetly virtuous, and men made lots of money, “Geneva” was in good repute. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, may have been a diplomat in Paris but he sent his accompanying grandson to Geneva for schooling.31 With the “thirty heads,” the cultural cachet of being “from Geneva” shifted from the realm of domestic virtue to that of public value. Yet it was also very literally a way of “domesticating” risk: the potential loss of investment offset by the mass of privileged and highly cosseted young women who spent their days doing nothing riskier than going for walks, attending tea parties, and being inoculated against smallpox. The real role of Anne Audéoud, Jeanne Suzanne Cabanis, or Marie Antoinette Diodati in the transaction was to serve as a sort of collateral. Their fathers, uncles, and husbands raised money to lend the French state by telling their own creditors that it could only become a losing investment if their own daughters died. Inconceivable as it was to imagine a père de famille who wished his child dead, her continued existence proved the investment’s respectability and soundness. So, while it is tempting to think of the “Genevan heads” as indicative of the sudden emergence of “modern” financial practices in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was not really much of a departure from established traditions. Rather, the reputation of Genevan bankers

30

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for both personal wealth and familial sobriety meant investing in rentes viagères was widely seen as a cautious and prudent use of money, much as other rentes long had been.32 One of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cousins, believing he had money coming to him after the writer’s death, insisted: “I want the inheritance, or at least my part of it, to be secure.” Did he therefore buy a small piece of land or hide the money in a sock under his mattress? No. After further consideration, the would-be heir concluded: “I think the safest thing to do with the money would be to invest it on the thirty heads.”33 Toward the end of Louis XVI’s reign, pamphleteers in the controversy around his new finance minister, Calonne, began to denounce rentes viagères as a deplorable form of speculation. This tells us quite a bit about political posturing in 1786–1787 and about how debt—be it individual or national—became such a “hot button” issue in what turned out to be the final years of the Old Regime. It gives us little indication, however, of ordinary people’s experiences with debt, their attitudes toward money, or their economic thoughts more generally. To grasp the latter, we would do better to consider the case of the “Savings and Benefits Fund for the Indigent Class” (Caisse d’Epargnes et du Bienfaisance en faveur de la classe indigente), better known at the time as the Caisse Lafarge. One of the great business successes of the revolutionary era, the Fund (named after its founder, Joachim Lafarge) offered those with even the smallest disposable sums (as little as nine livres per year) a chance to acquire their own share in the monarchy’s rentes viagères. Between 1791 and 1793, it issued nearly 700,000 shares to more than 100,000 investors all across France; many shareholders named themselves or family members as the life on which the contract should be written, but the Fund also issued thousands of shares written on “Genevan heads.” While the Caisse then paid out small amounts—and continued doing so until the fi nal “head” died in 1888—it never produced the vast riches some shareholders had anticipated. 34 Explaining the discrepancy between investors’ expectations and their actual returns, the Fund’s administrators noted in 1808: “It is easy, no doubt, to be a prophet after the event and one can think today that Monsieur Lafarge ought to have been able to predict [what would happen to the state’s rentes viagères in the course of the Revolution] . . . But Lafarge was no more clairvoyant than anyone else; he calculated for ordinary times. Because, in 1791, he believed he lived in them.”35

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In 1791, after two years of truly unprecedented challenges to royal authority, not just Joachim Lafarge but thousands of investors—from aristocrats and wealthy Parisian notaries, to office workers and widows in Lorraine— still thought of the Crown’s rentes viagères as safe investments.36 One easy way to explain this perception would be that economic thinking simply did not keep pace with other sorts of change, that people’s financial expectations “lagged behind” transformations in political culture. French men and women, in other words, did not fully understand the changing world in which they lived. Yet it is also worth considering that the relation between new-style revolution and old-style investment may have been as dialectical as it was linear. In other words, it may have been precisely because the political and cultural situation was so palpably uncertain, that individuals were financially so cautious. It was not because so little had changed in the past few years but because so much had, that Lafarge and his investors “calculated for ordinary times.” In their desire for stability, people looked not to the chaos of the present or the uncertainty of the future but to the patterns of the past.

Movables and Immortality Speaking in September 1789, Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, Turgot’s protégé and the most prominent second-generation Physiocrat, called the girls from Geneva “fairies who will never die.”37 The Crown’s rentes viagères paid such high interest rates because they lasted only for a lifetime (a period presumed to be of short duration). Yet savvy investors had found a way to overcome this constraint, “and to silence nature’s voice with their greed.”38 It would be more than sixty years before all those lifetimes came to an end, worried another liberal nobleman and revolutionary.39 The distinction between perpetual rentes and lifelong ones, Dupont de Nemours and others suggested was under threat—and with it, many of the categories that had structured French commerce and inheritance for centuries. As their titles made clear, the real difference between the two types of rente lay in their temporalities: one theoretically lasted for all of eternity, while the other endured only for the span of an individual’s existence. The first would always be there; the latter could be extinguished in an instant. Like all credit arrangements, a rente structured the relationship between time and money. While other types of property in Old Regime

32

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France were not literally described as “perpetual” or “lifetime,” the closely corresponding category distinction between immovable (immeuble) and movable (meuble) property had nearly the same effect. It marked some holdings as permanent and therefore low risk, others as transitory and far less reliable. A legacy of the Roman Empire, the distinction between movables and immovables structured French inheritance practices and property transactions in both the written law of the South and the many different regimes of customary law followed in the North.40 While those legal regimes all differed in detail, it was typical for the movables brought into a marriage (and only the movables) to form part of a couple’s “common goods.” Her meubles became his and vice versa. Nothing legally prevented a drunken husband or a spendthrift wife from taking the other’s coins or pawning the other’s furniture. Immeubles, in contrast, were generally distinct from the couple’s property held in common. A woman’s share in her father’s estate, for instance, remained forever her family’s—if her marriage were childless, her share passed at death not to her husband (nor to his children by another marriage) but to her closest blood relations. It did so because it was not really hers: as an inherited immovable, it was part of the family lineage and legally had to remain so.41 Movables belonged to individuals; immovables in many ways did not. In cases of insolvency, therefore, it was the debtor’s movables that went to the auction block but it was creditors with legal claims to a particular immovable (hypothèque spéciale) who stood first in line. Writers on legal matters as different as the encyclopédistes and Charles Loyseau (the early-seventeenth-century theorist of the Old Regime as a society of orders) hence agreed that every “thing” in France had to be classed as either immovable or movable. Trainee bookkeepers learned to distinguish the two in any accounts they kept; notaries separated them in marriage contracts as in probate inventories; the authors of legal treatises devoted chapters to the distinction’s niceties. The phrase, “movables and immovables” tripped easily off pens and tongues in more than one context. Voltaire, fl irting with one of his female correspondents, observed that he would limit himself to praising the contents of her mind “without going into the further details of your movable and immovable assets [meubles et immeubles].”42 For the late seventeenth-century Jansenist and legal reformer Jean Domat, the division made sense because it arose from nature: “The

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Earth was given to men for their home and to produce all things necessary for their needs,” he wrote. “And this is the source of the distinction between those things we call immovables and those that are movable. . . . Immovables are all parts of the surface of the Earth . . . as well as those things that adhere to it.”43 This rationalist typology—in which immovability as a legal attribute and immobility as a physical one ought always to coincide—was of use for distinguishing actual movables from immovables in only the most simple of cases, however. Consider, for instance, venal offices. Since the 1670s, selling positions as everything from tax farmers and secrétaires du Roi to judges, stevedores, wigmakers, and military commanders had been a cornerstone of the monarchy’s finances. In structure, these posts strongly resembled perpetual rentes: the would-be officeholder gave a large lump sum to the Crown in exchange for yearly “emoluments” and everlasting enjoyment of the position. He had no right to ask for the return of his money but the Crown could, and sometimes did, abolish offices. Bought and sold, venal offices were obviously forms of property; like anything else that could last forever, they were immovables. (In the words of venality’s preeminent historian, “Offices were an alternative or complementary investment to real estate.”44) For their purchasers, acquiring this form of “immovable” property offered one of the few and most certain chances for status mobility within an otherwise largely static structure. The man who acquired a prestigious venal position moved, as it were, because his office did not. People in eighteenth-century France inhabited a world increasingly full of such intangible immovables. Despite Domat’s claim, many of the most valued pieces of property—such as perpetual rentes or venal offices—“adhered” to the Earth only in the most metaphorical fashion. In other ways, as well, the accumulations of history made the division of movables from immovables on naturalistic grounds largely untenable. Law and custom did more to determine categorization than did common sense. Furnishings, for instance, were literally movable (the French word for furniture is meubles), but circumstances might render them legally “immovable”: if taking a mirror off a chimney would leave a mantelpiece obviously unfinished, then the mirror—like the mantel itself—was classed as immovable, since its “perpetual home” was as part of that house. Garden statues became immeubles if a house’s owner displayed them on custom-designed and permanent pedestals, but they remained meubles if a renter so placed them. Even living things had a legal

34

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

status distinct from their natural one: a rabbit colony in a warren was immovable, but bunnies confined to hutches were movable (albeit less mobile). At the moment of harvest, agricultural goods crossed the line from immovable to movable. Beehives could be moved; fish ponds could not. In many cases, the stakes used to support grapevines were classed as immeubles, “since there can be no vine without its stake.” Newly acquired trellises on which nothing had ever grown were, however, movables.45 When a mid-eighteenth-century legal scholar began his “Treatise of Things” (traité des choses) in the era’s common vocabulary of sense-based epistemology—“corporeal things,” he wrote, “are those that we perceive with our senses . . . such as a house, a farm, a horse, a bookcase,” whereas incorporeal ones “have only an intellectual existence”—he therefore referred to characteristics cutting across the movable-immovable distinction rather than corresponding to it.46 Some things were immovable “by their nature”; others, “by repute.” In France, buildings were nearly all classed as immovables but so too, in some cases, was the exchange relationship through which they changed hands. When a house was sold, for instance, the buyer might pay cash or he might make a down payment and then pay the remainder in a number of future installments—both arrangements with which we are familiar today. However, the movement of money might also initially go in the opposite direction: a would-be seller could part with his or her property by “buying” a perpetual rente from the house’s would-be purchaser (who could then use the lump sum toward the purchase cost). This latter arrangement effectively doubled the number of immeubles in question. The buyer had the house (the literal immovable), while the seller now had an “incorporeal immovable” in the form of the rente contract that guaranteed him an income forever.47 For legal purposes, a perpetual rente was as fi xed and permanent as any habitation. The point here is that people’s perceptions of the stuff that stuck to the world—or moved easily across its surface—depended as much on cultural precedent and social expectations as they did on sensory stimulation. Not its literal materiality but its almost metaphysical fi xity defined an immeuble and made it desirable. “The key distinction,” writes the medieval historian Martha Howell, “was between goods that produced income . . . and those that were income.”48 Because immeubles endured, they were sources of renewable wealth. Next year, there would be more wheat or more grapes, more rente payments or more venal stipends. Immov-

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ables, we would say today, were sustainable. Since an immovable would outlive its holder, it produced not just for that individual but for future generations as well. Its permanence, in fact, meant that in many cases the current possessor did not hold an immeuble as private property to do with as he or she wanted. Rather, the relation was one of stewardship: he or she only had use of the immeuble as someone in a particular family line. The individual would of course die, but the family lineage and its immovable property would remain. Paradoxically, then, its very inertia gave this class of things a sort of vitality, almost an autonomy, impossible to predicate of mere personal effects. Metaphorically unmoving, immeubles would always be where they belonged, even if their holders wandered to the far corners of the Earth. Unlike the rupees, guineas, and lapdogs that narrated some of the eighteenth century’s more forgettable fictions, immovable property in one respect had no stories to tell—after all, it had never gone anywhere.49 The opposite of a picaresque character, an immeuble just stayed in its place. Yet if it had no adventures to recount, inalienable property was, in itself, an accumulation of history, a way of folding the past into the present and vice versa. The constancy and fruitfulness assumed of immovables meant they could be “hypothecated,” or borrowed against, whereas movables could not. Historians today often translate hypothèque as “mortgage,” but doing so obscures an important difference. In fact, eighteenth- century French legal culture treated hypothèques and mortgages almost as diametrical opposites, and while the former were very common, the latter were almost universally prohibited. As with rentes, everything hinged on the juridico-theological strictures against collecting or paying interest: a mortgage required interest payments, a hypothèque (which simply established some immeuble as collateral) did not. The literal or metaphorical fruits of hypothecated property hence remained the possessor’s to enjoy unless he failed in a contractual arrangement, while a mortgage obliged him to give them all away. In Old Regime law, mortgaged property was thus legally and etymologically defunct. Much as the Morte d’Arthur is a romance about the death of Arthur, a “mort-gage” was a gage (that is, a pledged item) that was mort (or dead). Hypothecated property, in contrast, was still productive and therefore “alive.”50 The distinction separating hypothèques from mortgages depended on agricultural land—on property that was literally productive or could

36

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otherwise be imagined as yielding fruit (for instance, by being leased)—as the fundamental conceptual model for all immovables (including venal offices and other, equally intangible, items). As William Sewell has noted, this idealization of “rustic” property may have been inherited from centuries of Catholic theologians, but Enlightenment authors from Locke to the Physiocrats did little to challenge it. Instead, Sewell writes, Louis XVI’s reform-minded chancellor, Turgot, “so strongly identified property in land with property in general” that he felt even houses did not fully qualify as such. “A house,” according to Turgot, “is an unsecured sort of property. Every year, repairs take away part of its value . . . and at the end of a century, it all has to be rebuilt again completely. . . . Given the risk of fire, this cycle [révolution] is in fact usually even shorter . . . A field, which requires no upkeep and which is not subject to the same accidents, keeps its value into perpetuity.”51 The men and women of eighteenth-century France lived in a conceptual and material universe in which it made sense to treat even houses as movable, potentially ephemeral, property. So, while people certainly valued their movables and while the era’s consumer revolution made new forms ever more available, nearly everything in individuals’ life experiences—from their personal family histories to their perceptions of social structure and their readings of reform-minded authors—inclined them to think of land as the exemplary form of property. 52 And this mental-material inheritance (this stuff ) simultaneously shaped perceptions of money. Money was movable. “The word meubles generally includes anything that can be moved from one place to another, be it cash [argent comptant], furniture, and all other sorts of movables whatever their quality or nature,” explained one jurist. 53 Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel specified that a movable was “any property that can be moved . . . hidden or diverted” and then offered the examples of cash, merchandise, and livestock as three common forms. In the Encyclopédie as well, money came first in the enumeration of movables. 54 Its mobility, however, did little to enhance money’s value in eighteenth-century eyes. Rather, as the oftcited Latin proverb, res mobilis, res vilis, had it, “a movable thing is a thing of little value” (literally “a movable thing is a vile thing”). The Lamothe brothers of Bordeaux, provincial professionals, were cautious with their fi nances, yet when a crunch came—when repairs had to be made to a roof, or improvements to a vineyard—they far preferred borrowing money

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to selling land or sacrificing other immeubles. The latter, they observed, “afford us some revenue.” Money, they felt certain, would not.55 Nearby, the Lacombe family of Gaillac experienced remarkable social mobility, going from being mountain farmers to lawyers and a secrétaire du Roi in only three generations. Whatever money they had, the Lacombes quickly lent and they did so usually in the form of a rente perpétuelle that converted their movable cash into an immovable investment. 56 On a daily basis, the perils of monetary wealth were very real. In a society without banks and where workers in many trades lived itinerant existences, such easily transported wealth brought with it considerable risks. A day laborer might physically entrust his small cash inheritance to a relative with more stable employment, but it still could be stolen from the latter’s trunk. 57 Artisans and professional men were just as vulnerable. From the prosecutor in Paris’s Châtelet law court, who kept his cash and other valued movables in custom-built storage units in his apartment’s salon, to the café keeper in the predominantly working-class faubourg Saint Antoine with his coins in three little bags, nearly anyone could be the victim of robbery. 58 If cash were taken, the chances of recovering it were vanishingly small; coins were easy to recognize but almost impossible to remember. So, for instance, while the above mentioned café keeper knew that his six-livre écus had been in a sack of “plain cotton cloth, with some red Spanish wax on it and a hole patched in white”; his gold louis in a red silk purse; and his three-livre écus in another cotton bag, that was all he could report that would help identify them. Coins, unlike the bags and trunks that held them, were anonymous and interchangeable. A police commissioner might describe a would-be suicide with a gunshot hole in his mouth “the size of a six-sous coin” and another wound “as big as a six-livre écu,” but to the best of my knowledge no robbery victim reported the loss of three coins made in Bayonne and one in Paris. 59 The holder of coins could have done the latter (every coin was stamped with a letter indicating its mint of production), but it seems evident that most people did not memorize, or individualize, coins in such a fashion. Rather, those very same physical qualities—ease of transport and interchangeability—that made money convenient also made it, practically speaking, vile. Coin’s slipperiness, its tendency to be not where and what was expected of it, extended to its exchange value as well. Bearing no numerical indicator of denomination, Old Regime coins circulated on the basis of

38

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Figure 2. Like all Old Regime coins, this 1789 écu gives no numerical indication of its monetary value. Depicting the royal family’s coat of arms, its Latin text (“Blessed be the name of God”) reminds bearers of the divine source of kingly power. The I at the bottom of the coin indicates it was minted in Limoges (a K in the same place meant Bordeaux; M, Toulouse).

royal decrees. An écu worth 62 sous one day might be worth 60 the next. If few living in the 1770s–1780s had personal familiarity with silver coinage being so revalued, the possibility nonetheless loomed large in their historical political awareness. Their grandparents’ and greatgrandparents’ generations, after all, had lived through the final decades of Louis XIV’s reign and repeatedly seen the écu’s value altered.60 In their own day, Calonne’s 1785 reminting of gold coins occasioned a veritable panic and a pamphlet war.61 In theory as in practice, money had its shortcomings. Of all eighteenthcentury writers, the Physiocrats (or, as they were then known, les économistes) warned most strongly against mistaking currency’s mobility for anything of substance. All so-called “sales,” they argued, were but trades

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in disguise, trades in which one party ceded some useful object (a loaf of bread, a bushel of wheat, a pair of shoes) for tokens whose only use was to circulate. Cities might appear to flourish, Quesnay remarked in his Encyclopédie article, “Farmers,” but all those attractive storefronts and enticing boutiques added nothing to the nation’s real wealth. Commerce, he asserted, produced nothing; rather, it was like gambling “and though some win and others lose, the amount of money remains the same.”62 For the Physiocrats as for theologians, money was sterile. In one of the doctrine’s key texts, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière forcefully restated this claim, contrasting the “hidden [occulte],” “fugitive,” and “clandestine” quality of monetary wealth with the true riches of fertile farmland. Easy to hide and almost impossible to tax, money mainly interfered with understanding the true nature of both politics and society. Throughout his grandly titled The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies (1767), Le Mercier repeatedly called on his readers to “assume there is no money.” When he did write about it, the language he used in describing money was highly but also (and tellingly) inconsistently gendered. If “men only understood . . . that commerce is just the exchange [of two equal values],” he asserted, “. . . they would not let themselves be seduced by its [money’s] attractive appearance.” Secretive, easily concealed, and fatally alluring, money also needed to be sown (semer). Polymorphously perverse, money for Le Mercier both partook of the hidden, dark qualities often associated with female sexuality and, at the same time, had to be planted like semen; “lands are only fertilized by expense,” he wrote.63 His extended development of this last metaphor—elsewhere in the text, Le Mercier proposed that when “married to agricultural wealth,” money would find itself in a “union [that] results in abundant production”—hints at the tensions that plagued even the famously doctrinaire économistes when they confronted mobile wealth. While it seemed self-evident to them that all wealth came from the land, the latter’s immobility meant that riches threatened to remain there. Moreover, while all land ought to be arable, much of it was not; swamps had to be drained, pastures had to be planted, and canals had to be dug—all of which required buying supplies and paying laborers. Money was in fact necessary, even though it had no value of its own. The Physiocrats therefore championed commercial agriculture and free trade. They argued that greater investments would increase crop yields and thereby allow farmers to reap greater profits which they would

40

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

then reinvest. Farmers would pay wages to laborers and buy furnishings or fashions from urban artisans; all farmers would pay taxes, some would pay rent, and that money itself would then be spent on the state’s needs (chiefly troops and armaments) and on further movable expenditures. Everybody would prosper, Quesnay purported to demonstrate, as long as grain prices were such that the “productive class” could reasonably expect to make a profit and farmers were hence willing to stay on the land and farm. (If government regulation kept grain prices low, however, then no one would invest in agricultural improvement, harvests would decrease, and there would be neither surplus to sell nor profits to invest.) Movable wealth, that is, had a crucial role to play in Quesnay’s model, but only so long as it kept changing its place. If money piled up or pooled somewhere, then circulation would break down, and the whole system would collapse. A practicing physician, Quesnay took the already familiar analogy between blood and money and turned it into an axiom of his new science of economics. In another recurring metaphor, Le Mercier depicted money as a river system: of no intrinsic value in itself (despite their preoccupation with land, the Physiocrats were no environmentalists), it nonetheless played a crucial role in allowing goods to circulate. According to the abbé Baudeau, ordinary people (le vulgaire) already understood money in this fashion. “Ask any man if he wants pieces of gold or silver if he cannot spend them,” wrote Baudeau, “and he will tell you that he would rather have lumps of rock. It is the spending that makes money useful.”64 Mocked at the time for their clumsy prose, rejection of history, and peculiar reverence for Quesnay’s Tableau, the Physiocrats were hardly the only authors (or even the most successful) to write on questions of political economy. They are useful here nonetheless, since their bluntness and hyperbole bring some of the era’s most common preoccupations into particularly sharp relief. Many others, for instance, shared their concern to “regenerate” French agriculture—as well we might expect, given that magistrates in Rennes and Rouen, as in Toulouse and Bordeaux, had all amassed fortunes that consisted largely of land.65 As John Shovlin has observed, Physiocracy’s demand for liberalization of the grain trade was nothing short of “commonplace.” And, in their conviction that unfettered circulation of goods (including that often misrecognized object, currency) would vivify the body politic, they shared imagery with both their closest sympathizers and their staunchest opponents. Turgot, for

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Figure 3. François Quesnay, Tableau Oeconomique (1759). For Physiocrats like Quesnay, land was the original source of all wealth, but circulation—here indicated by the lines zigzagging across the table—was required for prosperity.

41

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instance, who was something of a fellow traveler, described the motion of money as “that useful and fertile circulation . . . which maintains movement and life in the political body.” The royal administrator Véron de Forbonnais called Quesnay’s Tableau “preposterous,” but he nonetheless agreed with him about circulation, as did little-known writers such as Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau. In his writing on political economy, Condillac described money flowing from reservoirs to canals and back again; “any obstacle,” he concluded, “will cause commerce to languish.” Even Jacques Necker, who challenged the Physiocrats on nearly every point, attributed Britain’s prosperity to “the wonderfully active circulation of specie.”66 That some “things” had perpetual value but could neither be moved nor disposed of at will, whereas others circulated easily but were unproductive and potentially evanescent—these were basic realities of life with which individuals in eighteenth-century France dealt on a regular basis. The movable-immovable dichotomy structured the legal landscape and the mental frameworks within which men and women made current decisions and imagined their future lives. By investing on the Genevan heads, some hoped to acquire movable property that was nearly as secure and productive as any immovable. By purchasing venal offices, others enhanced their own social standing and hence their ability to borrow and buy on credit. By producing oats, straw, and hay for the markets of the capital, farmers in the Paris Basin turned immovable property into considerable movable wealth.67 Many others, of course, had neither the hope of possessing any immeubles nor the likelihood of acquiring more meubles, but for them, as well, “movable” and “immovable” were the two fundamental states of matter. No one (not even the Physiocrats) imagined that France would somehow be strengthened if everyone converted all their movable wealth into immovables and no one seriously considered the possibility of categorizing property in some other fashion. (To this day, the immeuble-meuble distinction remains central to French property law.) Yet when Enlightenment writers insisted that gold and silver’s durability made those metals naturally suited to use as coinage, they attempted to make money, that most mobile of movables, into something far less fluid. The numismatists among them had long considered coins to be some of the most permanent of monuments; they described the ancient temples depicted on

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Greek and Roman coins as “buildings which the Goths and Vandals could not demolish, that are infinitely more durable than stone or marble, and will perhaps last as long as the earth itself.”68 When Locke or Montesquieu or Turgot emphasized silver’s convenient durability, he translated the coin-collecting and medal-celebrating sensibility of antiquarianism into the vocabulary of law and political economy. And while Locke claimed to be ignorant when it came to ancient medals, he still expressed great interest in them as the only indisputable evidence of how the ancient Hebrews had written their language. Diderot’s Encyclopédie article, Argent (“silver” but also “money”), took the fairly heterodox position of describing the commercial use of that metal as merely a social convention, but the article on Monnoie (“coin”) by De Jaucourt—who, tellingly, also authored the article on Médaille (“medal”)—adamantly insisted gold and silver coins had intrinsic, natural worth. Money, such authors asserted, might be movable, but it derived its value from the very stuff of the earth. If some hoped to base money on a “solid” foundation, others would have recognized that the prestige attached to immovable property produced its own complications. Its security and stability, for instance, meant that it was the property itself—and not its transitory human holder—that was obliged and made responsible by contractual hypothecation. As legal authorities repeatedly noted, a hypothèque “followed the thing” and it did so regardless of the individual hands into which “the thing” (the immeuble) might temporarily fall. A débirentier (borrower) or his heirs could therefore conceivably sell part or all of a hypothecated immovable and leave the property’s new purchaser to deal with the previous owner’s irate creditors. Combined with the Old Regime’s remarkably complicated system of overlapping seigneurial rights and the tendency to borrow against one immeuble in order to acquire more, this legal doctrine resulted in even the most tangible immovable being rarely what it appeared to be. Instead, any piece of property might well be encumbered with myriad hypothèques and liens. One nobleman’s inheritance, for instance, had been hypothecated in such complicated ways that it took over 35 years to settle and resulted in 281 different claims being made against his parents’ estate.69 While the Crown succeeded in creating a central registry to record hypothèques on venal offices, nothing comparable existed for landed property.70

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For those who wanted to cash their holdings quickly or make deals regardless of inherited tradition, immovable property’s notional permanence and productivity could be as much a curse as a blessing. A man might be able to transfer his share in his father’s estate to a sibling, but there were far fewer circumstances in which he could sell it outright. Easy to borrow against but much more difficult to liquidate, immovable property affected how individuals acquired movables as well. The enormous role played by credit in the eighteenth-century French economy and the high value placed on “traditional,” immovable forms of property did not contradict each other (as scholars preoccupied with credit’s supposed modernity tend to assert). Instead, in a manner that only seems paradoxical, immobilized wealth and ready credit supported and even necessitated each other. The more immeubles one held, the more debt one could amass. Consumption in Old Regime France actually depended on illiquidity, and the circulation of goods required the immovability of wealth.

A Shortage of Money If the king of France had fabulous wealth but very little money, something similar was true for many of his subjects. Only rarely was this a source of alarm. Cash—rolls of gold coins, sacks of silver, pockets full of copper and brass—had its uses in eighteenth-century France but it was hardly the only, or perhaps even the most common, way to make a purchase. Many families, like the state itself, lived more or less on credit. In a society that expected no dramatic upheavals and where many forms of debt were heritable (as were debts owed), there was in some sense no real urgency about paying bills. Leases, for instance, stipulated that rents be paid twice or four times annually (usually pegged to a major religious holiday for ease of remembering), but many were a year or two overdue. In early eighteenth-century Paris, 65 percent of day laborers died with debts; in 1790, the figure was over 80 percent. Similar statistics hold for domestic servants.71 At the other end of the social spectrum, it was not unknown for a noblewoman’s dowry to go unpaid for decades or longer.72 When Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, author of the bestselling Paul et Virginie, realized he had borrowed nearly 800 livres some twenty years ago, he expressed surprise at the amount owed but not at the time elapsed.73

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The point here is that in eighteenth-century France, a functioning and growing but not necessarily speculative (or “bubble”) economy coexisted with a chronic shortage of specie.74 This was, in part, why properties were sold in exchange for perpetual rentes rather than for lump sums; why a country gentleman paid his grocer and his draper with debts that others owed him (though he paid the baker in wheat); and why some very respectable tradesmen made the majority of their sales on credit.75 The existence of a highly “monetized” society—that is, one in which exchanges were calculated with reference to some general, abstract equivalent and in which production for markets was the norm—did not require the existence of physical coins. In fact, the opposite may have been the case. Barter, for instance, supposedly the most primitive and inconvenient variety of exchange, flourished and took on increasingly elaborate forms as commercial life expanded. In the pages of the Paris Affiches (a newspaper consisting almost exclusively of classified advertisements, published daily as of 1778), one man announced that he would like to trade cases of nonbubbling champagne for a carriage, while another offered to part with his handsome green parakeet in exchange for a good harp.76 Noting that one of his creditors “did not want money,” Bernardin de Saint Pierre instead repaid him with books and a subscription to the Gazette de France.77 Consumer goods could easily circulate without any cash changing hands. In an economy structured by credit- debt relations, a “shortage of money” did not necessarily translate into underdevelopment. Instead, numerous forms of material and immaterial support held together largely invisible—but nonetheless very real—networks of obligation. Notaries’ offices, for instance, served as crucial intermediaries for both public and private borrowing and held copies of all the rente contracts they drafted. On a more small-scale, daily basis, credit mechanisms also facilitated retail sales. If, with cash in hand, a consumer could go to the market and haggle, with empty pockets he or she had no choice but to rely upon familiar shopkeepers. Bakers kept track of their regular clientele with wooden tally sticks they notched every time a household made a purchase. Each stick, or taille, was one of a pair: the baker retained one, while the customer held onto its twin. In a prosperous neighborhood, an established baker might have dozens of tailles, and each of his patrons might owe him for several sticks’ worth of bread.78 Familiarity of this sort made for long-standing debts. When an eatery or a barber-wigmaker’s

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shop changed hands, the “patronage of regular customers” was often transferred along with the shop’s fittings, sign, and stock of supplies, since “selling” the clientele was far more feasible than expecting them to settle their accounts all at once.79 A wigmaker or a baker who did not extend credit would quickly find himself with few customers; a patron who switched barbers on a weekly basis would have to pay cash each time he was shaved. Other merchants, including those who sold goods less uniform than loaves of bread, or artisans who performed ser vices less routine than shaving, relied on account books in which they recorded credit transactions in a more or less clear and comprehensive fashion. At the wholesale level, much more complicated networks of credit emerged through the trade in bills of exchange (financial instruments vaguely comparable to personal checks today).80 Even the simplest such bill involved three individuals and two cities: someone in Amsterdam (for instance) could use one to request that his agent in Paris (for example) pay a certain amount in six months to a third party. To be valid, the agent in Paris had to have “accepted” the bill (that is, he had signed it and agreed to pay it at the due date), but the individual named as the bill’s beneficiary did not necessarily have to wait the full period for the bill to mature. Instead, by endorsing the bill and indicating what he had received in exchange for it (cash, goods, or somebody else’s bill), he could pass it to another party who could, of course, then do the same thing. Transferring bills before their maturity was called “discounting” them, since they rarely traded hands for their full stated value (which was, explicitly, something they would have only at a future date).81 Bills were discounted at varying rates, depending both on the volume of bills to be paid in a certain city and on the reputation of both the originally named payer and all those who had endorsed the bill as it traded hands. If once the bill came due, the designated payer refused to pay it for any reason, legal liability then extended to all who had signed the note. The fantasy, if not always the reality, of personal, individual responsibility remained central to the bill trade as it expanded throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While some high-volume businesses used printed bills of exchange, they had them produced in a font that resembled handwriting as closely as possible. A lost bill of exchange was an individual object; when one was misplaced, its holder could advertise for it, as he might a lost dog or an umbrella gone astray.82 (No one

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advertised for lost coins.) The signatures on a bill, be they those of the original contractants or of others into whose hands the bill had passed, made it possible to imagine that even hitherto unknown individuals could be found and held responsible if necessary. When, in the 1760s, a ring of bankrupt brandy dealers and forge masters wrote bills to each other and had them further endorsed by their friends, they quickly found merchants willing to cash them since, as was later remarked, “No one imagined all the signatures could fail at once.” That all the signatories then turned out to be insolvent made not just for one of the era’s greatest commercial scandals but for a crisis that the Intendant, Turgot, qualified as a “revolution.”83 The network of credit-debt relations holding together various elements of eighteenth-century France could sometimes—as in the case of the brandy dealers of Angoulême—be revealed as simply a fraud and a fiction. In many more cases, however, credit made apparently autonomous, individual commitments congeal into remarkably solid structures of social obligation. True at the subsistence level—“The purpose of credit,” writes Steve Kaplan of Paris bakers, “was not just to capitalize trade but also to stabilize ties between buyers and sellers”—it was the case for furniture makers, hat makers, and fashion merchants, as well.84 More or less personal networks of credit and debt linked Bordeaux merchants to those in Le Havre, master artisans to workers, retailers to consumers, rural lace makers to textile entrepreneurs, and even one peasant woman to another. 85 Consumers and shopkeepers, wholesale merchants and retailers, employers and workers, the king and his bankers, prosperous parents and their newlywed offspring: credit and debt connected them (and many others) into long and fragile chains that stretched across time and space. Credit was extended and debts were amassed at all levels of society; the monarchy was hardly alone. From the artisan who paid his rent and other bills once or twice a year, to the retailers who built grand reputations by selling to insolvent aristocrats and the international merchants who balanced incoming sugar against outgoing ships, many in France both owed money to someone and were owed it by somebody else. While those many purchases made on credit would in theory have to be paid for sooner or later, the timing of that payment was nonetheless far from certain. As Laurence Fontaine has argued, both the size and the duration of an individual’s debts correlated directly with his or her social

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position. The greater one’s status, the further away was credit’s time horizon. Consider a few examples: when the Prince de Soubise acquired 22,000 livres worth of upholstery fabrics and fine furnishings in 1746, his long delayed payment eventually took the form of constituting a perpetual rente to the benefit of his textile merchant—but even those small payments were often overdue. In 1769, a Madame LaRoche went sixteen months before paying a cook-caterer for the regular meals he had provided for her parrot. Over four years, Anne-François d’Harcourt, a duke and army officer, ran up a 7,000-livres bill for gold and silver braid; only two years after the final purchase, in August 1790, did the seller attempt to collect the money due, and even then he agreed that the duke could have another five years to pay the bill. The city of Paris itself ran a number of large tabs, including a six years’ overdue bill for wallpaper. If Marie Antoinette had notorious debts with her dressmaker, she could do so not despite being queen but because of it. In contrast, a peasant who borrowed 144 livres from his neighbor had only two years to repay it.86 Some special categories of payment did have to be made in cash, but even they might take months or years to be completed. When Joseph Grisel, the noted religious author and confessor to many of the most powerful people in Paris, glossed the New Testament episode of Jesus and the tribute money (Matthew 22:17–22) as teaching that the ruler’s image, “engraved on the coins with which we pay taxes, teaches the People what they owe to their Sovereign,” he drew on a long tradition.87 Render unto Louis XV what is Louis XV’s, Grisel might as well have written, and, in fact, most taxes had to be paid in cash as did various licensing and registration fees. When venal offices were purchased, as well, it was sacks of silver and rolls of gold that changed hands (often after the purchaser had hypothecated whatever he could, perhaps including his future office, in order to borrow the necessary specie). Many eighteenth-century “cash transactions” dragged on for years, however. Taxes, for instance, like other payments due, were usually in arrears. Communities therefore had two individuals named to collect the taille (the main direct tax): one village notable fulfilled the position in odd-numbered years, another in even-numbered ones—the underlying assumption was that it would always take at least twenty-four months to collect a single year’s taxes. 88 Even when dealing with the state, the exact form of payment could be as negotiated as its timeframe: asked on what basis coins were

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accepted in payment of the gabelle (the hated salt tax), one official replied that in his area it depended on the coin’s size, while another replied that it was a matter of whether an imprint was still visible or not. Yet another said that he refused all two-sous coins but was willing to give them as change if he happened to have them. Given that much smalldenomination coinage circulated in bags, the state’s tax receipts also commonly included random pieces of copper and flattened nail heads.89 Many transactions were routinely made on credit and others were regularly overdue but some allowed no such flexibility. Above all, poor working people and especially the nonworking poor had to have cash. When Dupont de Nemours, for instance, drew up a list of contexts requiring payment in money, he included “making exact change or small daily purchases; giving to the poor; paying workers and soldiers.”90 Varied as these monetary activities were, they all gave le peuple a central role. For the poor were not credible (in Laurence Fontaine’s formulation, they were “doubly poor” in having neither money nor family members who could lend it to them). Since few retailers would sell to them on credit, the poor literally needed money more than anyone else did. Smalldenomination coins, made of low-grade silver and copper in various alloys, were therefore much like bread—necessities for the life of the poor, they meant less to the rich (who could always eat cake and buy on credit). Nonetheless, social elites recognized that a severe shortage of small change could result in protests or worse. As one subdelegué wrote to the Intendant of Brittany in 1783, “Small change [menue monnaie] has become so rare over the past six months that it is impossible to pay the workers or make retail food purchases [menues denrées] . . . I am overwhelmed with complaints. . . . The dearth of money [disette de monnoies] is so great, I fear the city may revolt.” 91 He was not alone in his worries. Within the year, the Intendants of Normandy, Alsace, and Lyon had all reported comparable crises.92 In all such cases, officials expressed concern neither with the level of poverty in their jurisdictions nor with overall discrepancies in wealth but with the possibility that the specific “money of the poor” might be in short supply. At such moments, individuals and institutions in local positions of authority innovated however they could. Confronting the crisis of 1783–1784, Jean Boisgelin de Cucé, the Archbishop of Aix, wrote out and signed coupons good for “so much bread” and “so many vegetables.” Given to parish priests for

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distribution to the needy, these “food stamps” (in effect) were eventually collected from bakers and market women by the archbishop’s agents and redeemed in cash.93 The poor and the very poor, those who were paying taxes (or other state charges, like buying lottery tickets), those planning to travel far from their usual haunts or contacts, and those gambling at cards or dice—in ordinary times in eighteenth-century France, these were the people who had to have cash at the ready. Others had to have it at various moments, of course. One day, the pastrycook would pay the shopgirl the wages he owed in addition to her room and board; one day, the regular patron at the neighborhood eating house would pay his three-month bill; one day, the ribbon manufacturer might demand that the fashion merchant settle at least part of her account. But it was highly unlikely, almost inconceivable, that all those bills would come due simultaneously. For all credit-debt transactions—be they perpetual, lifelong, or much less—the time horizon both was distant and felt familiar. The expectation that future months and years would resemble past ones underpinned Abraham LeFort’s decision to list his daughters as the “heads” in multiple rente contracts much as it did Pierre Lefevre’s willingness to sell gold braid on credit and other fi rms’ trading in bills of exchange that would only mature twelve months hence. If the eighteenth century’s stereotypical gambler lived in the libertine moment, the actual banker, rentier, or tradesman surely did not. While codes of honor mandated that the gambler pay his debts immediately, thereby marking the end of one game before another could begin, millions of ordinary Eu ropeans were enmeshed in networks of monetary obligation that stretched far into the past and—as far as anyone could anticipate—well into the future. Except for the truly indigent, all lived life based on credit and debt. This was, for the fathers, uncles, and neighbors of the girls from Geneva, a road to more riches; it was, for the French monarchy, the basis of international repute (investors, after all, did not initially flee when interest rates went up); it was, for many others, often their best hope for surviving, if not always thriving, in what would otherwise have been a truly precarious environment. When something happened to shake individuals’ perceptions of personal or political stability, however, they called in their debts. In the early 1750s, one Parisian merchant who specialized in the manufacture and sale of clerical skullcaps habitually did most of his business on

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credit. With France’s declining fortunes in the Seven Years’ War (1756– 1763), however, even he—with his especially godly and presumably credible clientele—turned to expecting cash at time of sale. The state’s partial default in 1770 (when Controller General Terray cancelled a series of loans) provoked a series of credit crises that wiped out merchants from Languedoc to Lille. Over several decades, high wheat prices in rural Burgundy consistently triggered a limited but definite contraction of credit markets. In a major port city like Bordeaux, one prominent trader’s bankruptcy could easily provoke fear that others would go the same way; merchants responded by holding onto goods or selling only for cash.94 Credit was forward looking but, when the prospect appeared dark, the future could arrive rather abruptly.

History, Money, Politics In the 1780s, an increasingly vitriolic debate about the monarchy’s debt occupied a central place in French public life. Writers referred to the debt as “a slow poison . . . a weighty burden, [and] a dangerous wound”; as an abyss; and, most often, simply as a void. Throughout the decade, the king’s finance ministers came, went, and reappeared with new titles. Meanwhile, a 284-page pamphlet of budget figures became the bestseller of its day.95 Yet France was hardly alone in carrying sizeable debts across multiple generations: in 1772, the Genevan banker Abraham LeFort had written to a colleague that some of his debts “should surely have died of old age by now . . . since they were born in the seventeenth century.” 96 Over the same decades, the British monarchy had amassed a debt considerably larger than the French one. As the economic historian Eugene White has therefore argued, there was nothing inevitable about the collapse of the French Crown’s finances in 1787–1789. Debt and its twin, credit, were standard features of early-modern existence, in good times and in bad. State borrowing and budget shortfalls alone did not cause Old Regime France to turn revolutionary.97 Rather, as other historians have effectively demonstrated, French social elites gave new urgency to the debt and taxation questions by using them for their own, political ends. As royal advisors increasingly argued for a form of taxation that would collect more from the king’s wealthiest subjects, prominent noblemen and magistrates responded by charging the monarchy with despotism, with violating the rule of law and

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arbitrarily confiscating individuals’ property.98 When ControllerGeneral Calonne announced in the summer of 1786 that the state’s revenues fell 20 percent short of expenses, he did not speak as a dispassionate technocrat. Committed to reversing policies introduced by his predecessor, the Genevan banker Jacques Necker, Calonne was also locked in a power struggle with the Paris Parlement (the highest court in the land and the body responsible for enregistering new taxes or loans). In declaring such a significant budget shortfall and hinting at the prospect of state bankruptcy, Calonne was therefore playing politics. Asserting in a very public fashion that extraordinary mea sures were necessary, he hoped to resolve the crisis by exploiting it. Already imagining himself as Sully to Louis XVI’s Henri IV (at the time of his coronation, Louis had been hailed as the “resurrection” of that good king and there had been a fad for late-Renaissance-style dress among courtiers), Calonne used the fi nancial emergency to clear the way for convoking a hand-picked Assembly of Notables that he assumed would overrule the Parlement and endorse all his proposed reforms. So sure was he of success, that he even commissioned a poem praising the Assembly of Notables and gave the poet detailed instructions as to its content. The final work was to show agriculture regenerated, commerce liberated, and Henri IV reincarnated in the person of Louis XVI.99 Calonne’s expectations, like those of so many others, were disappointed. Over the past twenty-five years, a number of historians have devoted themselves to these episodes in order to find the “financial origins” of the French Revolution. The rewards have been considerable. Michael Kwass’s study of the taxation of privileged wealth, Paul Cheney’s work on primitive globalization, Michael Sonenscher’s study of attitudes toward public debt, Amalia Kessler’s analysis of merchant law, and John Shovlin’s dissection of “luxury”—these are just a few of the books that have changed historians’ thinking about economy, culture, and politics in eighteenth-century France. We know now, for instance, that active debates in the 1750s and 1760s had already challenged absolutism’s legitimacy as a political discourse. We know both the monarchy and its critics struggled to reconcile a sense of France’s grandeur with the reality of defeat in the Seven Years’ War. We know Physiocracy, with its conviction that land was the source of all wealth and its condemnation of commerce as sterile, was not the only variety of political economy available. We know colonial merchants who lived in Atlantic port cities and royal

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administrators based in Versailles or Paris saw France’s future in quite different terms. And we know Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws was widely cited and discussed, whereas Rousseau’s Social Contract was not.100 Our picture of the increasingly public political culture of Louis XVI’s France is hence far richer than it was half a century ago. Yet those insights have also produced blind spots and in many ways have made the events of the 1790s less, rather than more, comprehensible. For while it is fair to say Montesquieu, the Physiocrats, and geopolitical transformations in the Atlantic world were all in some ways necessary for the French Revolution to take the form it did, recognizing this fact is not the same as explaining the dynamics at work in the revolutionary process itself. (They may all have been “necessary” in a descriptive sense, but they were not so in a causal or explanatory one.) And so the more we know about the Old Regime, the less we understand about the 1790s. This situation arises not from the answers historians have offered (“Montesquieu” instead of “Rousseau,” for example) but from the question they have asked. Since searching for “origins” most often means identifying some salient feature of the revolutionary era—the idea of human rights, creation of French republicanism, militarization of civil society, and so on—and tracing it backwards in time, the eventually discovered origins come into existence only after the events they supposedly explain. In intellectual, historiographical, and even causal or genealogical terms, the effect precedes the putative cause. It is rarely recognized as such.101 Instead, the search for origins has gone on, even though this sort of historical analysis is logically an infi nite regress with every posited cause having its own origins as well. History, in other words, has tended to recede, the work of explanation not so much postponed to the future as it is antedated to the past. In the great bulk of work on the “origins of the French Revolution,” revolutionary events themselves seem never actually to happen. Focused as they are on eighteenth-century innovations, these studies treat revolution more or less as an afterthought. Originality, rather than revolution, has become that which needs explaining. In the confusion of originality for revolution, a paradox has emerged. While historians implicitly assert that nothing truly new could have started in the 1790s, they nonetheless have had no difficulty identifying novelties galore in earlier decades. Even as their understanding of “origins” has shifted from “causes” to “conditions of possibility,” innovation has remained central to the story they tell.102 New forms of sociability,

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the growth of colonial trade in the national economy, or a new vocabulary of patriotism—all have been credited with making the French Revolution possible chiefly because they were new. Yet whatever was new in eighteenth-century France can only have had any revolutionary effect insofar as it confronted what was “old.” The latter, however, has consistently attracted less attention. Even when Alexis de Tocqueville put the word “old” in the title of his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution (a book that has enjoyed renewed popularity of late), he did so in order to downplay the real changes and social confl icts produced in the 1790s. The absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV and Louis XV, he argued, had already introduced most of the transformations usually considered “revolutionary.” “I used to think that our present rulers’ obsession with statistics was a new development,” Tocqueville admitted, “but I was mistaken.” He continued: “Toward the end of the old régime, small printed forms with blanks to be filled in were frequently circulated among the Intendants. . . . The information thus supplied was hardly less detailed, and no more reliable, than that provided nowadays by our subprefects and mayors.” Tocqueville spent months doing research in departmental archives, only to declare that he had found not the “old” regime but evidence of that era’s prescient (if imprecisely dated) newness. All the real changes in French society, he concluded, had occurred well before summer 1789.103 To understand the revolution of the 1790s rather than the novelties of the 1760s–1780s, we need to think about the relation of old and new in dialectical, rather than linear, terms. The one does not simply follow the other chronologically nor grow from it in some quasi-organic fashion. Instead, the new emerges (rarely fully formed) in confl icts surrounding, and produced by, the old. Consider, for example, Louis XVI’s eventual decision to summon the Estates- General (the French legislative body that had last met in 1614). Throughout 1787 and 1788, the highly politicized debate over debt and taxation brought France almost to a standstill. After both the Paris Parlement and the Assembly of Notables refused to endorse planned reforms, the king reluctantly agreed to convene the Estates- General. In September 1788, the monarchy announced that the Estates would meet the following spring and would observe protocols established at its last meeting. The resurrection of procedures nearly 200 years old had an immediately polarizing effect, since they strictly separated nobles from commoners for both electoral and legisla-

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tive purposes. In Brittany, for instance, nobles and commoners who had long worked together in municipal government and provincial administration quickly become bitter antagonists over the question of modifying the 1614 regulations.104 The old, this example suggests, can often be just as revolutionary as the new.

This chapter has not been concerned with identifying causes of the French Revolution. France’s borrowing in the form of rentes viagères eventually provided a focus for elite criticism of the centralizing, would-be reforming, absolutist state, but it did not prompt the confl ict between parlementaires and the monarchy (which had been growing in stridency for decades). That property could be intangibly immovable or fictively mobile may have struck philosophes and legal experts as unnecessarily complicated, but no one stormed the Bastille Prison or swore the Tennis Court Oath with the intention of simplifying property transactions. The intense politicization characteristic of the last years of the Old Regime had many targets (including the queen’s consumption habits) but it was not directed at ordinary people’s routine credit relations. Rather than look for origins or causes, then, this chapter has focused on how things were done in the 1770s–1780s because any reasonable person expected them to continue in roughly the same fashion in the 1790s. That there might be another war, another emergency tax, maybe even another state default on loans—all that was imaginable. A “revolution”—in the sense that word suddenly came to have in the summer and early autumn of 1789—was not. In the crisis atmosphere of 1789–1790, aspirations to stability would prove as powerful as fantasies of change. Uncertainty about the future did not necessarily entail the collapse of the past. If the vocabulary widely used in political debates made recent history feel more remote— speakers started referring not to “how we did things last month” but to “the barbarous remains of feudalism”—other aspects of the past could seem all the more solid, stable, and present in the face of future precarity. Laws, habits, and family traditions that made land the most reliable sort of wealth; communities held together at every level and in myriad ways by relations of debt and credit; the perception that France was a naturally rich country in which shortages were caused by faulty “circulation”— all were central to French life at this period and none were particularly

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new. They were, rather, fairly unremarkable and sometimes unremarked upon patterns of experience and structures of expectation that were to be given revolutionary meaning and significance only by later events. The extensive credit economy of the eighteenth century was not a “bubble.” It was not fated to pop. Other scholars have been inclined to reach this conclusion, but it seems a failure of historical imagination to label the Old Regime credit economy “unsustainable.” True enough, after 1789–1793 it largely was not sustained, but that accident of history does not suffice to declare it already structurally unsound in 1782 or even in 1785. Sustainable, it may well have been. Shock proof, it was not. Far more stable than the proverbial house of cards or of straw, the eighteenth-century credit economy nonetheless required a certain temporal levelness, a general comparability of past with present and present with future, in order to function smoothly. The dramatic political dislocations of spring and summer 1789 interrupted these patterns of expectation and left many profoundly uncertain. While the concatenating events and reactions we call, for convenience’s sake, “the outbreak of the French Revolution” did not have bakers’ tally sticks, merchants’ account books, or bankers’ bills of exchange as their target, they affected them nonetheless. In the pervasive and intensifying political and social uncertainty of 1789–1790, the unthinkable happened. All bills came due at once.

2 The Money of Liberty I have a horror of these assignats, which have made us so many enemies. Marie Antoinette to the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, April 30, 1791

The utter destruction of assignats, and the restoration of order in Europe, are one and the same thing. Edmund Burke to the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, August 1793

O

confronting the French National Assembly (1789–1791), few proved as central as money. In the immediate aftermath of declaring itself a “national” body in June 1789, it had been comparatively easy for the Assembly to term existing taxes illegal and the state debt, a sacred trust.1 It was not obvious, however, what its members were to do next. How could the state pay its creditors, if its taxes were illegitimate and should not be collected? How could time be spent devising new forms of taxation without the state’s accounts drifting dangerously into arrears? Was it reasonable to expect any revenue at all, when so much of the countryside had erupted into open rebellion? And why—they asked, a year later—had the bill for demolishing the Bastille come to over half a million livres? It was all, wrote the assiduous (and largely obscure) deputy, Michel René Maupetit, “a maze with a thousand detours from which we are working desperately to extricate ourselves.”2 In the first years of the French Revolution, fiscal and monetary matters provoked hours of speeches, hundreds of pamphlets, and dozens upon dozens of official reports. Debates about money featured prominently in deputies’ letters to their families, friends, and constituents and F ALL THE PROBLEMS

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in the pages of the Paris and provincial press. They were not among the National Assembly’s most immediately intelligible discussions, however. Finances, in the words of a little handbook published by the lawyer and deputy Théodore Vernier, were most usually thought of as “a gaping maw . . . or, if you prefer, a spider’s web, the countless threads of which prevent all prey from escaping.”3 Even the most level-headed presentations on such subjects could easily prove more confusing than helpful, full as they were of numbers and arcane vocabulary. More than one listener protested it was impossible to follow budget calculations aurally while others resorted to counting on their fingers.4 “Public credit, banking, finance: these are all completely foreign to us,” one deputy ruefully confessed. 5 Still, when all was said and done, the National Assembly passed monetary legislation that would have profound effects on nearly every person in France (and many beyond). Historians and economists usually refer to this legislation as “the creation of the Revolution’s paper money, the assignats,” but that shorthand equation obscures as much as it reveals. For when the assignats were first created in December 1789, they definitely were not money. Moreover, their proponents long maintained the notes were not in any meaningful sense “paper” (though they were coincidentally made of it). They were, rather, “the signs of unalloyed value,” “emanations of the general will,” and “the savior of France.”6 If the assignats are known today chiefly as a “disastrous experiment,” useful only as a warning to statesmen who might otherwise start printing money, this tells us more about their demise than it does about their creation.7 Any scholar of the Revolution is familiar with the rudiments of this story: lands held by the Catholic Church were nationalized and a paper currency backed by those properties was issued. Few, however, have given much thought to how this “economic” history relates to revolutionary political culture or sheds light on that culture’s tensions and contradictions.8 This chapter, in contrast, explores the early history of the assignats to suggest that as lawmakers faced the financial crisis of 1789–1790, they tried very hard not to do anything “revolutionary.” Their conscious impulses were, in many ways, conservative ones: many of their effectively most radical decisions were made with the aim of protecting property, maintaining commitments, and ensuring continuity. Where Tocqueville describes these men as unwittingly taking from the past its “customs, conventions, and modes of thought” even as they claimed to “obliterate

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their former selves,” I see almost the reverse happening.9 In the name of honoring debts, paying overdue bills, and minimizing confl ict, many members of the National Assembly opted for policies that turned out to be far more disruptive than they expected or intended. We might think of their radicalization as a Möbius trajectory—moving in what seemed to be a single direction, they nonetheless arrived on the other side of the metaphorical strip. In his Becoming a Revolutionary (1996), Timothy Tackett asked, “How did men and women become revolutionaries? How did they arrive at the stunning conclusion, so rare in the course of human affairs, that the political and institutional world they had always known should be overturned and reformed from top to bottom?”10 Such questions are especially thorny for the French Revolution, since so many of its prominent participants were settled and successful figures in their own communities. The National Assembly’s Finance Committee, for instance, included nineteen titled noblemen, three archbishops, and nine senior military officers—not men with obvious personal motives for rocking the status quo.11 How, then, did many of them end up agreeing to mea sures that later conventional wisdom characterizes as “a debacle”?12 How did they persuade more than half their colleagues to do likewise? How did it happen that the duc d’Aiguillon, one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom and a peer of the realm, took the hardly conservative stance of suggesting the country needed more assignats, not fewer?13 My answer, in short, is that many came to these surprising positions in an effort to stop, slow, or stabilize a revolutionary situation.14 Historians of economic thought have tended to tell this story in a much more linear fashion. For them, the assignats emerged almost fully formed from the high forehead of Etienne Clavière (a Genevan exile and one of Mirabeau’s closest collaborators).15 With his only child married into a family that provided at least four “girls from Geneva,” Clavière was also involved in a variety of high-profi le start-up ventures, from a scheme to settle Swiss watchmakers in Ireland to the notorious Compagnie des assurances sur la vie (Company for the Ensuring of Lives). His personal history in banking and speculation, his writings supporting the assignats, and his central role in later revolutionary events—after serving twice as finance and taxation minister, he was arrested in a political purge and left to commit suicide in prison—all combine to make Clavière credible as “the inventor of the assignats.”16 Yet for his “invention” to

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enter the world, be applauded, and be manufactured in the millions, far more than this man from Geneva and his economic thoughts were required. Others had to like and support the assignats as well. Or, at the very least, they had to distrust and dislike the assignats’ opponents so much that the paper currency could emerge as the lesser of two evils. Voting in the National Assembly was as much a physical activity as it was a cerebral decision. For most votes, those in favor were asked to stand, those opposed to remain seated. Though it leaves no record and hence is retrospectively anonymous, this stand-sit voting was far from impersonal for those doing it at the time. Recall that our own categorization of political “Left” and “Right” emerged from literal seating habits within the Assembly: advocates of change clustered on the presiding member’s left and their opponents on his right. As divisions within the Assembly hardened into factions, men also became increasingly rigid in their choice of seats. Hence, when it came to a man’s vote on highly contested matters—such as the introduction of the assignats—he might be as swayed by the movement of the bodies around him as by the arguments made at the rostrum.17 With nearly 1,200 deputies, this first French National Assembly was an enormous body. (Its Finance Committee alone had more members than the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.) If some of its members— Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Robespierre, the abbé Sieyès—feature prominently in any history of the Revolution, many others do not. Likewise, if some of its key early acts—the abolition of privilege, the division of France into uniform administrative units (the départements), the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man—are known to any student of modern Europe, the great bulk of the Assembly’s work has interested only a handful of specialists. Its fiscal and monetary debates, which even many contemporaries found boring, fall squarely into this latter category.18 Then, as now, many public figures found it most effective rhetorically to treat state finances as equivalent to those of individual families; from this perspective, the impersonal or aggregate vocabulary of accounting was usually far less compelling than a human-interest story might be.19 It is for this reason that we must pay as much attention to their words and reactions as we do to those of Adam Smith or Clavière. The examples they retained, the metaphors they used, the clichés they repeated: this was how the men in the National Assembly thought about their choices

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and how they explained them to themselves and to their families, friends, and constituents. For much of the public—both the members of the Assembly and the journalists, petitioners, and protesters with whom they interacted— monetary and fiscal questions were central to their experiences of revolutionary upheaval and political ser vice. In December 1789, the deputy, Thomas Lindet, told city authorities in Bernay (Normandy) that he was trying to get an answer to their question about collecting the capitation (a tax first levied in 1695), but “financial concerns in general have absorbed so much time” that it was impossible to address more specific queries. Just a day later, Antoine Thibeaudeau offered a very similar explanation to municipal officials in Poitiers, who were pressing him to support their proposed bond issue for poor relief.20 “I should have an answer for you soon about next year’s tax base,” replied another deputy in July 1790; another reported in October that monetary denominations had yet to be decided.21 Such questions may appear mundane, but they are not ones usually posed in a smoothly functioning polity. Taxes may be overdue and money may be in short supply, but the continued existence of either is rarely a topic of discussion. While these matters may seem more the stuff of administrative tedium than of revolutionary drama and while half-completed tax rolls will probably never replace severed heads as icons of “revolution,” the relentlessness of these exchanges nevertheless reveals real uncertainty and growing frustration. “Les finances, les finances, that is all you say,” wrote Maupetit to his friend, the mayor of Mayenne. “We say it too,” he continued, “but is it really so easy for novices to disentangle such a mess?”22

Revolutionary Finances and Extraordinary Times Like so much that happened during the French Revolution, the creation of the assignats responded to a crisis. As the still highly trusted prime minister of finances, Jacques Necker, outlined in November 1789, measures already taken—the levying of a one-time “patriotic tax” and repeated vows to introduce transparency into bookkeeping—ought to restore the French state to financial health by 1792. They would not suffice, however, to address the current “shortage of money,” a situation, he explained, that had never before been seen and was unlikely ever to occur

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again. While all “periods of alarm and crisis” made money rare, this time was worse. The previous year’s disastrous harvests had made it necessary to import grain (hence, export money) while “circumstances” had scared away foreign investors. Tax collection had slowed, Necker observed, to almost nothing. Most worrying of all was the “never before witnessed” mass emigration of France’s “rich and affluent,” who at best were spending their money elsewhere and, at worst, taking all their capital with them.23 By describing the autumn of 1789 as an extraordinary time calling for extraordinary financial mea sures, Necker did nothing revolutionary. Rather, he followed a pattern well established in the eighteenth century of seeing state finance as an alternating cycle of the routine and the unusual. The latter meant war, which statesmen habitually expected to finance in some out-of-the-ordinary fashion: floating loans, melting down silver, imposing an emergency short-term tax. When the war was over, revenue would have to be found—further short-term borrowing or a new, permanent tax—to cover interest payments on war-time loans. If sufficient time passed between wars, the costs of one confl ict could be paid before the next started. In the meantime, things were held together by credit and by a complicated, but widely accepted, system of transfers between various accounts. Given that France had been at war for half of the preceding 130 years, however, extraordinary finances had become something of a customary practice by 1789. In fact, much of Necker’s popular esteem came from his time in office during the American revolutionary war, when he had used loans rather than taxes to cover the costs of French military involvement.24 Coinciding as it did with large-scale popular unrest and administrative reorga nization, the deficit crisis of late 1789—at least 170 million was needed to make it to the end of the year and Necker had not a cent to spend—could hardly be addressed with a new tax. The National Assembly had already assented to the “patriotic tax” (contribution patriotique), which called on all individuals to give a quarter of their annual revenue in payments staggered over the next three years, but its members were as unlikely to grant any further taxes as the people were to pay them. In fact, in this particular revolutionary moment, many members of the Assembly refused to address financial matters at all lest constitutional questions be left unresolved. Some deputies cited their cahiers de doléances (requests and demands compiled during the election process), some of

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which specifically forbade representatives to agree any new loans or taxes until a constitution had been written and accepted by the monarchy. Others did not treat their cahiers as binding instructions, but nonetheless acknowledged that their own positions as lawmakers could be traced to the “confusion in finances” that had reigned for the past half century. When Mirabeau, with typical rhetorical flourish, called the public deficit a “national trea sure,” this was what he meant: that without the crisis it had provoked, nothing would have persuaded the king to convene a representative, legislative body.25 Some deputies, therefore, were reluctant to sanction any immediate funding mea sures because the monarchy’s problems would then have appeared settled and the king could have sent them all home. Harboring suspicions of just such a move, many future radicals tried to block any financial discussions until a constitution had been completed and ratified.26 This “no taxation without representation” ethos that pervaded much of the Assembly further complicated the crisis precipitated by Necker’s November speech. On June 17, 1789, in their very first act after adopting the title “National Assembly,” the members of that body pronounced all existing taxes to be illegal (because not formally agreed to by the people who paid them). Though they also asserted that tax collection should continue as usual until the “principles of national regeneration” had been agreed, the first declaration was enough to make noncompliance a norm rather than the exception in the following months.27 Then, on July 13, confused and terrified by the king’s dismissal of his ministers and the buildup of troops around Paris and Versailles, the Assembly’s members reaffirmed that “no power has the right to pronounce the infamous word, bankruptcy” and that the monarchy’s debt (now the nation’s) was secure.28 Taken together, these two planks of the new constitution—the sacredness of the debt and the illegitimacy of existing taxes—did more to intensify the existing deficit crisis than to alleviate it. Leaving the existing debt on the books was a bold thing to do. In terms of governing philosophy, it marked a clear departure from historical precedent, since several previous finance ministers had defaulted to resolve their own crises: the abbé Terray, when controller-general, had abruptly cancelled a series of tontines and John Law, earlier in the century, had so manipulated currency and share values that mere mention of his name was said to strike horror in later generations. 29 Throughout the eighteenth century, critics had decried these bankruptcies as acts of

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despotism, since only an arbitrary ruler would so violate the property rights of investors or use force to impose a valueless currency. By emphatically insisting that all existing obligations would be honored, the Assembly did all it could to protect the state’s creditors. It also put down a significant political marker: the state’s budget and monetary policies would henceforth be subject not to the whims of ministers but to the laws of the nation. The “no bankruptcy” policy broke with past political expedients in the name of honoring past debts. It also, and in ways no one fully anticipated, made history much harder to leave behind. Burdensome at the best of times, this commitment to making payments on past loans created almost unbearable pressures in the summer and autumn of 1789, since it confirmed a major budget item at the very moment when most sources of revenue had almost completely disappeared. Moreover, few could honestly envision the latter being quickly reestablished, for it was precisely the absolutist monarchy’s fiscal practices that were most sharply and roundly attacked—in the cahiers, in the press, and in the Assembly itself. While the regime’s symbols could be spiffed up and produced in greater quantities than ever before (the royal fleur-de-lys, for example, would appear on hundreds of yards of new wallpaper hung for the Legislative Assembly), the state’s revenue structures, most agreed, had to be scrapped completely. 30 As even the arch-conservative comte de La Gallissonnière, a military officer and soon-to-be émigré, said in September 1789, the “fi scal regime” was “a dreadful hydra, of which the Assembly must leave not a trace.”31 Caught between widespread opposition to existing taxes, their stated commitment to honoring past loans, and the near impossibility of further borrowing, many deputies felt a growing sense of desperation, if not outright panic. Pressed by his correspondents to explain why order had not yet been restored, poor Maupetit was left to exclaim: “Unless we give up eating, drinking, and sleeping, we can’t go any faster!”32 Several months later, two senior members of the Finance Committee, neither known for hyperbolic oratory (the administrators Michel-François d’Ailly and Pierre Hubert Anson), calmly announced that it would be useless to continue the Assembly’s proceedings if the state could not cover immediate operating expenses. Without some sort of emergency mea sure, they asserted, the constitutional edifice was likely to collapse before it had been completed.33 Annoyed by moves to postpone financial discussions, the

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abbé Goullard (a parish clergyman from near Lyon) had already proposed that they lock all the doors and continue the current day’s session (September 25, 1789) until they finished the constitution. “Better,” he had insisted, “that 1,200 men exhaust themselves, than that they send twenty-four million others into the abyss.”34 Like many individuals who would sit with increasing regularity on the right-hand side of its hall, Goullard saw the Assembly itself adding significantly to the country’s woes. “We were called to impose order on the kingdom’s finances, and instead we spend all this money printing copies of laws,” fumed the baron de Gauville (who eventually quit the Assembly in disgust) weeks later.35 “We’ve been meeting for eight months,” complained the abbé Maury in late January 1790. “For eight months,” he repeated, “and we have barely touched finances. . . .”36 In contrast, their opponents who clustered on the left tended to offer loosely historical explanations for the deficit crisis, even as they eventually proposed solutions that required bringing those histories to an abrupt conclusion. If some offered accusatory caricatures—one deputy suggested the state’s money had all been squandered on “superb stables and hotels for the king’s dogs”—others were far better informed, but all saw their own options constrained by inherited debts. When the marquis de MontesquiouFézensac presented the Finance Committee’s overview of the state’s “needs, resources, and prospects” in November 1789, he began by asking: “How can we ever get to the point of restoring order, if our lack of funds forces us to live by our wits and we find ourselves indebted on the day when we ought to be free?”37 This, then, was what the Assembly and France faced when Necker gave his grim account of the deficit. The situation that Saturday morning was hardly auspicious. Moreover, the prime minister of finances arrived so visibly unwell that no one questioned his decision to rest in a nearby armchair while one of the Assembly’s elected secretaries read his report aloud. 38 Confronted with an almost impossible situation, Necker proposed to do as the state had repeatedly done in the 1780s: borrow from the Caisse d’Escompte (Discount Bank), whose notes had circulated within Paris (and only in Paris) since 1776. Acknowledging that the private bank faced difficulties of its own, Necker asserted that its credibility would be considerably enhanced if it were renamed the “National Bank” and if more individuals could be found to invest in it. By his calculations, if the Bank were allowed to issue another 12,500 shares (and

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thereby increase its capital by 50 percent), it could easily lend the state the necessary 170 million. In exchange, the state would establish a special designated fund, the Extraordinary Receipts, into which all money from the patriotic tax, any patriotic gifts, and possible future sales of property would go. This new fund would soon be flush to overflowing; in the meantime, the state would pay its already existing debt to the Caisse d’Escompte in short-term, interest-bearing IOUs backed by the promise of future Extraordinary Receipts. In short, he proposed that France establish an institution comparable in most respects to the Bank of England. (The private Bank had since its creation in 1694 served two masters: its shareholders, including many of the wealthiest people in the country, and the British government, to which it lent money at a favorable rate. In exchange for its ser vices to the latter, the Bank had a legal monopoly on the issue of paper money and its property was tax exempt.) Necker recommended the creation of a new national institution, but in other respects he dealt with an unusual financial situation in the usual way. His proposal would have enhanced the status of the Caisse d’Escompte but it did not entail any fundamental challenge to existing norms. Rather, he maintained the time-honored pattern of borrowing from expected future income in order to make payments currently due (many of which, in turn, arose from past borrowing). The absolutist monarchy’s account books were full of such fiscal time-knots: the Finance Committee observed that 20,000 had already been “spent” from postal revenues expected two years hence, as had 22 million from various taxes to be collected in September 1790 (that is, ten months in the future). In all, the public held nearly 175 million from the state in the form of anticipations (short-term promissory notes). 39 If it was a convoluted form of accounting that produced more than one logical paradox— the “future” could be classed as “past due”—it was, nonetheless, common operating procedure.40 Necker’s report, with its dire picture of the current crisis, left the Assembly in consternation and mayhem. While some aristocrats bore a confi rmed grudge against the minister, whom they despised as a foreigner, a Protestant, and a bourgeois parvenu, many more deputies saw him as a general-purpose miracle worker. When his sacking had first been rumored in July, they had felt bereft of personal and fi nancial security. (According to the abbé Barbotin, a rural clergyman, “It seemed that ev-

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eryone was about to lose his father. Tears welled in all eyes; one heard only wailing and bitter complaints. A general bankruptcy seemed certain.”41) His return to office had been greeted with glee in the Assembly and in the country more generally; many genuinely saw him as France’s only hope for salvation.42 Such sentiments remained widespread in November. In a letter to his wife, François Ménard de la Groye (a judge from Le Mans) described Necker’s presentation as a “heartfelt outpouring” and demonstration of the minister’s “limitless zeal for the public good”; Garat, in the Journal de Paris, told a much wider audience that while the plan’s details might be difficult to follow, “one thing we really did understand and fully sense was the deep pain Monsieur Necker felt in bearing such bad tidings . . . and his untiring commitment to carrying a weight under which his physical strength was collapsing.”43 However they reacted, the deputies were unsettled by Necker’s news: in the aftermath of his visit, discussion of the hated salt tax was suspended and instead several hours of debate were needed and three votes required to add evening sessions to the Assembly’s regular calendar. In the weeks that followed, men with personal connections to private banking, state fi nance, and the very considerable intersection of the two dominated the discussion.44 Unlike the Assembly’s extensive later debates on taxation—in which many deputies happily intervened on the basis of their own locality’s customs and a nasty spat erupted on the question of whether the example of Paris was relevant for a discussion of Champagne—Necker’s report with its shares, stockholders, interest rates, and allocated funds seemed to demand specialist expertise.45 Those without it were easily overwhelmed. As the estate manager for the duchess of Mazarin, Maupetit had an enormous yearly income and plenty of business experience. Yet his reactions to the finance proposals of November and December of 1789 depended chiefly on his perception of the individuals involved. He trusted the finance minister: when the bishop of Autun (Talleyrand) criticized Necker’s plan as ill- conceived and inadequate, Maupetit was plunged into “suffering” and later fretted that his worrying had upset his correspondents as much as it had himself.46 Given the debate’s eventual outcome, others’ reactions must have been much like Maupetit’s—vague on details and more attuned to personalities. The Finance Committee’s response called for a more extensive overhaul, lest the Assembly “fall asleep on the edge of the abyss” but few

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expressed enthusiasm for such dramatic mea sures.47 In the end, the Assembly neither heeded Necker’s recommendations exactly nor did it depart far from them. Anxious that the nation’s fortunes not be tied to a private institution with a checkered reputation, the Assembly left the Caisse d’Escompte fundamentally unchanged. It could issue more bills if it liked but they would remain the bank’s notes (not the nation’s). Moreover, they would still circulate only in Paris, and the bank would have to continue to redeem a small number of them for coins. One truly new institution, the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire (Extraordinary Trea sury), was created, but two of its revenue sources—the patriotic tax and various voluntary donations—had existed since September. Another of the Treasury’s designated sources of money, income from the eventual sale of up to 400 million livres worth of nationalized properties (biens nationaux), was far more controversial, but also still in the early planning stages. In the meantime, the Treasury would repay the Caisse d’Escompte in interest-bearing vouchers “preferred for the sale of national properties” and “assigned to” the Extraordinary Treasury for payment. These vouchers, each worth a thousand livres and yielding 5-percent interest, were the first assignats.48 As Garat observed in the Journal de Paris, the mea sures passed in December had “the advantage of putting new resources into play while using mechanisms that have long been active.” All the rejected proposals— Necker’s; Montesquiou’s for the Finance Committee; another from the court banker, Laborde de Méréville—promised more sweeping institutional change than did the mea sures actually passed. With hindsight, it is easy to see the decision to sell properties once held by the Crown and the Church as a point of no return. A minority at the time certainly viewed it that way: Maury protested he had been denied the right to speak and stomped from the meeting hall, taking a number of other deputies with him. Nicolas Bergasse, one of the darlings of the Assembly’s early days, left the session as well, never to return. Many more deputies, however, saw the planned sale as a stopgap mea sure, as a necessary sacrifice in desperate times. The Protestant merchant from Lyon Guillaume Couderc, who served on the Finance Committee, described it as “essential” but also “provisional.” After all, the biens du clergé had already been declared “at the Nation’s disposal” by a vote of 568 to 346 on the second of November. Estimates of their value ranged from the almost limitless to the barely adequate, but many who participated in the De-

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cember vote would have believed 400 million to be only a small fraction— maybe one-fifth, perhaps as little as one-tenth—of those properties.49 From their perspective, they had made a fairly conservative choice, especially given the many reports over the previous decades that had described archbishops with 240 times the income of all twelve apostles and seventy disciples combined. 50 After all, the Assembly’s members had specifically not created a national bank modeled on the Bank of England. And they most definitely had not declared bankruptcy. Nor had they issued paper money. As a Paris notary wrote to one of his clients on December 24, 1789, “There is no longer any discussion of creating paper money. This project has been rejected.”51 More of a bookkeeping tool than a currency, the first assignats had much in common with the anticipations, rescriptions, and other government-issued papers that had proliferated in the final decades of the Old Regime. Like the bills of the Caisse d’Escompte, these assignats chiefly allowed the financial elite to settle accounts with itself across a range of seemingly distinct institutions that were, in fact, tightly linked by personal and familial ties. In March 1790, Joseph Duruey, who both held a venal position in the Royal Trea sury and served as one of the Caisse’s administrators, was appointed to sign the assignats; Jacques Jean Le Couteulx du Molay, who was named to manage the Extraordinary Trea sury, had himself been one of the original administrators of the Caisse, as had his two brothersin-law (themselves first cousins of Jean-Barthélemy Le Couteulx de Canteleu, a banker from Rouen who was widely perceived to be one of the National Assembly’s leading financial experts). 52 If these first assignats were a revolution of any kind, it might be best to think of them as a palace coup.

Nonetheless, the months of dire reports and intense concern had initiated two fundamental shifts of attitude. The first was to say that the state had to provide physical collateral—in this case, the properties to be sold—as support for its borrowing. In a sense, the monarchy had done so for decades, since the rentes it paid were “assigned to” (assignés sur) indirect taxes for payment. 53 Yet while the key taxes involved—the aides on wine and the gabelle on salt—certainly touched consumers in a material fashion, the income from them was nevertheless always anticipated and hence hardly substantive. Since people had to have wine and salt (indeed,

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Figure 4. This model (from a royal proclamation dated March 7, 1790) makes it clear that the first assignats were bookkeeping devices expected to circulate chiefly among royal administrators and court financiers. By the time the Assembly voted to monetize the assignats, the Trea sury had sent 12,800 of these pieces of paper to the Caisse d’Escompte and the Caisse had issued 1,791 of them to the public (in exchange for its own notes). See A.N. F12 796.

in parts of France they were mandated by law to buy a certain amount of the latter every year), it was reasonable to think of the aides and gabelle as a secure resource, but they were not really a gage in the sense that a watch left at a pawnbroker’s shop would be. The abolition of those unpopular taxes addressed two sources of popular unrest, but it also left rentiers with no earmarked source of funds. Some other pledge, it was said, needed to be found. 54 Moral conceptions dominated the initial discussion: “The King’s debt, which will become the Nation’s, will henceforth have for its gage the honor and loyalty of the nation itself and will be overseen by its representatives, the holders and trustees of the sacred treasure of public faith.”55 First stated on the fifteenth of June, reiterated in slightly different wording on the seventeenth of that month (“from the present moment, the state’s creditors are protected by the honor and loyalty of the French nation”) and on the thirteenth of July, this vow was central to the

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Assembly’s policy of “no bankruptcy.” Yet the implicitly religious language of this formulation (“faith,” “sacred”) with its reference to a moral quality (“honor”) long associated with the nobility, offered cold comfort in the summer of 1789 when chaos seemed to be engulfi ng the kingdom. 56 In the aftermath of the abolition of privilege on August 4, two liberal members of the court nobility (the marquis de La Coste and Alexandre de Lameth) suggested that the properties held by the clergy should be offered as “pledges” to the nation’s creditors. On the following day, the monarchien comte de Clermont-Tonnere protested that since those same creditors were already protected by (sous la sauvegarde de) the French nation’s loyalty, no further collateral was needed. At this point, that is, it was voices now usually called “conservative” who appealed to “the Nation” as a moral ideal, while individuals often labeled “patriot” or “revolutionary” insisted the nation put its money where its heart was. It was, in fact, a radical departure to insist the state could only borrow against some sort of “solid pledge” (the liberal duc de Biron repeated this phrase when summarizing the Assembly’s decisions). 57 By doing so, the Assembly effectively “downgraded” France’s “credit rating.” In eighteenth-century parlance, the state could no longer borrow against its “personal credit” but was, instead, restricted by the extent of its sûretés réelles (“assets”). Seemingly common sense to advocates of balanced books, this development deeply upset others. Faced with arguments that the monarchy’s resources should be made visible and accountable, the conservative nobleman Montloisier (soon to author the pamphlet, On the Necessity of a Counter-Revolution) proclaimed, “French honor and loyalty are as constant as the land we inhabit.” For those attached to a semimystical conception of the king’s majesty and power, the simple materiality of these emergency fi nance mea sures seemed vulgar and undignified. While other observers found it a touching show of patriotic virtue when artists’ wives and daughters donated their jewelry to the state and the king volunteered to give up his silverware, the baron de Gauville found such episodes tawdry and “truly humiliating.”58 In the words of one pamphleteer, the Assembly had been tricked into leaving the state as a “pledge . . . at the pawn shop known as the Caisse d’Escompte.”59 The December decrees staked the future sale of nationalized property as collateral against which the first assignats could be issued. They also had the effect of making the debt and the deficit ever more difficult to differentiate, since the biens nationaux were now in theory being used

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to cover both. The Crown and Church properties had been nationalized with the goal of reassuring investors in the long-term debt, but the decrees actually addressed a different issue: as Necker presented it, the crisis was now, not in the past or the future. Nonetheless, discovery of the Trea sury’s immediate deficits—from the fi fty million needed for the navy to the possibility of trimming five million off the royal family’s household budget—still raised questions for many deputies about the debt.60 In the November 1789 report on current expenses, for example, the single largest item consisted of interest payments due (or past due) on the debt: a total of 162 million, more than eight times the cost of various royal households and nearly twice that of military spending. Moreover, while the Finance Committee felt comfortable slashing other items—proposing to cut more than half the budget for the king’s brothers and abolishing the royal stud farm completely—they found no way to reduce the rente payments.61 Since the royal decrees creating them had explicitly specified the rentes would “neither be reduced in value nor anything retained from them,” touching that budget item threatened to provoke public outrage. It was also widely asserted that rentes viagères by their very nature were contracts that could not be reimbursed; they were, after all, life-time investments.62 Returning the amount originally given would mean prematurely ending the life of the rente and, by implication, that of the investor (or whoever had been named as the “head” in the contract). The collapsing of Old Regime borrowing onto the revolutionary idiom of “balanced books” created a situation far more explosive than that created by the debt itself. The Finance Committee’s more politically radical members—men such as Briois de Beaumetz, Dubois- Crancé, and Alexandre Lameth, all of whom belonged to the Jacobin Club—increasingly saw the Assembly’s inherited fi nancial obligations as among the greatest challenges they faced. As later debates made obvious, the “no bankruptcy” policy thereby both lodged the fiscal past in the revolutionary present and made the desire for a transcendent future all the more pressing. The symbolic importance of distinguishing present from past would become most starkly obvious in future years, with the imposition of a new calendar calibrated to the founding of the French Republic. Yet, well before anyone had imagined September 22, 1792, might be the first day of the first month of Year One, lawmakers and others were increasingly keen to wipe the country’s financial slate clean once and for all.

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Land in a Form That Can Circulate And still the nation’s coffers were bare. Perhaps even more worryingly, so were everybody else’s. Starting more than a year earlier, merchants and others had worried about a coming disette de numéraire, a shortage— perhaps even a famine—of money. By October, the baron d’Allarde was certain a “great want” ( pénurie) of it existed. In December, the lawyer and hothead from Alsace, Jean-François Reubell, shocked his fellow deputies when he suggested that searching private households would quickly reveal where all the missing money was hiding.63 Appalled at the idea of violating the sanctity of private property, the Assembly immediately rejected Reubell’s proposal. His suspicions were not completely unfounded, however, even in the behavior of his colleagues. From early summer 1789, for instance, the Marquis de Ferrières had been writing to his wife about property, advising her to hoard cash as she got rid of other possessions. She should not, he insisted, try to acquire more land, because “the times are too critical and in the coming revolution, money in hand [l’argent comptant] may become an indispensable necessity.” She should repair the moat and the walls around their château lest popular violence spread to their region; no, actually, she should do no such thing, since “this is not the time to be spending money on a house that may no longer exist in a year, or six months.” Instead, she should devote her energies and charms to getting cash for the IOU her late father—dead as of only a few weeks— had given them. This would be complicated, Ferrières admitted, for his mother-in-law “had no god but gold”; he advised his wife to tell her mother they were making an offer on a piece of property and the sellers required cash. If she got the money, he recommended she hide it in the part of the cellar where no wine was stored (presumably because he feared looters would seek out the wine). It would be safe, he thought, if she buried it in a box under the sand, but above all she must make certain no one knew she had it. “Burn all my letters in which I write about money,” he instructed her.64 Ferrières’s own impulses fit poorly with those he wanted to see in others. He encouraged his wife to conceal money and pack up the family’s silver, while he simultaneously told his sister that Paris, where “nothing sells and people have no work [because] . . . all the money has been hidden or buried,” risked erupting into further violence. He felt sure he and his family would be “over burdened with new taxes,” but he also insisted

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France would be lost if everyone yielded to “vile selfishness” and failed to pay the contribution patriotique in full. Ferrières wanted to do what would be best for himself and his extended family (he worried not just about his daughters, but also about tenants on his land); he wanted everyone else to do what would be best for France.65 Ferrières did have cause for concern: peasants had sacked châteaux and burnt their contents (especially the titles, deeds, parchments, and receipt books he was keen to protect). His panic, nonetheless, magnified the crisis as much as it alleviated it. Had his wife followed his instructions and filled the moat, it would have done more to alarm their tenants than to protect their property. Had harassing her mother for cash proved successful, the older woman could have faced a serious disette de numéraire of her own. Since he wanted the money only to hide it, Ferrières’s plans would simply have exacerbated the shortage. In Ferrières’s thinking, as in that of thousands of others, two different shortages came increasingly to be conflated. The first, the French state’s ongoing deficit crisis, arose from a shortage of confiance, or trust. Unable to borrow, the state had to pay cash (or offer its assets as collateral): such an unparalleled situation was enough to throw the whole administration into convulsions. Spread throughout society by the uncertainty and violence of 1788–1790, this politico-emotional shortage of trust seriously undermined the vast commercial networks based on deferred payment (crédit) central to French society. A lack of trust in the state quickly became a shortage of credit in the marketplace. In this strange new world without credit, cash became increasingly—almost unprecedentedly—necessary. French people at all levels of society therefore also experienced a serious shortage of specie. (In the idiom of modern economics, we would say “demand for money” was extremely high in 1789–1790, whereas money’s velocity was especially slow. Everyone wanted to receive cash but few were willing or able to spend it.) Many made sense of the situation through analogy with previous crises in the grain trade: France was being starved, they said; speculators were hoarding money in the hope of making bigger profits later; others were exporting gold and silver to foreign lands.66 Whatever the cause, the situation was bad and risked getting far worse. Writing to a fellow clergyman at the end of March, the abbé Pous observed that “since there is absolutely no money [numéraire] to be had, we are going to discuss plans for paper money.” Hardly one of the Assembly’s more radical members politically—he be-

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longed to the conservative Capuchin Club and would later protest against the constitution before fleeing to London—Pous nonetheless felt the poverty he saw around him in the capital called for such drastic mea sures.67 The “money shortage” and further bleak reports from the finance minister worried many deputies deeply. Anxious about their own fortunes— at least one, a wholesale merchant in Troyes (Nicholas-Jacques Camusat de Belombre), declared personal bankruptcy in spring 1790, thereby defaulting on creditors to whom he owed 213,000 livres—and fearful of further popular violence, deputies were also terrified that state default might soon become a reality after all.68 One commented in his letters that the combination of “personal fears” with “national considerations” provided “a rather sound basis for terror,” while others suggested that conservative forces saw state bankruptcy as their “last hope” for defeating the Revolution.69 In early April, revelations about the monarchy’s hitherto hidden pension costs and the long-awaited debate on the tithe made the situation even more tense. When a number of bishops intervened to argue that the November vote putting the clergy’s properties “at the disposal of the nation” had not actually meant they could be sold, tensions rose high; as Poncet-Delpech reported, “the Archbishop of Aix has until now always spoken in a moderate fashion, but today he flew into a sort of rage.”70 Dom Gerle, a pious monk who was also a member of the politically radical Jacobin Club, attempted to make peace by proposing Catholicism be declared the state religion, thereby ensuring the faith’s centrality regardless of who owned the land, but his motion backfired into one of the Assembly’s most vitriolic and literally dangerous debates. With crowds physically attacking deputies as they left the meeting hall, Lindet was left to conclude, “Here we are in yet another moment of crisis.”71 In this charged context, the Assembly voted to convert the assignats into a full-fledged national currency. Though quickly entangled with other matters, the Finance Committee’s proposal for “money-assignats” was meant first and foremost to end the Assembly’s “habitual troubles” (unpaid taxes, Necker’s monthly deficit statements, reliance on borrowing against expected future revenue) by stimulating the circulation of money in any form.72 Historians are accustomed to think of French revolutionaries as eager to break with the past. In the spring of 1790, it was the past practice of borrowing from the future that especially rankled, for

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it meant one could never hope to arrive in the fi nancial-fiscal present. In the here and now, it seemed, there would always be a shortage of cash. Presenting the Committee’s recommendation that the assignats be legal tender for all transactions (not just for the purchase of biens nationaux), the former royal financial administrator, Pierre Hubert Anson, spent little time describing the current scarcity’s causes: “whether it is absolute or relative, whether the money has flowed away from us or been hidden, whether from malevolence or from fear”—in a sense none of this was relevant. What mattered, he said, was to get through the rest of the year without depending on hypothetical future revenues. The proposal therefore suggested monetizing the already decreed assignats in order to break the pernicious cycle of meeting past debts with anticipated future income. After all, it argued, France was at this very moment sitting on enormous immovable wealth (the nationalized properties formerly held by Crown and Church). While it could not literally pay its creditors (including naval suppliers, grain dealers, and especially the Caisse d’Escompte) with these immeubles, the Assembly had already agreed some percentage of them would be sold in order to cover December’s assignats (which were fundamentally another tool for borrowing from the future). If those assignats were declared to be money, then they would do more than allow the state to meet its obligations to the Caisse—they would also make it possible for the Caisse to pay its creditors who could, in turn, pay their own. Trade would revive, commerce would be stimulated, and the assignats would eventually fall into the hands of individuals who wanted to acquire one of the biens nationaux. At that point, the piece of property and the assignats would cancel each other out: the former would no longer be available for purchase and the latter would be removed from circulation. Alert to the deeper causes of the current crisis, the proposal attended both to the shortage of trust and to the absence of credit. To deal with the first, it appealed to social-contract theory: while currencies imposed by force originated in injustice and hence could never be legitimate, “all such vices disappear when a paper emanates from the general will. Who among us would dare doubt its value? We would be doubting ourselves.” According to this reasoning, whatever the Assembly decided to do would automatically elicit greater trust than any of the machinations of the previous decades. Yet the submission of all to the general monetary will formed only one short paragraph out of more than eighty in the Finance

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Committee’s report. The remainder of the text countered this highly political account of the notes’ trustworthiness by including a range of mea sures designed to address the collapse of credit relations. Most of the presentation, in fact, implied that a unified political will was not actually necessary, since in its absence the notes would still be economically attractive to self-interested individuals. Stating money had to be lured “from the billfolds of capitalists, the tills of merchants, and the purses of farmers,” the committee’s proposal even subtly acknowledged that social and monetary difference went hand in hand. “Some of us,” Anson admitted, might not want to accept an assignat that, while representing a piece of land, was not identical to one. To enhance their appeal, therefore, the new “money-assignats” would still bear interest even as they were redefined as legal tender.73 This meant the assignats, unlike stashes of coin or silverware, would be “alive” and growing: worth 3 percent more at the end of a commercial year (360 days) than they had been at its beginning. Since holding onto an assignat would be a risk-free source of income (comparable to a perpetual rente), the committee expected many individuals to reintroduce their “dead” cash willingly into circulation. Concern for their own material well-being, not the selfsacrificing virtue of the Spartan or Roman republic, would transform money hoarders into model citizens. With just a little enticement, people would do both what was best for themselves and what was best for France. The authors of the draft legislation (Anson, the colonial merchant Pierre Isaac Garesché, and the director of the Limoges Mint, Louis Naurissart) were highly successful merchants and state fi nancial administrators who routinely thought in terms of investment yields and profitmaking strategies.74 They envisioned the money-assignats—which would first enter circulation when the Caisse d’Escompte redeemed its bills for cash—going mainly to individuals like themselves. For them, the Caisse’s non-interest-bearing bills, which legally circulated only in Paris, were both dead and discredited. And while coins were certainly credible, they produced no new wealth. Anson and his colleagues therefore assumed that if the interest rate on money-assignats was set appropriately, people would prefer assignats both to the Caisse’s bills and to coins. Threepercent interest on 200 livres (the smallest denomination assignat) meant six livres a year: enough for fifteen four-pound loaves of bread and a sizeable enough sum for the marquis de Ferrières to comment upon donating

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it at the end of a religious ceremony. (“I did not regret it,” he wrote to his wife.) Yet it was also a small enough yield, obviously below the standard 4.5 percent return on most rentes, that it seemed plausible to imagine people paying their debts with assignats or, especially, giving them up in order to acquire one of the national properties. By combining movable wealth’s liquidity with the productivity usually premised only of immovables, the money-assignats would be attractive to nearly everyone. The Finance Committee’s proposal did not foresee a single motive guaranteeing the assignat-money’s success. Instead, some individuals would accept the bills because they wanted to collect interest, others would seek them out in order to acquire biens nationaux, and yet others

Figure 5. Monetized, the assignats issued between mid-April and October 1790 resembled both a bill of exchange (note the text and spaces for signatures) and a coin (the two sides of which are represented). Note the interest coupons at the bottom; many of these were detached and used as small change.

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would spend assignats so they could hoard gold and silver coins. Wealth would circulate and commerce would be revived whether a general monetary will existed or not. With veiled reference to the ecclesiastical deputies, Anson admitted it would never be possible to “satisfy all interests,” but he also asserted that “the art of pleasing everyone is still unknown on this earth.” Couched in a vocabulary of practical, calculated, and reasoned possibilities, the proposal pointedly eschewed utopian ideals (“we have set aside . . . general ideas, vast and universal plans”) and invited listeners instead to think calmly and methodically about the options available to them. (At one point, for instance, Anson asked his listeners to “step down from your lofty legislative heights” and consider the example of a borrower who arranged matters with his creditor by promising to sell some property. He ended the thought experiment a few sentences later, saying “please put yourselves back in your lawmakers’ seats now.”) Granting current circumstances constituted “a tempest,” the proposal nonetheless suggested the Assembly could survive this “stormy weather,” if it set “childish fears” aside and attended to the facts indicated by “the thermometer of credit.”75 Rationalist and commonplace, the Finance Committee’s preferred metaphors echoed the Physiocrats in implying that monetary systems, be they functional or disrupted, were fundamentally part of the natural order of things. The Declaration of the Rights of Man might be, in the words of one deputy, “the door through which one enters the edifice of the national constitution” and the municipalities (according to another), the constitution’s “building blocks,” but money—its appearance, disappearance, and movement—was rarely described in terms of architecture or construction work.76 For while referring to the constitution as an “edifice” allowed French lawmakers (like their North American counterparts) to appeal explicitly to freemasonic imagery and consent-based politics and thereby escape the “body politic” metaphors so central to absolutism, the language of building and making carried opposite connotations when applied to money.77 Describing government as something actively constructed might be tantamount to rejecting divineright monarchy but talk of humans creating currency evoked criminal counterfeiting or political despotism. (Many noted it had been the illegitimately powerful John Law—a foreigner appointed by a regent—who restricted the use of gold and silver in 1720 and forced people to accept paper as a replacement.)78 Even those theorists who emphasized gold

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and silver as signs of value (rather than value itself ) therefore usually insisted it was the natural, physical qualities of those metals that made them uniquely well-suited to their semiotic role. Humans might build a better political order, but most argued they could not and should not pretend to create value. In an age of enlightenment, alchemists were held in little esteem. Even those who wanted the assignats to become legal tender insisted that simply “creating” money would be wrong and dangerous. When the Physiocrat Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours argued against the assignatmoney on the basis that value could come from nature alone, the duc de la Rochefoucauld disagreed but did not challenge Dupont’s basic contention. Instead, the liberal nobleman expressed his great respect for Dupont and then added that his esteemed colleague nonetheless erred in thinking the characteristics of “paper money” might somehow be relevant to a discussion of the assignats. The duke continued by making two key claims: first, the historical experiences of absolute monarchy no longer mattered for “a country become free”—those events were, rather, the stuff of history. Second, the assignats would be utterly unlike any mere “paper” money previously issued since they, alone of all their kind, were backed by “well-known real estate.”79 The slips of paper would be human creations but the source of their value was not. Throughout the grey and rainy days of mid-April 1790, numerous speakers and writers reiterated these points.80 While opponents of money-assignats cited a great range of precedents—everything from Charlemagne to the English Reformation and the Spanish conquest of South America could be made relevant— proponents, well versed in the empiricist reasoning of much eighteenthcentury science, encouraged them to put down their history books and look instead at the world around them. For even if, as Dupont de Nemours so sternly insisted, only God and nature could create value, did not the money-assignats embody it? 81 What were they but land, or a representation thereof ? Each assignat, Anson asserted, “would correspond in the eyes of all to the particular mea sure [arpent] of land it represents.”82 And while the gold and silver in the Bank of Amsterdam’s vaults could be stolen or lost, the land would always be there. Literally immovable, the properties, he observed, could never escape. With hindsight, it is easy to see these first money-assignats as an illogical construction, full of contradictions. In a rare moment of levity,

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Dupont de Nemours said it “rang false [mal sonnant]” to decree silent pieces of paper should be treated as “sound money [espèces sonnantes],” a witticism that encompassed a host of objections.83 (In English, a punster might have said it was “soft thinking” to imagine the assignats could ever be “hard money.”) The money-assignats were legal tender and they were interest bearing; they were “valid for all transactions,” but issued in no denomination smaller than 200 livres—enough for nearly a hundred nice meals in a Paris restaurant.84 They replaced the bills issued by the Caisse d’Escompte and, yet, for their first four months of existence, the money-assignats literally were those same bills, stamped by hand to read “good for an assignat” and signed on the back by the trea surer of the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire (Extraordinary Trea sury). The greatest incongruity of all was the one that inspired the firmest confidence among the assignats’ supporters. In the money-assignat, two confl icting pictures of the world and two competing understandings of value were made to coincide. Building on the notes’ original relation to the biens nationaux and in deference to both aristocratic tradition and Physiocratic principle, land guaranteed value. Yet the point of treating assignats as money was to encourage wealth to move freely throughout France. As countless commentators noted, wealth, like blood and air, had to circulate; without motion, these otherwise munificent forces produced only the most alarming results (hoarding, gangrene, miasmas).85 The logic at work in the money-assignats combined blood and agriculture; the assignats were, remarkably enough, land in a liquid, circulating form.86 An early protagonist, the baron de Pinteville- Cernon, developed this point at considerable length. While other papers, such as bonds or bills of exchange, were “best compared to a pile of rocks of different sizes and different compositions, variously and irregularly shaped, such that it takes enormous effort to get them to roll across each other . . . and then they quickly disintegrate into dust,” the money-assignats were “a beneficial liquid, able by its fineness, its homogeneity, and the roundness of its elements, to diffuse and seek out everywhere its necessary level.”87 Like water in a river system or blood in an individual organism, the bills would invigorate France as they circulated throughout society. Anson introduced the money-assignats by calling them a “new river whose waters are destined to revive the body politic”; a petition from one Paris section (administrative unit) referred to the bills as “a majestic and

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beneficial river . . . fertilizing an immense country.”88 Explaining a later debate to his wife, Ménard de la Groye wrote more assignats were required in order “to give the gaunt and weak body politic the strength and vigor it needs.” Once its forces had been restored, he continued in the next paragraph, the Assembly’s business would be finished and “our successors will come decorate the vast and majestic edifice we have constructed.”89 In the new and regenerated France, political structures were made by men; money and economic life were forces of nature. It was the money-assignats’ apparent ability to combine rapid circulation with utter solidity that made them so appealing in 1790. The major Parisian book dealer Nicolas Ruault (once Voltaire’s editor) wrote excitedly to his clergyman brother that the Church’s former properties backed the money-assignats; when he heard the lands’ total worth had been estimated at twenty billion—a figure he claimed had been verified ten times over—he was little short of ecstatic. “These assignats will be the best money in Europe . . . we can pay for everything without having to tax the people. The French people [les Français] are really going to be franc [“franked” or “debt free”].90 In Ruault’s account, as in most positive evaluations, the money-assignats resolved France’s difficulties precisely because they were not “paper money.”91 Routinely appealing to the value of particular plots of land, deputies and others rejected the argument, forcefully made by Nicolas Bergasse in particular, that issuing assignats on biens nationaux was identical to John Law’s disastrous banking venture, seventy years earlier.92 Unlike Law’s notes “which were only paper, representing no value, and offering the unfortunate bearers no more security than some dream investments in Mississippi,” the assignats were (in the words of a petition from a Paris section) “attached to a piece of land, whose fruits the holder can harvest at will.”93 According to another Paris section, Law’s schemes and the Revolution’s notes were no more similar than were “uncultivated lands on the banks of the Ohio” and “the fertile plains of Normandy.”94 If a handful of writers endorsed the money-assignats on the basis that they would introduce a Britishstyle “national debt” into France, theirs was hardly the dominant position. Rather, the attraction for most was that the assignats—land in a circulating form—would make state finances material, taking them out of the realm of the fantastic and the man-made and anchoring them firmly in the domain of nature. So great was enthusiasm for this measure that at least one ship was rechristened: its new name, Promesse

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d’Assignats, carried the happy news from Marseille to Martinique and back.95

Born, as it were, of land and living as water, the physical object that was an assignat would at the end of its circuit be consumed by flames. On December 24, 1790, Anson again presented on behalf of the Finance Committee: this time, he reported a million livres in assignats had been not just withdrawn from circulation but removed forever from the surface of the earth. Prefacing his statement by remarking “everything connected to public trust [confiance publique] deserves the Assembly’s attention,” he concluded with the thought that “this national money, which has saved the state and given hope to creditors . . . will, I hope, relieve any remaining fear and ill will by disappearing month by month.”96 In the years that followed, numerous “commissioners for the assignats” took over the role of reporting the assignats’ progressive disappearance. On a regular basis, they told France’s elected representatives that after coming into the state’s coffers as payment for national properties, some quantity of assignats had been carefully counted and recounted and their serial numbers entered into a register. Bundled together with bands of paper, the bills had then been fed into a fire at the central Paris offices of the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire and burnt to nothing. Economists today regularly define money by function, not form; they say one of money’s key functions is to serve as a way of storing value. If that is the case, then the assignats were a peculiar sort of money indeed. For it was not the bills’ critics and skeptics but their fi rmest believers who regularly drew attention to the countings and pilings, recordings and burnings. Part of the weekly routine of revolution, these fires and ensuing reports were meant as reassurance, implying people might take comfort in the thought of money going up in smoke. “From the moment they enter commerce, the assignats’ success depends on being able to envision when they will leave it,” agreed representatives of Paris commerce. “Under current conditions,” they continued, “the assignats are a beneficial liquid watering and fertilizing all parts of society but an imprudent stagnation could turn their regenerative powers into poison. They derive their merit from the destination where they must arrive: it alone can make them worthy of trust [lui seul peut leur donner la confiance]. The abyss that will swallow them gives life to the course they will run.”97

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The assignats’ paradoxical, almost impossible-to-think temporality was that of the Revolution itself: something that had to be accepted with utmost seriousness for the time it endured, but that would be finite in duration (if potentially infinite in consequences). The Revolution could not be permanent. Its success, like that of the assignats, would be measured by how quickly it ended.

The Savior of France It is one of the great and largely unremarked-on ironies of the French Revolution that just when the members of the National Assembly had become fully alert to the financial difficulties they faced, they lumbered themselves with another 1.339 billion in payable debt. Aware that tax collection had ceased, reminded on a weekly basis of the state’s operating deficit, and alarmed by the scale of past borrowing, these twelvehundred men nonetheless more than doubled the amount of money they owed. They did so neither because they were libertine spendthrifts nor because they were impractical idealists. Nor were they canny terrorists, intent on destroying the existing system “from inside” (though the measures they adopted came close to having that effect). Rather, they were upright citizens and staunch defenders of property rights. But in their commitment to balancing accounts with the past, they further unbalanced France. Reporting for the Finance Committee in late August 1790, the former marquis de Montesquiou revealed the extent of the recently tabulated “payable” or “current” debt (dette exigible). It was a burden largely of the Revolution’s own making. Composed in small part of sums once owed by the clergy (now transferred, along with the properties that had secured them, to the nation), the current debt had chiefly been brought into existence by how the Assembly interpreted its acclaimed decision to “abolish privilege.” That vote had been taken more than a year ago (late in the evening of August 4, 1789) and had been followed by lengthy and complicated discussions in which “illegitimate” privileges—abuses of power that humiliated commoners and metaphorically besmirched all of France—were distinguished from other, “legitimate” ones. While the first could be simply outlawed, the latter were defined as forms of property and their abolition hence raised pressing questions about ownership, investment, and payment. In no area was this more obvious than in the case of venal offices. Renounced by office-holding members of the

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Assembly in August, venality was legally abolished three months later. Yet the decree promulgated on November 3, 1789, distinctly specified that “those holding these offices shall continue to exercise their functions and enjoy their emoluments, until the Assembly has provided means to reimburse them.”98 The offices had, after all, been purchased; they were obviously forms of property and were, in fact, usually treated as immeubles. Since only a despotic government took property without recompense, they would have to be paid for. The bill would be enormous. For the members of the National Assembly, intangible immovables such as venal offices were just as much property as was real estate. Though many agreed that being able to buy a position as judge or royal counselor was “barbarous,” it was also obvious to them that those purchases, having been made in the past, were covered in the present by article 17 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (“Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified”). Privilege, in short, could not be “abolished,” without indemnification. But where was the money to come from? The Finance Committee’s report first suggested gradually liquidating the debt over the next thirtytwo years. It also quickly rejected this possibility. After all, the man presenting the report was nearly fifty-one years old—could he wait thirty years to be reimbursed for the major general’s post he purchased a decade ago?99 Moreover, such a slow, steady liquidation would add millions in interest payments. “You see, gentlemen,” Montesquiou concluded, “[if we were to pay off the current debt gradually], we would actually need to increase taxes [to cover interest payments] . . . and our primary goal, the relief of the people, would prove only a chimerical fantasy.” As he had already done in November 1789, Montesquiou then contrasted miserable generations united in debt with the far rosier prospect of accelerated financial time: “If we could, in an instant, trade some or all of the nationalized lands for the entire current debt . . . we would fi nd ourselves more prosperous than we dare hope . . . and the work of half a century would be finished in a day [emphasis added].” The Finance Committee was “unanimous,” he said, “in seeing the sale of the biens nationaux as the salvation of the State.” Its members were deeply divided, however, “on the quality of the representative signs to be given in reimbursement.”100 The Finance Committee therefore did not definitively propose any specific mea sures but

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instead sought “enlightenment” (lumières) from the Assembly and from all of France. Some on the committee felt those owed money as part of the current debt should be paid in the assignat-money that was secured on the biens and had already been declared legal tender; since the assignats could be used for all transactions, they would move freely and would stimulate the entire economy at the same time they liberated the state. Other committee members preferred officeholders be reimbursed with a different kind of state-issued paper, a so-called quittance de finance, that would carry 5 percent interest (the rate on the original assignats decreed in December) and be good only for the purchase of biens. In their opinion, introducing more than a billion livres of “paper money” into the economy was sure both to chase the remaining coinage out of circulation and to produce rampant inflation; they argued those ills could be avoided by the far more restricted circulation of quittances (which, while they were paper, were not money). Finally, Montesquiou himself had proposed a third, hybrid possibility: why not offer both assignats and quittances and allow individuals to choose between the two forms of reimbursement?101 Discussion of these three options began immediately and recurred with growing length and intensity for more than a month. The distinction between the quittances (interest-bearing IOUs redeemable for some part of the biens nationaux) and the assignats (a paper currency backed by the same biens) may seem minor today, but the two monetary instruments were predicated on starkly different visions of French society. Though called quittances de finances, the Finance Committee’s second type of “representative sign” was, in fact, almost identical to the first assignats decreed in December 1789: interest-bearing papers that would go from the state to former officeholders and then back to the state (when one of the biens had been purchased). Quittances could be voluntarily transferred between individuals, but their circulation would be obligatory only in the exchange between the state and its creditors. Their movement would effectively form a closed circuit, a network much like that within which the monarchy’s many pieces of paper had moved for decades. In contrast, the circulation of yet another new model of assignat—no longer interest bearing and to be issued in denominations as small as one hundred or even fifty livres—would be far deeper and wider: they would move as money did, to all parts of society. As they did so, they would both resolve the “extreme shortage of money” and, their proponents argued, increase

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popular support for the revolution. In Mirabeau’s words, “Everywhere a money-assignat goes, there will be someone who wants it to be solid . . . and since the fate of the Constitution depends on the successful sale of the biens nationaux, everywhere you find someone with an assignat, there you will find a defender of your mea sures and a creditor interested in your success.”102 Throughout the debate, no one (not even Marat or Robespierre) took the truly revolutionary position of suggesting venal offices might be illegitimate privileges that could be cancelled without payment.103 Simply abolishing the offices was unthinkable but so too was leaving the debt on the books, since officeholders who had not been repaid would retain their property and “privilege” would still exist. If they could all be reimbursed simultaneously, however, the “old regime” would truly become a thing of the past. Settling this debt, in short, meant the difference between a largely finished revolution and an ongoing, potentially failed, one. So while most interventions in the debate focused on whether assignats were or were not “paper money” (and hence on whether evidence drawn from past paper money was relevant), the underlying question was even more fundamental: could France afford to “finish” the Revolution or not? Though the Assembly’s members dealt with many other significant issues in September 1790 (including the structure of the judiciary, the foundations of a new taxation system, and a major mutiny among troops in Nancy), it was therefore “the great business of the assignats” that absorbed the most time and filled nearly everyone’s thoughts. In print and in person, in cafés and in chambers of commerce, the promise and peril of more assignats began to seem the only topic of conversation. The English ambassador, Earl Gower, succinctly reported, “The subject of the Assignats occupies the attention of every body,” while the Finance Committee’s Théodore Vernier told his constituents, “We continue to worry the assignats, but they worry us even more [Nous agitons toujours les assignats, mais ils nous agitent bien d’avantage].”104 Already divided, the Assembly grew increasingly polarized in the course of this seemingly never- ending debate. Men as different as the abbé Pous, a conservative village vicar, and Augustin Robesbierre, Maximilien’s younger brother, agreed in saying they had never seen the Assembly’s debates turn so nasty.105 The conservative nobleman JacquesAntoine de Cazalès and the young lawyer and Jacobin Antoine Barnave had already fought a formal duel in the woods outside Paris (neither

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died), but now the abbé Maury insisted dueling be brought into the Assembly as well. Proposing “all these long speeches that just repeat each other” be removed from the agenda, Maury suggested replacing them with “hand-to-hand combat”: “I throw my gauntlet [gage] before Monsieur Mirabeau,” he announced defiantly. “I demand that he speak and that I be allowed to reply immediately thereafter.”106 A pistol-packing clergyman from Picardy who was also the noted author of several works on pulpit oratory and a member of the Académie Française, Maury had already been formally censured by the Assembly.107 Nonetheless, he remained a loudly verbal and irrepressibly physical presence: when he was challenged at the speaker’s podium for saying only speculators wanted assignats, he grabbed his antagonist (the generally well-liked former duke Louis Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld) by the shoulders and twirled him around several times, then asked the audience to listen carefully to the rest of what he had to say.108 As Maury and Mirabeau (dubbed by one newspaper editor, the “chevalier des assignats”) traded insults and sparred throughout September, many in their audience—in the Assembly, in Paris more generally, and among readers of letters and newspapers—adopted similar postures as well. Asked to submit their opinion on the matter, provincial merchants and section militants convened their own assembly meetings, only to discover they were as divided as the deputies themselves. From Lyon, Angers, and the small industrial city of Louviers came reports saying local commercial elites were strongly in favor of paying the entire debt with assignats; then there came more reports, claiming there had been electoral fraud and denouncing the first reports as fakes.109 “Some say the Constitution and our finances will be lost if the assignats pass; others say all is lost if they don’t,” wrote an overwhelmed abbé Pous to a fellow parish clergyman. “What are we to do?” he continued. “I really have no idea.”110 The health of France and of everyone who lived there seemed to be at stake—Maupetit compared the controversy to that of sickbed doctors so engrossed in their competing diagnoses that they risked letting the patient die while they finished their debate.111 The naturalizing vocabulary predominant in financial discussions made debt liquidation a matter of life and death: Mirabeau spoke of the need to effect a “complete cure” of the country’s ailing credit and reminded those worried about the scale of the proposed venture “that the mass of water rolling in torrents

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through our rivers is also enormous.” Delandine argued against Mirabeau, but he reached for similar images, warning his listeners that the “extreme remedy” of issuing more assignats would produce no real growth but only “a sudden swelling,” much like “opium which first dulls the pain, then intoxicates and slowly puts out life, until it finally produces horrible convulsions and the ghastly sleep of nothingness.” Still others explained that while those already in circulation were salutary, more assignats would be like “taking too strong a dose of medicine; instead of saving the patient it becomes a poison and kills him.”112 In the debate’s final moments, Antoine Barnave pushed the now stock vocabulary of life and death to an even more exalted level. “The salvation of the nation depends on the decision we reach today,” he began. After refuting arguments against the solidity of the assignats—it was, he said, “the law” that tied them to the land (des terres), just as the law attached individuals to their own property—he concluded that without them, France risked being fully engulfed by anarchy. “We have said a lot in this assembly about restoring order . . . ,” Barnave observed, “but we cannot do so without money. Judges who are not paid will not judge; administrators who are not paid will not administer; . . . this mea sure [paying the entire current debt in assignats] is the only means to save the state.”113 As Barnave clearly enunciated and as others had come to see, as well, the open question of the dette exigible had turned into an equally open referendum on the Revolution itself. Could the Revolution be finished? Could the excitement and possibility—which was also the chaos, fear, and uncertainty— of the past sixteen months be brought to a close, be settled as conclusively as any account with the word “paid” written beside it? After more than a year of spending fifty, sixty, or seventy hours every week in meetings and committees, many of the deputies certainly hoped so (Maupetit told his correspondents the Assembly would be done with its work by November, while Ménard de la Groye felt sure it would be finished in the course of the winter).114 And much as no one in the September 1790 debate suggested treating venal offices as illegitimate privileges, no one revived the idea of gradually reimbursing officeholders over the next three decades. No one wanted the Revolution, per se, to continue. When the day came to vote on the dette exigible (September 29, 1790), therefore, the atmosphere in the Assembly was tense at best. Crowds—eager for news, aimless and out of work, perhaps paid by agitators—surrounded

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the meeting hall, as they had done for the past week. Everyone knew how important the vote’s outcome would be: Claude Gantheret, a wine and grain dealer from Dijon who otherwise showed little zeal in fulfi lling his elected role, forced himself to attend the Assembly, though he had suffered for days with an abscessed tooth. Either from his swollen face or because he had appeared in the meeting hall so rarely, guards did not think he belonged; even after he showed his deputy’s card, they suspected fraud and asked him to leave. Recognized by another Burgundian sitting nearby, Gantheret was eventually allowed to remain and cast his vote (“the only trace,” writes one historian, “of his presence in the entire existence of the National Assembly”).115 Time passed and tempers flared long before Gantheret and the others got to vote, however. Debate had been formally closed but procedural questions remained open. Because the Finance Committee’s August report had not actually recommended any particular course of action, it was left to the entire Assembly to propose wording on which they would then vote. When Duval d’Eprémesnil, a former parlementaire and “patriot” hero of the 1780s turned pillar of the Right, rose to present another draft decree, he was therefore recognized and allowed to present it. Asking his fellow deputies to listen until the end, Duval then proposed that all former officeholders be reinstated in their posts and that the Church reclaim its rightful possessions. With this reversal of the Revolution, he noted, most of the dette exigible would simply disappear; as for the rest of it, the officeholders would pay an additional tax, the clergy would lend the state 400 million livres, and all who had emigrated would be invited to return. Having outlined mea sures that would balance the books as surely as issuing more assignats would do, Duval concluded by asking the entire Assembly to go as a single body to present this decree to the king and its respects to the queen. Thanksgiving masses should then be performed in churches across the land, and that, in short, would be that.116 The Revolution would be over. Duval finished reading and mayhem erupted. The Lameth brothers called for him to be sent to the madhouse at Charenton; Cazalès moved the Assembly pass a mea sure allowing personal insults; Mirabeau and Maury both demanded to speak and insisted neither do so without the other. By the time a beleaguered secretary asked whether there was to be a vote on each of the seventeen distinct proposals he had before him, shouting matches had broken out, threats of physical violence loomed,

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Figure 6. “Assassins of the Clergy” (1790). Those who believed the nation had no right to the Church’s property punned that the assignats were actually assassins. The rebus above the cleric’s head also says “assignats”: “a, cygne (“swan,” in French), a.” Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Cabinet des Estampes, this print was part of a collection assembled by Michel Hennin, author of the Histoire numismatique de la révolution française with which this book opens.

and the presiding member ( Jean-Louis Emméry) in desperation eventually resorted to putting on his hat thereby signaling the session had come to a close. So shocking an anticlimax would that have been—for days, if not weeks, the members had been reassuring themselves and their correspondents that a decision was near—that calm was somehow reestablished (though, as Garat wrote in the Journal de Paris, “we didn’t really know how”).117 After further procedural squabbling, the deputies

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voted, but not on any of the detailed draft decrees presented over the past month. Instead, galvanized by the bluntness of Duval’s presentation, nearly all agreed when Armand Gaston Camus, the Assembly’s archivist and the regular chairman of its Pensions Committee, suggested the issue could be reduced to “Will the current debt be reimbursed in assignats?” At that moment, weeks of debate and “enough reports to fi ll seven or eight volumes” were effectively set aside. The question simply became this: “for or against the assignats” and “for or against the Revolution.”118 With Camus’s question converted into a motion—“The [current debt] will be reimbursed in non-interest-bearing assignats”—the deputies voted on it in the usual stand-sit fashion. Since mid-September, however, those opposed to issuing more assignats had urged the vote be taken by roll call “so the Nation will know who supported this disastrous decision.”119 While the Assembly’s regulations allowed a roll call only in cases otherwise too close to judge and while it was obvious to most in the hall that the mea sure had passed, deputies from the Right nonetheless loudly and repeatedly reiterated the demand. With the former comte de Faucigny-Lucinge (a military officer with noble roots going back to the twelfth century) appealing to “all those of my opinion” to protest in writing if no roll call occurred and others demanding it as a matter of “conscience,” one of the Assembly’s secretaries (an international merchant and slave trader from Le Havre) officially declared the stand-sit vote too close to decide.120 A roll call—a procedure used only rarely, since the Assembly’s great size meant it took literally hours to read the name of each deputy and record his vote—then followed.121 The meeting, convened at 8:00 in the morning, finally adjourned at 8:30 P.M.122 While the Assembly’s regulations prohibited its secretaries from keeping any record of individuals’ votes (since doing so seemed conducive to factionalism and to aggravating, rather than overcoming, differences), at least two printed tallies of the vote appeared within weeks. These published accounts are not perfect— one for instance, lists the Breton merchant, Louis Robin de Morhery, as having voted “yes,” when he had actually resigned from the Assembly the previous May—but they nonetheless give us a rare opportunity to consider the choices made by all who voted and not just by the handful who spoke.123 From them, for instance, we see that members of the radical Jacobin Club very largely supported the issue of further assignats, but they did not do so unani-

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mously: at least fourteen club members, including high-profi le individuals, such as Sieyès, Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau, and the presiding Emméry, voted against the assignats. Barnave and many others may have referred to the assignats as the “salvation” of France, but the Left did not exercise a strong whip when it came to monetary policy. In contrast, the Right really did form a bloc: not a single “yes” vote was cast by anyone known to have participated in meetings of the Capuchin Club.124 More doctrinaire than the radicals, the conservatives were, on the other hand, not as good at “getting out the vote”: only seventeen of the Jacobin deputies failed to participate in the vote, as opposed to fifty-five from among the Capuchins. Overall, however, more than half those voting belonged to neither club. The numbers given by the various tallies do not coincide perfectly: the Liste suggests a final vote of 495 yes, 424 no, with two official abstentions (the liberal bishop of Chartres Jean-Baptiste-Joseph de Lubersac, and a lawyer and administrator from Nevers, Charles Marandat d’Olliveau) whereas other sources commonly give the figures of 508 yes to 423 no, with no abstentions. Nonetheless, it seems certain some three hundred “nonaligned” members of the Assembly—men who were neither Jacobins nor Capucins—voted for liquidating the current debt in assignats, while approximately two hundred of their number voted against. (The Jacobins accounted for 35 percent of the yes votes; the Capucins, for 42 percent of the nos.) We will never know exactly how each of the deputies made his decision— or indeed, whether he first made a conscious decision and then voted, or whether he first voted and then justified his action—but a few patterns do quickly become obvious. Those who voted yes were disproportionately young. On average, they were only two years younger than those who voted no, but eighty-two of the youngest deputies (those thirty-five or under) voted for more assignats, while only forty-five in the same age cohort voted against. (If the proportions were the same, we would expect seventy of the youngest to have voted against.) Opposition to the assignats came overwhelmingly, as contemporaries perceived, from those originally elected as representatives of the First and Second Estates: they cast 70 percent of the no votes and only 21 percent of the yeses. A clear majority position among those chosen as representatives of the Third Estate, support for paying the dette exigible in assignats clustered with exceptional strength among those with certain backgrounds. Of the medical doctors who voted, for instance, 82 percent endorsed the

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issue of more assignats, as did more than 90 percent of those whose primary occupation was agriculture in some form. (This does not include all the men like Ferrières who lived on family estates largely farmed by others.) Of the colonial deputies who participated in the vote, only one opposed the issue of more assignats. The mere existence of these published lists is perhaps more significant than the patterns we can glean from them, however. After five weeks of debate, the Assembly (and France) was no closer to consensus than the Finance Committee had been. By law, the assignats were money. Yet fewer than half of France’s national lawmakers had voted to make them so and any literate individual could easily verify this fact. The assignats may have been “the salvation of France,” the only way to abolish privilege while simultaneously reimbursing that system’s beneficiaries, but they were also divisive—as much so as colonial policy and France’s claim to the papal enclave of Avignon (the only other issues resulting in roll calls and printed accounts). The day after the vote, the former marquis de Foucauld publicly announced that though he had opposed the issue of more assignats, “I see now only the Assembly’s decree and all good citizens must work together to ensure it is executed.” While the future commander of a counter-revolutionary army may genuinely have believed what he said, the printed lists and other ongoing forms of recrimination make it obvious many did not. For them, the vote’s results only intensified their anger and hostility—forgiving and forgetting were not in the cards. In contrast, many of the men who voted for the assignats wanted to stop being revolutionary nearly as much as Duval d’Eprémesnil did. But whereas Duval imagined change could be undone, they hoped instead to complete it. Because they conceptualized a revolutionary social transformation (abolishing venality) as a fairly ordinary property transaction (reimbursing officeholders), finishing that work seemed possible, even plausible. That it turned out to be something other than a matter of accounting and logistics may have surprised them as much as it confirmed others’ suspicions. A year later, its business concluded and France precariously established as a constitutional monarchy, the National Assembly dissolved itself. Since its members had already prohibited themselves from sitting in the new Legislative Assembly, they were free to go home and resume their ordinary lives. Many did so: Ménard de la Groye returned to Le

Figure 7. “The Triumph of Patriotism” (1790–1791). For supporters of the Revolution, in contrast, the assignats saved France from debt and disaster. In this crowded allegory, the female figure of “France” is surrounded by cherubic “spirits” ( génies) each devoted to a particu lar patriotic labor. In the lower right (between “Sculpture” and “War”), “[economy] . . . calculates assignats to fill the Nation’s trea sury.”

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Mans and served as a judge in the new court system, Louis Naurissart went briefly back to directing the Limoges Mint, and Claude Gantheret greatly expanded his Burgundy vineyards through the purchase of biens nationaux. Other former deputies stayed in Paris and remained prominent public figures through the political clubs they frequented and the writings they circulated. Still others—a full 50 percent of those originally elected as representatives of the nobility—left France, many volunteering their ser vices to the emigrant armies committed to reversing the Revolution by force.125 But the members of one of the Assembly’s committees were required to stay in their posts: the Assignat Committee.126 Charged with supervising production, preventing waste, guaranteeing authenticity, and overseeing the weekly burnings, the committee was deemed too vital to be disbanded. If the business of verifying accounts, orga nizing taxes, and erecting a constitutional edifice had apparently all been completed, that of making money had only just begun.

3 Making Money Whoever accepted an assignat performed an act of faith; it was as if he said, “I believe in the Revolution.” And whoever purchased one of the biens nationaux said, in effect, “I believe the Revolution will last, I believe it is eternal.” Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution (1847)

I

of eighteenth-century France, making money was a family affair. Fathers adjusted the weight of metal blanks and stamped them with the king’s face and arms; mothers trimmed the blanks to make them perfectly round; children were apprenticed to one or both of their parents. The right to work in the king’s mints passed d’estoc et de ligne—from father to son, from mother to son, and even from father to daughter—and had done so for more than six hundred years. Only the eldest sons of eldest sons could hold the title of monnoyeur (and that only after serving an apprenticeship and passing a practical test), but it was very much in the monarch’s interest that the moneyers’ other offspring all had a legal right to be mint workers. Supposedly trained from an early age in the mints’ “habits of honesty,” the children had also been exposed to the facilities’ inner workings and techniques. Men and women who knew how to manufacture currency could hardly be allowed to set up their own businesses or sell their skills to the highest bidder. Being born into a family of monnoyeurs meant being a mint worker. As one anonymous official worried in 1755, this was therefore a guild that legally could “multiply to infinity.”2 A privilege of sorts, making money was therefore also a duty. It was not a lucrative one. Though they had considerably more personal freedom than the “public serfs” who had produced the Roman Empire’s N THE MINTS 1

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coinage, the moneyers of eighteenth-century France had little of their Merovingian forefathers’ wealth. Long gone were the days when the moneyer’s mark on a coin was as significant as the king’s or when a monnoyeur’s descendants included mint masters, church founders, and noble crusaders.3 Since they were paid only when they worked and since there were months, if not years, in which some of the kingdom’s thirty mints stood silent, most mint workers in the eighteenth century were far from wealthy. Instead, their reward came in the form of status: exempt from direct taxes such as the taille and the capitation, they were also free from the obligation to house troops or to pay excise duties on wine and other goods. For centuries defined legally as “fellows [commensaux] of the king’s household,” the monnoyeurs were noble in all but name—the men could even carry swords in public.4 Unlike France’s nobility, the makers of money were orga nized on national lines. In this they were distinctive: while the other Old Regime trades were municipal in structure, mint workers across the country were united into a single legal entity, the serment de France (“French oath”). 5 As a royal official explained to the Intendant of Rouen in 1759, “the moneyers and ajusteurs may be divided among the different mints, but their corporation is always a single body . . . whatever is explicitly granted to some of these workers must be given to the others as well.”6 Like the coins they produced, those who worked in the mint manifested a peculiar kind of sameness: a metal cutter from Paris could and did work in the mint in Amiens, much as silver écus made in Montpellier might be found in Flanders.7 Yet mint workers’ kingdom-wide interchangeability also made them unique: by their legal standing, though not by their productive activities, monnoyeurs were as different from other metalworkers as a gold coin was from a wedding ring. Custom, culture, and techniques, not tools and materials, distinguished the mints and made the workers’ personal skills into secrets of state. Moneyers’ status, like that of so many others in eighteenth-century France, was conferred, maintained, and policed by royal statutes. It had only a tangential relationship to the materials with which they worked— which were also present in crucifi xes and shoe buckles, coffee spoons and epaulets—or to the tools with which they shaped them. The écus, louis, sous, and even deniers made in the mints might be sacrosanct but the stuff of which they were made was not. Anyone, after all, could bring a gold button or some silver place settings to the mint and have them

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remade as coins. While it was the French king’s sole prerogative to set a coin’s monetary value and to determine what images and inscriptions it bore, he had no such monopoly over the mining of precious metals (most of which happened in Spain’s American colonies) or their import into Europe. It was the private sector that supplied gold and silver to the mints; the monarch’s representatives who divided it into units of a certain weight and fineness and then signed their work by stamping it with the king’s face. While the materials and techniques used in the mints could be found in many other locales—a watchmaker’s bench, an engraver’s studio, a jeweler’s shop—the law and language of the moneyers was specific to them alone. Their implements (mallets, crucibles, presses, and tongs) were used in all the other metal-working trades as well, but within the mints those objects took on special names. Not a mere “hammer,” but a “hammer called a boüard,” was used to flatten the metal blanks into proto-coins; the word boüard is so obscure that it appears nowhere in today’s online “Trésor de la Langue Française,” and the 1831 dictionary of the Académie Française could only define the verb form (“bouer”) tautologically as “to strike a piece of metal with a bouard [sic] . . . especially in a Mint.” In the preface to their Encyclopédie, that great compendium of eighteenth- century knowledge, Diderot and D’Alembert especially thanked “the talented mathematician, Rogeau” for contributing the articles on monnoyage— so specialist was his knowledge that he wrote no other articles for them and to this day he remains unidentified by historians.8 Along with their own lexicon, mint workers had their own legal system. Except in cases of murder, abduction, or arson, they fell under the jurisdiction of the Cour des Monnaies (Moneys Court), a sovereign court that decided civil and criminal cases arising from the minting of money and, by extension, from other uses of gold or silver.9 The Court’s judges— who bought their titles and found there an easy, if initially expensive, route to nobility—dealt with a surprisingly wide range of issues. They confiscated unhallmarked silverware and shoe buckles; they resolved disputes between the gold-platers’ and the button-makers’ guilds; they prosecuted those who tampered with the coinage. Like any court, the judges heard many cases with only local significance. A master goldsmith in northeastern France, for instance, petitioned to move his forge and furnace to a building other than his own shop because they produced

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smoke that ruined the silks used by his dressmaker wife in her trade; the Court granted permission.10 When serious crime happened within a mint, the punishment was severe. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Louis XV asked his loyal subjects to donate silver in support of the military; many did so and the Paris Mint took on temporary workers to help orga nize and transport the extra materials coming through its doors. In 1759, the Court convicted one of those hired hands, Edme Chollet, of stealing several small silver items and trying to resell them. The judges sentenced him to death, but before his execution he stood in front of the main entrance to the mint with a noose around his neck, holding a ten-pound torch of yellow wax, and wearing a sandwich-board marked front and back with the words “worker in the mint, thief of materials from its laboratories.”11 Like a counterfeiter, or a poacher who hunted in the royal domains (whose offense his more closely resembled), Chollet was guilty of a crime against the king—a crime of lese majesty. For it was the monarch, and the monarch alone, who had the right to make coins and to set the objects’ monetary values. “The power of minting money,” explained Abot de Bazinghen in 1764, “belongs to the sovereign alone, since only he has the right to require that his mark be accepted as authoritative witness among an entire people.”12 Within the mints of eighteenth-century France, the king’s privileged workers weighed metal and assayed it; they melted it, rolled it, cut it up, and stamped it. Over the previous six hundred years, the monarchy had slowly established a monopoly on such activities and in doing so wrested monetary control from ecclesiastical authorities and rival princes alike. As the kings of France strengthened their hold on their realm, the king’s stamp overshadowed God’s: the ruler’s portrait on coins replaced the saints and crosses formerly found there. This growing consolidation of symbolic power should not be mistaken for centralized production or state control of the money supply, however. Each mint in Old Regime France—in 1789, after various reforms and consolidations, there were still seventeen in a territory roughly the size of Texas—had its own engraver, its own mint mark, and its own director. Since coins and the materials from which they were made were both valuable and heavy, it was risky and expensive to transport such items any distance. Each mint therefore produced chiefly for its own hinterland. When the intendant of Brittany reported a potentially explosive “small change famine” in his

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region, the controller general responded by authorizing the nearest mint to produce up to 100,000 marcs (over 50,000 pounds) of copper coins. Five months later, production had yet to start: it was up to the director of the mint in Nantes to get the necessary copper, and he was waiting for a shipment to come from the Netherlands.13 For all that an air of mystery hung around their operations, the mints and the monnoyeurs belonged to the system of privilege that structured so many aspects of Old Regime life. If their case was special, so too was that of the shoemakers in any given city and that of the judges in any parlement. Privilege literally means “private law,” but in a polity with no written constitution and a culture with no concept comparable to “civil rights,” it was in many ways the only kind of law there was. The Revolution’s abolition of privilege in the name of national, legal uniformity would affect the mint workers as it did workers in all other trades. With positions no longer hereditary and posts allocated on a competitive basis, personnel confl icts broke out in many facilities ( just at the time when everyone ought to have been hard at work melting down unwanted church bells and minting them into small change).14 In winter 1794 (Pluviôse 26, Year II), the Convention closed all but the Paris Mint. Meanwhile, in a converted convent in central Paris, over a thousand workers were making assignats. Recruited from printers, other artisans, and various branches of government administration, the employees of the “Central Manufactory of Assignats” had none of the legal, social, and cultural distinctiveness of their money-making predecessors. While it was axiomatic under the New Regime(s) as under the Old that only the sovereign power could issue money, that did not resolve the question of how currency was literally to be made. The sedimentation of centuries had marked moneyers’ tools, their manual labor, and the items they produced as all uniformly distinct, such that even physical differences between coins could be the sign of a single political authority. Without this tradition of dead generations, however, establishing the legitimacy of physical assignat manufacture would prove no easy task. Throughout the early 1790s, individuals inevitably drew on their own experiences as they attempted to determine just what it was that had made money money. In doing so, they folded the past into the present, in ways that made revolutionary change both all the more difficult to achieve and all the more tempting to idealize.

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Making Belief When speakers and writers in 1790–1791 referred to the assignats “saving” France, they reached first for medical metaphors. France was gravely ill, they said, and its finances in desperate need of restoration. The prognosis was not good; the patient required a strong remedy, a purge, or an entirely new regimen—these words and images made sense to many in the early years of the Revolution.15 Yet salvation had obvious religious connotations, as well, and there was undoubtedly something eucharistic in the way believers envisioned the assignats coming to the rescue of France. Much as a communion wafer was flour and water that, at a certain moment, became the body of Christ, so could the pulped and treated rag fibers that made up a piece of paper transubstantiate—when marked with the right insignia and consecrated by a correctly constituted authority—into “a piece of land whose fruits the bearer can harvest at will.” And much as few Catholic lay people knew anything about the literal production of the “sacramental bread,” so too did few citizens of France gave much initial thought to how or by whom the assignats would be manufactured. As land in a form that could circulate, it was the fact of land that mattered far more than that of “form.” Mirabeau (in August 1790) could not have been more adamant on this topic: “It must be said,” he insisted to his fellow deputies, “that the doctrine of money-assignats is widely understood by our compatriots like it is understood here in the National Assembly. They know very well the difference between what is called ‘paper money’ and . . . our own territorial currency.”16 Whatever the assignats may have been, he made clear, they were not paper. And yet, less than two months later, the same orator appeared before his colleagues in order to make a crucial point, namely: “We cannot pay too much attention to the paper of which they are made.” A week later, Louis Naurissart, speaking for the Finance Committee, forcefully echoed this sentiment: “Gentlemen, nothing is more important than the paper for the new assignats.”17 The assignats were not a form of “paper money,” but they were, nonetheless, made of paper and discussion of the dangers of counterfeiting could not help but highlight that very materiality, that very paper-ness, so assiduously denied by the currency’s advocates. Few revolutionary lawmakers had much aptitude for the literal “making” of the money-assignats, however. When the members of the

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newly convened Legislative Assembly’s (1791–1792) Assignat Committee discovered that their duties would consist chiefly of counting sheets of paper, one—a wholesale merchant from the Southwest—protested that such a “cold and sterile” task was hardly appropriate for men who burned with desire to serve the public good. If a handful of elected men (such as the Constituent Assembly’s Charles Guillaume Leclerc, a well-established Parisian book dealer and commercial authority) clearly had relevant previous experience, many others hesitated to involve themselves in something so notoriously complicated and obscure. For the few who actually had backgrounds in typography, book selling, or intellectual property, the question of paper currency was unlikely to seem as pressing as that of copyright or censorship; for the self-styled experts in political economy, monitoring the output of assignats was, at best, a “mechanical and manual” task.18 Yet the job was so important that it was on the agenda for the National Convention’s first full day in existence; exceptionally and for speed’s sake, the new French Republic named its commissioners for assignat manufacture by appointment rather than proceeding to elect them by vote.19 Historians, like the revolutionaries they study, have been slow to take an interest in how money is manufactured or even in what it looks like. While this era’s economic thought and monetary policy have been the subject of multiple volumes, the business of printing assignats and of minting small change has gone almost completely unstudied. Inspired by authors such as Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, both of whom treated money as the modern world’s chief and most powerful abstraction, scholars have generally been loathe to look at money. 20 After all, surely only fetishists and four-year-olds really care what money looks like? Yet the processes, techniques, and, especially, the pace of money manufacture mattered very much to the people who lived through the revolutionary decade. In September 1790, the deputy Maupetit, for one, took solace from the thought that artisanal production and elaborate anticounterfeiting mea sures meant that the assignats could only enter circulation very slowly: “It will take at least a year,” he wrote to his friend who worried about the potentially inflationary consequences of adding 800 million livres to the money supply. It was physically impossible, Maupetit reassured his correspondent, for France to be “flooded” with paper. The assignats, far from being a torrential downpour, would be a slow and steady trickle. 21 Or, as a pamphlet from that same month

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concluded, the bills promised to be a “beneficent water” that would gradually “fertilize” all of society before they “flowed back into the ocean.”22

Before the money-assignats could rain gently upon the kingdom, however, new challenges confronted lawmakers and administrators at all levels. As legislators and local officials quickly came to recognize, simply creating and manufacturing the assignats (much less getting them into circulation or having them accepted as money) required the alignment of multiple forces. It demanded both political will in the Assembly and workplace efficiency in the various ateliers. Even the weather conditions were crucially important: too rainy a spring and the assignat paper would not dry properly; too dry a summer and the streams that powered the paper mills might run dry. Moreover, this was the first time that the state endeavored to control the amount of currency being printed (or minted), the fi rst time that the state exercised a monopoly over the raw materials from which money was made. Historically, control of the money supply had fundamentally belonged to the private sector: any prosperous Frenchman could, if he wanted, take his ewers and his silver serving bowls to the nearest mint and have them reformed into coins. While in practice the metal had chiefly been supplied by international merchants who imported ingots or foreign currency, in principle anyone could choose to sell silver for coins. The mints continued dependent on the private sector in this fashion throughout the nineteenth century. In contrast, individuals had no such access to the assignat production facility. No one could arrive with paper and ask that it be printed into money (yet further proof, one might say, that the assignats were not paper money). In late April 1790, when members of the National Assembly’s Finance Committee conferred with royal commissioners about the literal making of money, they turned to the hitherto distinct domains of the king’s mints and his printing office. They contracted Etienne Alexandre Jacques Anisson-Duperron, the director of the Imprimerie Royale, both to print the notes and to make the paper for them at a mill in Buges (Loiret) where he—in his private capacity—had a part interest. 23 Theirs was not an unreasonable choice: Anisson-Duperron’s presses fi lled a wellestablished workshop at the Louvre and only the Imprimerie Royale had

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letters in the font known as Grandjean or “the King’s Roman,” a typeface designed for Louis XIV more than a century earlier. Meanwhile at the mill, Anisson-Duperron’s collaborator, Léorier de Lisle, had already earned a certain notoriety for his experiments with making paper from vegetables and tree bark (rather than the customary cotton and linen rags).24 The commissioners then hired Augustin de Saint Aubin, an engraver from an established artistic dynasty—his father had held the title “embroiderer to the king,” and one of his brother’s had studied painting with Boucher—to produce copperplate engravings for the bills. And they selected Pierre Joseph Lorthior, a graveur du Roi whose other works included a silver medallion celebrating Louis’s marriage to Marie Antoinette, to design and engrave the embossing seal (timbre-sec) for the assignats.25 Given their own backgrounds, it is hardly surprising the commissioners chose “Old Regime” masters even when faced with the “revolutionary” task of making paper money. Those first in charge of assignat manufacture, whether named by the Assembly or by the king, all belonged to the established elite: the comte de Lablache, a liberal nobleman who could trace his lineage to the early fifteenth century and was the sole heir of Louis XV’s financier, Paris-Duverney; the marquis de Montesquiou, raised at court and a member of the Académie Française; Louis Naurissart, director of the Limoges Mint; Anson, the deputy and former royal financial administrator; Nicholas Desmarest, a geologist and encyclopédiste, who as a royal inspector of manufacturing had supported the paper-making innovations pioneered by the Montgolfier brothers; and Briere de Surgy, formally an auditor in the royal accounting office (Cour des Comptes). Yet while none of the six was an angry young man, at least five of them were reasonably staunch patriots in the context of spring 1790 (only Naurissart, who resigned from the Assembly ten months later, might be considered already somewhat suspect in that regard). All wanted the assignats to succeed. Aiming for maximum credibility, the artists’ technology and the commissioners’ culture intersected to produce assignats nearly as individualized as eighteenth-century credit and commercial relationships had been. Consider, for instance, Saint Aubin’s engravings: produced on comparatively soft copper, each could only be used a few thousand times before it became useless. Yet there were over a million assignats to be

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printed. Drawing on his past experience as a portrait artist noted for detail work, Saint Aubin therefore produced not one, but two hundred, profile-bust engravings of Louis XVI and two hundred of the arms of France. Making a virtue of necessity, Saint Aubin made no effort to make his engravings perfectly identical; rather, he intentionally introduced minor variations between them, such that their almost imperceptible diversity would guarantee their authenticity. The king’s neck ruffle might fall in eight curves, for instance, or it might make nine; his lowermost ringlet might curl to the left or to the right. Writing a lengthy memoir describing his work, Saint Aubin insisted the variations would be too subtle for any common criminal to follow. In fact, so ingenious did he think his innovations that he assumed the assignat inspectors would have to be trained orally. “There are numerous details,” he wrote, “that can only be indicated by the author [himself ] and cannot be described.”26

Figure 8. Augustin de Saint Aubin, “Louis XVI, King of the French” (1790). The copperplates used for the engravings on the first assignats were so soft that each could only be used a few thousand times before it became worthless. Saint Aubin hence planned 200 portraits of the king, each ever so slightly distinct.

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Saint Aubin’s engravings may have looked a bit like the monarch but they looked even more like coins. Positioned in a circular frame, Louis faced to the left (“as he does on our current money,” specified Saint Aubin); the other image on these first bills—another circle, enclosing three fleurs-de-lys—closely resembled the central emblem on the reverse side of an écu. Even Saint Aubin’s assumption that difference would guarantee authenticity reveals the new paper’s debt to the old metal coinage. For while an “engraver general” in Paris had provided a model for all art on Old Regime coins, each of the mints had had its own engraver responsible for reproducing that master engraving as carefully as possible. With work being done in this way, minor variations among the engravings inevitably arose. Other secret codes, however, known technically as différents—the engraver’s mark under the monarch’s portrait, the mint’s letter similarly positioned on the obverse—made it theoretically possible to track discrepancies to their point of origin. In this regime, differences, even those that went generally unperceived, could be the sign of a single authority. Materially as well as conceptually, that is, the first assignats were hybrids. They combined the solidity of land with the liquidity of circulating media; they were interest bearing and they were cash; they looked like coins but they looked also like bills of exchange. Like a bill of exchange, these first money-assignats were at least notionally written (or “drawn”) by one individual and payable to another. Though both men had been appointed by the king and neither was personally responsible for the note’s value, the putative drawer and beneficiary each signed the assignat carefully, with the latter then signing it on the back as well. These first assignats (400-million worth) could be—many argued that they ought to be—endorsed like a bill of exchange every time they changed hands. Though it added another stage to their already slow production, they were even printed on the back with boxes for endorsers’ signatures.27 These first assignats appealed visually as well as theoretically to multiple registers of trust, as if a single object could somehow be lottery ticket, coin, and promise of future payment all rolled into one. Precedent certainly existed: several high-profi le state-borrowing ventures in the 1780s had, for example, combined a stable rente payment with a chance at winning a lottery. And it is understandable that the assignats’ supporters responded to vocal opposition (within the Assembly and in the

Figure 9. The first money-assignats, such as this one for 1,000 livres, were visual (as well as conceptual) hybrids. Saint Aubin’s two circular engravings look very much like the two sides of a coin, but the assignat also specifies it is “to the order” of a certain named individual and bears signatures like those on a bill of exchange. On the reverse side, assignats issued between April and October 1790 were printed with a grid of boxes intended for endorsers’ signatures.

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country at large) to the nationalization of the Church properties by trying to shore up the bills’ credibility in as many ways as they could imagine. Yet creating objects that simultaneously resembled bills of exchange and coins—like asserting the assignats were valid both because they were supported by the will of the nation and because they were backed by land—produced more contradictions than it resolved. For while bills of exchange and coins were both common in eighteenthcentury France, they did not circulate in the same fashion: acceptance of the first was voluntary and signaled by a signature, acceptance of the latter was not. The “Address to the French People” of April 30, 1790, may have asserted that the assignats would “serve as money” [ feraient l’office de monnaie], but many holders of the notes, like numerous petitioners to the Finance Committee and members of the Assembly itself, clearly felt more comfortable treating them as they did bills of exchange. 28 Merchants entered assignats as individual objects into their account books and people advertised for lost ones by serial number. Well into 1792, at least some district-level officials treated assignats that way: they recorded them not as so many bills of one denomination and so many of another, but as individual bills each noted by its serial information and signature.29 Based on the model of bills of exchange—each endorser of which was responsible for the full value of the note, such that the more signatures a bill carried, the more secure it became (much as with the girls from Geneva, safety was to be had in numbers)—many assumed an assignat ought to be signed each time it changed hands. In short, individuals’ reactions suggest these pieces of paper felt more credible as each accumulated its own set of signatures and hence as they became increasingly unique. For while paper credit networks had expanded considerably in the eighteenth century and many people held bills of exchange that originated in unknown hands, this expansion was nonetheless not strictly speaking “anonymous.” Rather, it depended on recognizing names or, at the very least, on feeling that unknown names must nonetheless belong to actual people who could be located if necessary. 30 In short, all the material techniques advised (and most of those attempted) in 1790–1791 for guaranteeing the credibility of the assignats both made intuitive sense based on people’s experiences with bills of exchange and sat awkwardly alongside—indeed, to some extent undermined—claims that the bills actually were “money.”

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In October 1790, after the month-long debate on debt liquidation, the Assembly named new commissioners for assignat manufacture (nearly all commoners) and voted several changes in the notes’ form. No longer interest bearing, the assignats also lost some of their most obvious visual references to bills of exchange and to coins. Valid “to the bearer” and with no pretense of having been written by one party to the order of another, the new notes were not printed on the back with boxes for endorsers’ signatures (though they continued to carry signatures on the front). While they still bore a representation of the king, that image was no longer an obvious depiction of a coin: whereas on an écu and on April’s money-assignats, the king looked to the left, on the new ones he looked to the right (and on most bills, he appeared without the coat of arms featured on the reverse side of coins). These changes reduced the cost of assignat manufacture—the fi rst bills had gone through three different presses (front, back, copperplate), whereas the new ones went through only one—and they were expected to make the notes circulate more freely. 31 Yet individuals instead continued to treat assignats as a special category of money object, and some insisted that the bills were not valid unless endorsed on the back. In June 1791, for example, when district-level administrators in Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle) audited the accounts kept by the local tax collector and postal officials, they recorded both the sums they had in hand and the serial number and letter of each assignat. By auditing accounts in this way, they produced two parallel columns of figures: those in the column headed “assignat value” could be added together to produce a total but those in the “assignat number” column could not.32 The manufacture of the bills, after October, was also further decentralized. Market pressures, Mirabeau and others argued, would result in assignats that were both cheaper to make and more beautiful to behold. As claims for the value of open competition trumped appeals to expertise and tradition, Anisson-Duperron lost the printing contract to Pierre Didot, and a self-made wallpaper titan, Jean-Baptiste Reveillon, took over the paper-making contract for himself and his business associates.33 Manufacture was still laborious, however. Since making paper required large workshops and access to flowing water, the paper was produced outside Paris and then shipped into the capital to be printed, signed, and numbered. At every stage of the process, security was crucial and safeguarding the precious paper a crucial concern. One of the Na-

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tional Assembly’s commissioners therefore counted the finished sheets at the paper mill before they were loaded onto carts bound for the capital; when they arrived and were unloaded into the National Archives for safekeeping, they were counted again, as they were when they returned from one of several printing facilities located in Paris. Printed, the assignats at that stage had been “manufactured” but they had not been “issued” and they notionally could have stayed in the Archives indefinitely. In practice, of course, the Trea sury continued to run desperately short of funds, and so the pieces of paper were once again counted and then sent to the nearby Caisse de l’Extraordinaire (the Extraordinary Trea sury, the office originally charged with making and receiving payments in assignats), to be signed, numbered, and embossed by hand. Then and only then, did they acquire the quality of “money.” Their production process guaranteed the assignats would not enter circulation overnight, and their denominations (now from 50 to 2,000 livres) meant they still could not be used in many transactions. The assignats therefore flowed only slowly from the archives. At the same time, political uncertainty and cultural instability combined to aggravate the money shortage. In a period of low-grade but constant crisis, the scarcity of cash affected everyone from artists to entrepreneurs; it impinged on the building industry and the luxury trades alike. In March 1791, a Paris furrier and hatmaker, Beaujolin, tried to pay his dozens of workers “collectively” with four assignats of fifty livres each, but they returned the notes to him at the end of the day, saying “they will not take any more paper, because they cannot share it among themselves as they did money.”34 Goldsmiths, carpenters, and mantua-makers felt the problem with equal acuteness. Jean-Antoine Houdon, the king’s sculptor, employed half a dozen junior artists in his workshop, along with a stonemason, a carpenter, and a day laborer to do the heavy lifting. While their salaries were calculated on a daily basis, they all expected weekly wages (nine livres for the manual laborer, twenty-five for the artists), and none wanted a 300-livre assignat for which nobody would make change.35 New work, work stimulated by the Revolution—remodeling hôtels particuliers into government ministries, preparing the Champ de Mars for the Festival of Federation, making banners and uniforms for the newly constituted National Guard regiments—had to be done and the workers had to be paid, but they, no more than Beaujolin’s or Houdon’s employees, had use for large bills. Duranton, who did the stonework for the Festival

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of Federation, was a highly successful mason, but still he could not pay three dozen workers with a single assignat for 200 livres. The same was true for Dujon, the painter, who needed 1,200 livres in cash for his workers’ contribution to the same patriotic occasion. It was even true for the engraver Lorthior, whose commission to produce artwork for the assignat borders obliged him to take on more workers, none of whom were willing to take the 300-livre notes with which he himself was paid (and which would have represented at least a year’s wages for any one of them). 36 The interest-bearing status of the first assignats only added further complications to their circulation: by October 8, 1790, a thousand-livre note was, with interest, “really” worth 1,014 livres, 8 sous, and 4 deniers, such that the individual using it to settle an account for a thousand livres ought to get fourteen livres, eight sous, and four deniers in change. 37 The National Assembly’s policies in all these areas proved politically quasi-universal but socioeconomically divisive. Although the Assembly’s members moved quickly to address the state’s “shortage of money” (and repeatedly attempted to resolve it), they were much slower to consider the small change “famine” faced by ordinary people. Not until midDecember 1790—a year, more or less, after the first creation of assignats— was debate first opened on the subject, and whereas the large and powerful Finance Committee drafted most decrees about the assignats, a separate and far more minor Mints and Moneys Committee presented on coinage. 38 The state’s finances were one thing; the people’s money, another.

Voluntary Money Laws of May and December 1791 eventually authorized the withdrawal of many large-denomination assignats and their replacement with notes for smaller amounts. Long before then, however, people had become familiar with many new forms of small change. In response to the ongoing liquidity crisis, more than a thousand bodies all across France— municipalities, districts, manufacturers, benevolent societies, and private, profit-making ventures—produced their own divisions of assignats, the so-called billets de confiance or billets patriotiques (“trusty” or “patriotic” bills) issued in denominations from six deniers to twelve livres. Much like district-based poor relief or other aspects of the municipal revolutions of 1789–1790, these bills show newly enfranchised citizens taking

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matters into their own hands, responding positively and, at least initially, optimistically to the disette de numéraire (the shortage of cash) that was nearly as great a concern as the availability of grain.39 Take, for instance, the Caisse Patriotique (Patriotic Treasury) that operated in Toul, a cathedral city of approximately 8,000 inhabitants in northeastern France. Established at the comparatively late date of February 1792 (similar institutions had operated in Bordeaux and Marseille since summer 1790), the Toul Caisse offers both an exemplary, but also a fairly ordinary, instance of private commitment to the public good. Firmly anchored in the administrative structures and institutions of the city—its twenty organizers included the mayor, the city prosecutor [procureur], a notary, and two parish clergymen and its billets were printed by one of the département’s deputies to the Legislative Assembly, Joseph Carez—the Caisse was nonetheless technically a private venture. Though many involved in its operations held public posts and its office was located in City Hall, the Caisse’s backers underwrote its activities as private individuals: they offered their own possessions as collateral and worked for no pay. Promising citizens a way to avoid the high commissions charged by private money changers, the Caisse Patriotique accepted one denomination of assignat and gave its own smaller denomination bills in exchange. During the nine months of its existence, the Caisse issued slightly over 50,000 livres in bills for five, ten, and twenty sous (that is, one-quarter, one-half, and one livre), all given in exchange for five-livre assignats. While tailors and cabaret keepers, printers, wigmakers, and volunteer soldiers all stood in line to exchange their assignats, the municipality itself was eventually the Caisse’s single largest patron, thereby further blurring the distinction between private enterprise and public resources.40 By the time concerned citizens in Toul had formed their own Caisse Patriotique, literally countless such establishments existed all across France. There were at least fifty different issuers in the city of Paris alone, a hundred in the Norman department of the Orne, and even fourteen in the famously remote and not-especially-commercial Breton department of the Finistère. In Saint Germain en Laye (Seine- et- Oise), as in Toul, revolutionary zeal combined with charitable inclinations to motivate individuals: a constitutional clergyman who was also president of the local Jacobin Club worked with four businessmen of “good repute” to issue small change backed by assignats donated by private individuals.

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Figure 10. Number of known, distinct issuers of billets de confiance (confidence notes) by department, 1790–1792.

They invited “ladies as well as gentlemen” to participate and assured them that any sums remaining at the end of the process would be distributed by the curé as poor relief.41 In Reims, as well, the impetus came from an enthusiastically prorevolutionary clergyman, who proposed as early as October 1790 that a “society of capitalists” might join together to address the shortage of small change.42 When Reims eventually had its own billets patriotiques in June 1791, the municipal officers who signed them were nearly all also prominent merchants.43 If a great many of the Caisses were private-public hybrids such as these, some of the largest and earliest issuers were truly private ventures. In Lyon, where the silk-weaving and hat-making industries employed thousands, manufacturers and merchants formed two private Caisses that issued billets only to shareholders. The languages of philanthropy

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and patriotism dominated here, as well—the caisses had been founded “to maintain the prosperity of French industry” and to save workers from “inactivity and indigence”—but the bills chiefly served the more immediate goal of protecting profits that manufacturers would otherwise have lost in exchanging assignats for coins.44 In Chateauneuf-d’Isère (Drôme)—a village of 300, with 1,300 more people in the surrounding hamlets—the mayor, Léorier, “in his capacity as a private citizen” issued 1,500 livres in billets so people could make correct change in paying their taxes (this at a time when all administrators, from the mayor up, felt growing pressure to get taxes collected). The most powerful extended family in town, two members of which belonged to the municipal council, immediately challenged the bills and denounced the mayor for fraud, deceit, and general mismanagement (much as he had earlier charged them with tax evasion). In the ensuing scandal, Léorier said the town had never sent inspectors to verify his books, while town officials asserted he had refused to show them; Léorier said the numbers on his bills had been altered, and his attackers charged him with printing far more notes than he had announced. Suspended by the district from his mayoral functions in August 1792, he was killed in a riot in October.45 At play in all these examples was the tension between the billets’ status as “privately” created objects and their intended purpose as more or less publicly circulating currencies. Backed, in theory at least, with largedenomination assignats kept safely locked in a town’s or company’s coffers, a given billet de confiance was potentially good for all purchases but not necessarily so for any. In Lille, the municipality posted notices reminding residents that no one was obliged to accept them. In Chateaubriant (Loire Atlantique), town authorities issued billets and then specifically stated that since “trust is born of liberty and constraint is the work of despotism,” no one was required to accept them (though all were invited to do so).46 Retailers could refuse them, but once they accepted one from a particular issuing body it made sense to accept more (in order to amass five livres in billets, which could then be converted back into an assignat). Café keepers and theater box offices handed out their own when they had to give change, thereby creating “loyalty schemes” that did not require face-to-face familiarity. With so many issuers, individuals quickly accumulated a variety of notes. Reporting the theft of his wallet in Paris’s Palais Royal garden in December 1791, Jean-Joseph Bardin noted it had contained: two assignats of five livres each; one five-livre

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note from the Paris Caisse Patriotique, and one from there for fifty sous; two issued by the Gravilliers section for twenty sous each; an écu of three livres; another coin of thirty sous; and three receipts from the Mont de Piété (the municipal pawn shop).47 By early 1793, an individual in Rennes had accumulated twenty-five livres and eight sous in billets from twentyfour distinct issuers spread across eight departments. Such cases were not especially unusual.48 Literally underwritten, in many cases, by leading figures in a town or district—the municipal officials of Le Havre complained that long nights signing bills by candlelight had ruined their eyesight and destroyed their health—the billets fall into a largely unfamiliar category known in French as “monnaie à cours libre.”49 As freely circulating or voluntary money, they were a currency that no one was obliged to accept or forced to reject. Because they were “free,” the Constituent Assembly refused to oversee the billets’ use or issue: individuals under the new regime, as under the old, could write and accept whatever papers they wanted. 50 In legal terms, the circulation of the billets was left to individuals to negotiate; the law said nothing on the subject and all were equally free to reach their own decisions about the bills. In social terms, however, the exchange relationship between an employer and his wage-earning employees, like that between buyers and sellers, remained unequal. Peasant proprietors—people who had eggs, grain, or onions to sell—were ideally positioned vis-à-vis this money of trust. If they felt so inclined, they could accept billets in payment; if they doubted them, they could take their apples or their barley and go home. Wage workers in cities faced a very different situation. They might be highly skilled individuals or they might be manual laborers, but in both cases they sold their labor, not a product. If they did not take the payment they were offered, they had no money and nothing to sell; if they had no income, they had no way to acquire fruits, vegetables, or even bread. A painter in the pottery factories of Nevers, for instance, could either accept the billet she was offered or go unpaid. Bill in hand, she had then to find a baker willing to accept it. 51 By the letter of the law, the billets people “voluntarily” used and the assignats “serving as money” were clearly different. In social and cultural terms, however, the distinction could easily be lost. Individuals, like one municipal official in Toul, could refer to locally issued papers as “assignats de confiance”; in other contexts, people found it most meaningful to distinguish between “communal” billets and “national” ones. 52

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The proliferation of “patriotes” (as the notes were called in some areas) suggests people felt some general level of comfort with this monetary voluntarism. Yet this voluntarism differed in important ways from the discourse of political will many historians have seen as central to the French Revolution. For whereas the general will was in nearly all cases an abstraction—a sentiment posited to exist but enormously difficult to locate—the billets made sense only so long as they were tangible and concrete. In theory, at least, they fulfi lled the oft-repeated demand that any circulating paper should be backed by a specific property: each issuer of bills, be he a merchant or the representative of a municipality, supposedly had his own stash of large-denomination assignats kept safely under lock and key. For all that some were inscribed with clearly political slogans—“Liberty, Equality, Never Two Chambers” read those issued by the department of the Charente—the bills were not issued against abstractions such as the nation’s credit or intangibles like the empire’s prestige. Rather, they presented themselves as firmly anchored in local contexts and familiar networks. Some, such as those produced by the Bureau Patriotique de Lodève (Hérault), specified the hours during which the issuing office was open (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, from 10:00 to 2:00); others, like those from the Caisse Patriotique de Niort (Deux Sèvres), printed the names of the thirty- one local dignitaries who backed the venture. Those from Saint Pons de Thomières (Hérault) told the whole administrative story of their existence—“Issued by the municipality with the guarantee of the General Council of the Commune and authorized by the Directory of the Department, on the recommendation of the Directory of the District”—but left the nation completely unmentioned. The billets materialized existing networks of trust and obligation; in Lyon and other manufacturing centers, they gave material form to existing differentials of power and wealth, as well. In neither their rhetoric nor their legal form would they have done much to encourage a feeling of national community. 53 Incomplete and dispersed throughout municipal and departmental archives, the material relating to these notes offers rare insight into what people do when left to invent their own means of exchange. Many of the billets understandably resembled the bills of exchange and other financial tools with which many French men and women had long been familiar. Though they were mass produced, often at very low cost, many of the notes were nonetheless printed in a font that imitated handwriting.

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Figure 11. The names ringing this billet patriotique from Niort (Deux Sèvres) include those of most of the town’s notables, including its mayors in 1790, 1791, 1792, and 1793 (Panvillier, Morisset, Guillemeau, Cruvelier) as well as the man who held that position from 1812 through 1815 (Noel Bernard- Chambiniere). Panvillier was later elected to the Legislative Assembly and to the Convention; under Napoleon, he served as president of the Cour des Comptes. At the time this bill was issued, he and Bernard Chambiniere were officers in the city’s Jacobin Club.

They varied in color, shape, and size—blue squares, white rectangles, green squares—but the billets in other ways were remarkably uniform. All indicated the issuing agency’s name, the bill’s value, and something, usually a serial number combined with a signature, that distinguished this par ticu lar note from any other (and hence asserted its validity). Some bore legends explaining their use (“in exchange for assignats”); a few were decorated with pikes, liberty bonnets, or other revolutionary emblems; others made use of municipal symbols (such as the crocodile chained to a tree on the bills issued in Nîmes). If a few were inscribed with semimagical or freemasonic looking characters in a non-Roman

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alphabet—some are bordered with Greek lettering, others carry Hebrew inscriptions, and one issuer, at least, made use of characters from a set of Arabic type—most were representationally quite simple. Many of those with slogans repeated already familiar ones, such as the “Nation, Law, and King” motto found on the buttons of National Guard uniforms and on billets issued in at least fourteen departments. 54 Others worked in the register of civic self-help, addressing the bearer in the first-person-plural imperative: “Let’s pay taxes!” reads one from a small community in the Southeast; “Let’s provide for our needs,” says the elaborate note, bearing five distinct signatures, issued by one Paris section. 55 No matter how much they varied and regardless of whether they were issued by textile magnates in Nîmes, city fathers in Angers, or the Jacobin Club of Guingamp, nearly every billet de confiance was signed by hand. In Nantes, finding enough men to sign the notes was clearly a pressing problem, and the administrators of the local Caisse eventually printed a form letter asking men to come append their signatures as soon as possible—they did not, however, take the more direct mea sure of simply printing the bills with names on them. 56 Some bills, such as those of the Caisse Patriotique d’Eymet (Dordogne), presented their vital information in a grid format, including a column labeled “signatures”; others, like the Caisse Patriotique de Bordeaux, printed lines where signatures were to be inserted. Many bills were so amply endorsed that the fourth to add his name must have felt cramped, if not outright superfluous; in Toul, after issuing their fi rst 580-livres worth of billets (each of which carried three signatures plus a “counter signature”), the organizers of the Caisse Patriotique revised their statutes to decrease the number of signatures on each note and increase the number of authorized signers. In any given case, the signature might be that of a former priest, now the town’s mayor (Issoudun, Indre), or it might be that of a cloth merchant (Alençon, Orne), but it was unquestionably a signature. Each and every bill pointed toward an individual or a number of them. As both a journalist in Bordeaux and the former marquis de Montesquiou approvingly noted, all were “vested with signatures known in the locality.”57 As did the first 400 million livres worth of assignats, the various billets de confiance invited people to treat them as unique objects. Since accepting one was at least notionally a voluntary activity, people were well within their legal rights if they preferred a parchment bill issued by the

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a Figures 12a and 12b. The printer who produced these billets de confiance in L’Aigle (Orne) had sets of Hebrew and Arabic characters—that he arranged them randomly around the bills’ borders suggests they were meant as anticounterfeiting devices, though perhaps they were also imagined to give the bills a certain mystical authority (Figure 12a). In contrast, the Toulouse printer of the billet shown in Figure 12b knew enough Hebrew to attempt writing “Elohim” (God in Hebrew)— but he misspelled it.

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b

Paris “Compagnie de Commission” to the orange or yellow paper rectangles produced by the Bibliothèque section. In fact, when district officials in Dieppe begged departmental authorities for guidance on which billets to accept and which to refuse they were told that “as the name confiance or patriotique suggests, these bills must circulate voluntarily . . . it is up to you alone to decide what you can and must do with them.”58 Much evidence suggests that even with this limited official guidance, people’s initial experiences with paper did not leave them skeptical of it. That the Paris Maison de Secours could issue 10,213,500 livres in paper, or that 47,000 was issued in the town of Anduze (Gard, with a population of roughly 5,000) suggests that people had little aversion to paper per se. 59 However, it also seems clear that their willingness to participate in paper networks relied more or less explicitly on a perception of individual responsibility and personal trust. Paper was man-made. Both literally and

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metaphorically, it bore the traces of the hands through which it had passed. Yet as the bills rippled outwards in concentric circles, those very features that made the billets immediately credible in their place of origin— the signatures of local notables and the known deposits of assignats held under lock and key—threatened to set limits on how far they could circulate. When war erupted and volunteers mobilized in spring and summer of 1792, new soldiers traveled far from their homes and often had nothing but local billets in their pockets. In Corbeil (Seine-et- Oise), “which can be considered a suburb of Paris” (or so municipal officials argued), fighting erupted between the town’s National Guard and soldiers from the battalion of the Lot (in southwestern France) when the latter threatened merchants who refused their billets. In the neighboring department of the Seine-et-Marne, administrators rightly predicted “interminable difficulties” when faced by volunteers brandishing billets from fifty-eight different departments, including over a thousand livres’ worth from the distant Corrèze and seven hundred livres from Brittany.60 Historians tend to think of the French Revolution as a key episode in the creation of a strong central state—in this, Tocqueville argued long ago, it may have continued the work begun under Louis XIV. The billets remind us however of the considerable administrative decentralization that occurred in the first three years of the Revolution. Political elites consciously planned some of it: the laws of December 14 and 22, 1789, for example, were reaffirmed in the Constitution of 1791 and gave enormous power to multiple levels (commune, district, department) of local government. After the eruption of civil war in the winter of 1793, reversing this intended decentralization required the draconian law of 14 frimaire Year Two (Dec. 4, 1793), which replaced locally elected procureurs with centrally appointed “national agents” and has rightly been called the founding of “revolutionary dictatorship.”61 Many other, less obviously relevant choices—such as the constituants’ commitment to an especially vigorous form of free trade—contributed to the decentralization of authority as well. For over two years, individuals found certain billets to be at least as legitimate and useful as the papers issued by the state in the name of the nation. French men and women could encounter new billets and new denominations of assignats in a single transaction, and while the two notionally had a different legal status, this was not how many perceived them. Rather, the locally issued papers could easily be

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understood as part of the unevenly democratizing trend that was, in the eyes of many, coterminous with the Revolution itself. Validated by local notables, municipalities, and districts, the patriotic billets would not be easy for “the nation” to invalidate.

Making Believe On an overcast evening in late November 1791, two men in search of silverware entered a Paris goldsmith’s shop.62 Like most other businesses on that stretch of the rue Saint Honoré, the Cross of Gold was hardly a humble establishment and transactions there often ran into the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of livres.63 Having settled on a price for six place settings and a serving spoon, the men tried to pay with a 2,000-livre assignat. But the men had gone into the wrong shop: rather than happily accepting the note she was offered—and she might have done so, for all the luxury trades suffered badly in the first years of the Revolution—Madame Odiot, the goldsmith’s wife, looked at the assignat and pronounced it counterfeit. Her husband, a prominent figure in one of the city’s most prestigious trades and a Jacobin, then insisted on taking the men and their bill to the neighborhood police commissioner.64 Over the next two days, half a dozen people gathered to tell local officials of their own experience with that particular piece of paper: where they were when they first saw it, what they thought of it, what they did with it. The two men from the goldsmith’s shop, Jean François Batonnier and Jacques Collot, initially expressed shock that anyone could accuse them of disseminating counterfeit money—they were, they claimed, just trying to do an errand for Batonnier’s father. A night’s detention and further accusations provoked a more ambiguous story, however. Batonnier, self-described as a watch dealer (négociant en horlogerie), never mentioned his family again. Instead, he explained he had met Collot at the Mont de Piété, and the latter had said he needed to get change for a large assignat—to which he, Batonnier, had replied the easiest way to get change would be to buy something. Collot, claimed Batonnier, had then admitted having “some doubts” about the bill, but they had agreed using it to make a purchase would be one way to set those doubts to rest. Either the bill would be accepted (and Collot would get his change) or it would be refused—in which case, Batonnier proposed, Collot should return it to whoever gave it to him. With this plan agreed on, the two men

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had gone from one goldsmith to another, trying to buy something with the assignat. The first had said he had no change; the second, that she did not have the key to the drawer in which the change was kept. Odiot’s had been the third shop they entered and the first place where they were accused of counterfeit. Collot, in turn, explained the assignat was not really his, either. Rather, someone who owed him 300 livres had handed him the note— though it was worth more than six times that amount—saying if he could break it, he could keep the 300. As the second day of questioning wore on, Collot expanded his story, further extending the web of blame and responsibility to include his debtor, Poinsot, who in turn claimed to have received the assignat from a money changer at the Palais Royal, in exchange for sixty-six gold coins. Since those coins had had a total face value of slightly under 1,600 livres, Poinsot (a wine merchant) had made a good numerical profit by trading them for a 2,000-livre bill—enough, indeed, to pay off his long-standing debt to Collot. But Poinsot had also expressed something stronger than “doubt” in showing his creditor the note: “Look at it, examine it!” he had reportedly said. “I would happily give twenty-five louis [600 livres] to anyone who would bring me that money changer.” Collot had attempted to do so but failed; instead, he showed the assignat to another business acquaintance of his, Bazire, whom he met in the Palais Royal. Despite being a merchant himself, Bazire had first claimed total ignorance of paper money. Deep in conversation, the two men then entered a café and scrutinized the assignat: “It was evening,” however, “and we only had candlelight by which to examine it.” Then the two men had gone to the Mont de Piété where they met Batonnier. Episodes such as this one occurred regularly across France in the early years of the Revolution, as men and women struggled with protecting themselves from fraud while continuing to make a living.65 Opting out of the new monetary regime completely was a choice few could make but accepting all papers was also risky: the category of “counterfeiters” subject to the death penalty included those who passed fake bills, as well as those who made them.66 Money, in this context, could hardly be taken for granted. Instead, a collective decision-making process, in which individuals carefully picked up cues from their neighbors, established each note’s validity. In this case, for instance, the goldsmith’s wife from the second shop came of her own accord to find the police commissioners when she heard there was an ongoing inquiry concerning false assignats.

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Asked if she knew Batonnier and Collot, she said she “recognized them perfectly” as the two strangers who had tried to buy a watch from her. Asked if she recognized “the assignat in question,” she responded with equal certainty: it was undoubtedly the note they had offered her last night. She had, she added, “suspected it was false,” but she had not wanted to make a formal accusation on the basis of her own suspicions alone. In the early 1790s, jewelers, goldsmiths, and the like—people long accustomed to handling small objects and assessing their value—were hardly the only ones to scrutinize assignats and other papers. When they finished with Collot and Batonnier, the police commissioners in this Paris section interrogated a hairdresser, himself accused of passing a false bill to a shoemaker; two prostitutes named “Victoire” (the second of whom was the hairdresser’s client and who admitted paying him, but denied having given him “that assignat on the desk”); and a money changer, whose offense was unrelated to the first two, but also involved a counterfeit note.67 Concern about possible fraud was not specific to the luxury and leisure trades: several months earlier, it had been two master butchers, a butcher’s apprentice, and a domestic servant who sat at a café table carefully examining something that might, or might not, have been state-issued money.68 Of most such conversations, historians have no trace, but it is easy to imagine many centered on questions like those that faced Collot and Bazire or the butchers: Where had this piece of paper come from? Was it really of value? Was it somehow a fake? And how would anybody know for sure? People hence looked hard at the papers they were offered, be it in taverns, shops, or tax-receivers’ offices. Concerned citizens even reported suspected counterfeits in other people’s possession: when a cashier in Paris rejected an assignat on the grounds that the letter n was printed backward, he was given another in its place, but he still relayed his suspicions about the first bill to the local police, “believing knowledge of this fact could be useful to the public good.”69 Notes might be transferred in the street or at a weekly market, but men and women remained adamant they had no difficulty recognizing individual assignats, even weeks or months after they had passed through their hands. Municipal authorities in Nancy found it believable when a woman they interrogated could identify one that had last been hers a month ago; in 1793, with more than 800 million pieces of state-issued paper money in circulation, police commissioners in Paris did not challenge a blacksmith’s wife who

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Figure 13. Two assignats for 300 livres— one was legitimate, the other counterfeit. Can you tell which is which?

claimed to know she had received a specific assignat from a particular horse dealer. (He, in turn, also knew how it had come into his possession.70) Today we might be more skeptical about such assertions, but they seem to have raised few eyebrows in the 1790s. People, it would appear, expected both themselves and others to be able to recognize individual pieces of paper.

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In other words, though it had been decreed the assignats would “circulate like money”—universally, anonymously, interchangeably—in practice, they did not. Legal decrees did not become customary legitimacy overnight. The Flemish farmer and deputy, Pierre-François Lepoutre, reassured his wife that she could and should use the assignats he sent her “as cash.” More than a little anxious—she had, after all, been left for more than a year to manage the farm and raise five children on her own— his wife replied their lease clearly stated the rent was to be paid “in hard currency [espèces sonnantes] and not in bills or any other effects.” He advised her that the assignats could not be refused, “at least not on French territory”; three days later, she wrote to say the landlord definitely would not take them and had been “rather angry” about the whole business.71 The arguments that shaped the assignats’ status within public political discourse did not answer the questions people asked of them on a daily basis. When an individual such as Angélique Lepoutre assessed the new paper’s value, she gave but fleeting thought to how venal officeholders would be reimbursed or how the biens nationaux would be sold. Describing the Church as “a tree that does not bear fruit,” Madame Lepoutre actually supported the sale of its former properties and had a testy exchange with her clergyman brother-in-law on the subject—but this attitude did not extend automatically to enthusiasm for the assignats. Rather, for her, as for millions of others, the assignats’ credibility depended chiefly on how other people reacted to them. If her landlord had taken the bills willingly—and some landlords and merchants did do so— then she might well have thought them a great success. But, he did not. In September 1790, her husband advised that she read the many pamphlets printed on the subject and form her own opinion; exasperated, she replied, “All I know is that with all this paper we are nonetheless always down to our last écu!”72 Making the assignats required considerable manual labor and extensive technical expertise, but making them “circulate as money” would take even more effort. In the minds of many, success at the latter task depended closely on the former: numerous petitioners to the National Assembly insisted that physical changes to the assignats would greatly enhance their credibility. A lawyer in Besançon recommended attaching an additional piece of paper to each note with a distinctively colored thread; the Jacobin Club of Valenciennes advocated punching an eyelet in the bills’ ends so they could be threaded together on silk ribbon;

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another writer proposed they be knit from silk thread (and included a knitted sample); yet another suggested that simply making purple assignats would be a great step toward perfecting them.73 All these writers implied that trust might be as much an attribute of objects as it was a conviction on the part of those who handled them. These proposals, firm in tone yet somewhat fanciful in reasoning, remind us that the crisis of sovereignty produced by the shattering of absolutism had significant economic consequences as well. The largely unexpected breakdown of state authority brought new confl icts into existence and legitimized the expression of old ones. Uncertain how to restore their faith that tomorrow would be like yesterday or to ensure that the people they encountered would at least seem to share most of their basic assumptions (about the role of the Catholic Church as a property holder, for instance), petitioners such as these desperately tried to externalize belief. They yearned for objects that would, in a sense, do the believing for them.74 In the words of one writer, “It seems that in order to renew our faith in the assignats, we must give them a visible form that testifies to their truth and legality.”75 In this attitude, ordinary French men and women resembled the many high-profile revolutionaries who saw symbols as a potent means of forging cultural and political cohesion. Robespierre, for instance, hailed the tricolor cockade as a “visible sign [of liberty] that speaks at the same time to eye and heart.” Yet while the latter valued uniform symbols and common beliefs—in the same speech, Robespierre insisted that since the French already had “this one sign,” no others were needed—most petitioners seem to have instinctively gravitated toward schemes that would have made each bill even more recognizably distinct. If, in the abstract, social unity required uniformity, in the case of the assignats it was actually differentiation that many found far more compelling. Writing “if duplicates are found, one of them must be a fake,” the artillery captain Dubois-Descours made publishing a list of bills with identical serial numbers into the cornerstone of his “Means for Making People Grant Greater Trust to the Assignats.”76 In his scheme and many others, sameness, rather than difference, emerged as suspect.

The French Revolution did not invent the problem of counterfeit. Rather, the ominous words printed on all assignats issued after December

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1791—“The law punishes counterfeiters with death. The nation rewards those who denounce them”—only made long-established practice explicit. Ordonnances concerning “false money” were nearly as old as the French state itself: regulations dating from 819 (in the reign of Louis the First) confirmed the Roman law definition of counterfeit as a crime of lese majesty and sentenced those convicted of it to being boiled alive in oil. Papal bulls issued in the fourteenth century excommunicated anyone caught counterfeiting French coins, thereby implying that his or her excruciatingly painful death would be only the first in an eternity of punishments. Under Louis XV, edicts of 1718 and 1726 reiterated that manufacturing or passing counterfeit coins was a capital crime and held local tax officials financially responsible for any false or underweight coins they sent to the King’s Trea sury, however unwittingly. The same texts established a handsome reward for anyone who provided information leading to a counterfeiter’s arrest. So serious an offence was it, kings swore an oath never to pardon anyone convicted of counterfeiting.77 In the early years of the Revolution, the assignats’ most zealous opponents nonetheless evoked the spectre of counterfeiting as if it were a fresh and novel danger, newly created by the bills themselves. Nicolas Bergasse, a charismatic deputy from Lyon, so vehemently opposed the confiscation of Church lands and the issuing of assignats that he boycotted the National Assembly after its first key vote on the matter. In the aftermath of the April 1790 decree on the money-assignats, Bergasse mounted an energetic campaign against them, cleverly interweaving claims about the illegitimacy of their creation with assertions about their susceptibility to counterfeiting. Since no one truly had the right to make assignats, Bergasse implied, everyone would soon begin do so: “To how many abuses and how much cheating will this despotic act lead? If the legislators themselves give the example . . . of violating the most sacred property, why should the greedy man or one reduced to misery not do the same?”78 Bergasse’s was an astute and especially active intervention in the forming of public opinion. He had copies of his pamphlet, Protestation contre les assignats-monnoie, sent to Chambers of Commerce all across France; it was commented upon in La Rochelle and in Le Havre; in Paris, both Jacques Necker and a number of aristocrats remarked upon it.79 Among his fellow deputies, Bergasse’s months of absence coupled with the timing of his pamphlet’s publication (it appeared after the vote as a

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“protest” rather than before it as part of the debate) especially rankled; he was denounced on the floor of the Assembly as a traitor and in the pages of the Journal de Paris as a deserter. 80 Others responded equally fast: within the week, Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris devoted fifteen pages to refuting Bergasse’s arguments and counseled readers to ignore his earlier reputation as an enlightened reformer.81 When Cérutti’s Idées simples et précises sur le papier-monnoie, which replied to the charges in a point-by-point format, appeared six weeks later, more than one reader found solace. Nicolas Ruault, once Voltaire’s editor, cited it in a letter to his brother, calling it a “comforting defense against Bergasse and his consorts” and asserting it could “calm” even the most “timid” soul; the Bordeaux-based merchant George- Christophe Bapst ordered two copies of the brochure from his Paris contacts. Still other readers encountered some version of Cérutti’s defense of the assignats in the weekly Feuille villageoise, which he founded.82 Yet while speakers and writers eventually decided they could dismiss many of Bergasse’s most sweeping claims—that the assignats were identical to the bills issued by John Law seventy years earlier, that nothing backed them, that the biens nationaux were unlikely to find buyers—they stumbled when it came to counterfeiting. For the assignats’ defenders had responded to nearly all points by reminding readers of Bergasse’s involvement with the discredited pseudoscience of mesmerism and then contrasting his obviously overheated imagination with the substantive reality of the biens nationaux themselves. While this sense-based epistemology—most evident in the repeated reference to the assignats as backed by “solid property that everyone can see in front of their eyes”83 — effectively moved the terms of debate from historical precedent to present reality and from emotional reactions to empirical reasoning, this same transposition could do little to assuage concerns about fakes, frauds, and trickery.84 The basic raw materials of assignat production (paper and ink) were also, after all, regularly visible to the naked eye. 85 When it came to counterfeiting, the burden of material proof fell squarely to the assignats’ supporters. From both sides of the political spectrum, voices challenged the National Assembly’s legitimacy as a maker of money. Attacked by Bergasse in the name of King and Church, the Assembly was also repeatedly vilified by the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in the name of the people. While Marat had no quarrel with the nationalization and sale of Church

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property, he charged Mirabeau and other “scoundrels” in the Assembly with printing money for their own pockets and with “perpetuating all the Old Regime’s abuses.” He suspected the assignat commissioners of being corrupt and condemned their reports as works of pure fantasy. “How are we to know how many assignats there really are?” he asked the readers of his L’Ami du peuple. “They have the mold [moule], they can make as many as they want . . . all they need is the signature of one clerk, who is already in their pay.”86 Like his rage against the scientific establishment in the 1780s—which had led him, like Bergasse, to sympathize with Mesmer—Marat’s hostility to the Assembly was framed in terms of insiders and outsiders, of conspirators and victims. Having once called for “popu lar sovereignty in scientific matters,” Marat extended a version of this demand to the circulation of assignats, insisting that each bill should be signed by “twenty different hands, each very distinct.”87 So attacked, deputies and others acknowledged that protecting the assignats from counterfeiters was a time-consuming, but necessary, task. As Claude-Ambroise Regnier, a noted lawyer and member of the Assembly’s Judicial Committee, argued, “The counterfeiter of assignats is more dangerous than the maker of false coins. The latter does not prevent gold and silver from circulating, but the former would completely destroy trust in the assignats.” Saint Aubin’s two hundred engravings were one response to this perceived threat; the planned establishment of “verification offices” in all major cities was another; the announced impending arrival of an American technique for making imitation-proof paper, a third.88 Whether inspired by Marat or responding themselves to Bergasse, many individuals wrote to the Assembly’s committees to assert that fears of counterfeiting and postal fraud could be allayed completely, if only assignats were more widely signed. Many petitioners, for instance, wanted the bills to be signed each time they changed hands, suggesting that “these endorsements will create certainty and will make them circulate without fear or hesitation.” (After making this basic claim, authors then went into considerable detail explaining what procedures should be followed once the back of a note was filled with signatures.89) Several writers suggested a register be kept, noting the serial number of every assignat issued and the name of the individual to whom it had been given. Proposing that copies of these registers be printed and made generally available on a monthly basis, these authors implicitly imagined

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a national paper would be most credible if its every movement were publicly known and permanently recorded. Others took such schemes even further, suggesting a daily publication listing assignat transfers or that every holder of assignats should declare on a yearly or monthly basis which ones were in his or her possession.90 All relied on some sort of additional inscription—a signature on the bill’s reverse side, a name and a serial number in a register—as the chief tool for guaranteeing the assignats’ veracity. A later author, writing shortly after the outbreak of war in spring 1792, argued for supplementing those supplements with national identity cards to be shown at the time of payment, thereby hoping to ensure both the bill and the person holding it were genuine.91 Such schemes were so generally intuitive that one ingenious counterfeiting ring even took to stamping the back of its fake notes with the words “I, Deperey, Head of the Assignat Verifying Office, certify this one as valid”—provoking the verification officer to publish announcements and circulate notices, reminding everyone that he did nothing of the kind.92 Despite the widespread public support for endorsement and related proposals, only counterfeits were supposed to be stamped. Outlining what became the National Assembly’s position on such questions, two reports by Jean André Périsse Duluc stressed that additional signatures or stamps could not be allowed because they would destroy the “formal unity and intrinsic parity” on which the assignats’ circulation depended.93 While anticounterfeiting schemes based on signatures and registers might temporarily seem to make any individual bill more secure, Périsse Duluc concluded the overall effect of such mea sures would be to make the assignats, as a whole, less credible. “If they are not perfectly identical with each other,” he asserted, “the assignats will have neither the nature nor the currency [cours] nor the effect of money.”94 While many petitioners argued for securing the assignats by having them function more or less like eighteenth-century commercial paper, Périsse Duluc contended that for the assignats to “serve as money” they had to behave like coins. (Two assignats of the same face value, he said, should be as comparable as “one écu with another écu.”) Like other prominent Jacobins, Périsse Duluc insisted the assignats had to circulate on the “sacred basis” of their creation, “without the addition of any imprint, signature, change of terms, or stamp.” (Adding that the bills must have “no remède [allowance for variation] and no alloy,” he defined

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them as more pure than the coinage actually in circulation.) Implying interchangeability to be fundamentally a physical property of coins, Périsse Duluc established visible uniformity as the most certain means of guaranteeing the assignats’ credibility. Coins were not actually identical with each other—a knowledgeable individual could easily distinguish an écu minted in Paris from one made in Lille and almost anyone could see that coins were produced in different years—but Périsse Duluc could not allow this material fact to impinge on how he imagined physical money. For if he had acknowledged the differences between coins, he would have been left to admit that their circulation owed as much to social habit as it did to their physical form. And while he and his colleagues could immediately pass laws on how the assignats were to be made, they could not legislate custom and tradition into existence. Predicating physical sameness of objects that were, in fact, distinct, lawmakers defined mass manufacture as a conceptual goal long before it emerged as industrial reality. To idealize the assignats’ uniformity— what he called the “homogeneity devolved onto them by their origin”— Périsse Duluc overlooked a host of awkward realities. Even setting aside the barely perceptible variations in Saint Aubin’s engravings, assignats of a single denomination were hardly identical. They varied in size: the paper had to be damp when printed, and its shrinkage, in drying, was uneven. They sometimes differed in text: when, by printer’s error, a word was omitted from one run of 300-livre notes, the Assembly recorded the misprint and decreed those bills to be legal tender nonetheless. Some entered circulation without having been embossed.95 Inevitably, some were torn, others sullied or creased. As a publisher from a family of publishers and bookdealers, Périsse Duluc would have been as familiar as anyone with these and other common irregularities. Ignoring them all, however, he elevated material uniformity into what his colleague Antoine Lavoisier would later call the “palladium” (patron saint) of the assignats.96 Often described in technical or aesthetic language, material identity was fundamentally a political ideal. The assignats may have been “homogeneous in their origin” but as long as the National Assembly’s authority was questioned, their common source could not guarantee them a single fate. Instead, from the LePoutres’ landlord to Jean-Paul Marat, voices across the ideological spectrum overtly challenged the Assembly and the currency it issued. Petitioners who begged for signatures,

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endorsements, and published registers also contested the Assembly’s legitimacy (albeit inadvertently). For as Périsse Duluc and others recognized, if each assignat made materially visible the specific networks within which it circulated, then supposedly national notes would effectively become personal papers. In consequence, the value of a particular assignat would depend as much on the hands through which it had passed as on the authority by which it had been issued. “What will happen,” Périsse Duluc’s report asked, “to those little favored by fortune, who are obliged to receive assignats in payment for their work? If they want to buy something or pay someone, how can they get an assignat accepted . . . given the little weight attached to their own signatures?”97 Since people were different in practice, their money in theory could not be.

4 Liberty of Money What difference is there between bread and money? You cannot deny that they are both goods of prime necessity. If you cannot live without bread, you also cannot have bread without money— even if the bread sells for only half a sous per pound. Réflexions sur le danger du commerce de l’argent, présentées par M. Blin, citoyen de la section de Sainte Geneviève . . . et acceptée à l’unanimité (1791)

H

ISTORY CA NNOT BE COUNTER FEITED :

so, at least, claimed one anonymous author in autumn 1790. Using the term “historical money” for currency depicting past events, the writer maintained its introduction would constitute a great improvement over the existing coinage. If instead of showing the king’s bust on one side and three fleurs- de-lys on the other, coins were to portray Louis XVI swearing to uphold the constitution or visiting Paris after the fall of the Bastille, their authenticity—he asserted—would be easy to verify. Since the coins would be “an exact account of facts” and since history only happens once, “any alteration of the truth” could be quickly identified.1 By accurately depicting the “glorious events” of the nation’s history, historical money would be both true to the past and valid in the present. The writer (almost certainly one of Mirabeau’s speechwriters, if not the former count himself ) knew how to craft a good and politically engaging story.2 While the logic of his main claim can easily be refuted— would the “truth” of the Festival of Federation really be transformed into an immediately apparent “satire” if an inept counterfeiter switched Talleyrand’s and Lafayette’s positions?—it nonetheless represented a significant democratizing impulse in thinking about money. Saint Aubin’s

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two hundred portraits of Louis XVI, like the “secret points” on Old Regime coins, had made the policing of money’s authenticity a matter for specialist expertise. For this writer, in contrast, the entire population could be entrusted with that task, if only the imprints on the coins were changed. 3 Instructive and secure, historical money would ensure that citizens both knew their own history and knew when it had been tampered with. Verifiers, inspectors, and even assayers could all be replaced by fidelity to an origin that, while it no longer existed and may never have happened, nonetheless offered the firmest source of legitimacy. Thanks to a new, shared, and easily recognized past, the French could consign numismatic codes to the ash heap of the Old Regime. Public sameness would replace secret difference. In positing shared history as that which could make money inimitable, hence rare and hence valuable, the author implicitly described a national currency. The version of the past shown on these coins would become common “French” knowledge: it would link Breton to Gascon, even as it separated both from Spaniards and Poles. Extending across space, historical money would also be meaningful through time as it served to educate future generations. Mirabeau, for instance, elsewhere fantasized that children’s curiosity about the scenes shown on coins would give rise to new pedagogies and attitudes. After his father explained its imagery to him, “a boy will no longer admire a gold, silver, or copper coin for its value or shininess, but for the talent and intelligence of its artist; soon, the subject of the engraving will fill his entire imagination. And that [will be] how a child learns from an early age to esteem the arts that support virtue and [to love] virtue that serves the arts so well.”4 Historians have long recognized that many protagonists in the French Revolution aspired to create forms of civic education that would transcend “book learning” and be successful in the absence of anything like a public school system: planned monuments, prohibited insignia, and actually celebrated festivals all worked to this end. 5 The proposal to “nationalize” France’s money was in this same vein. After all, for administrative and political purposes, France was no longer divided into three estates nor made up of thirty-five heterogeneous provinces: bishop or beekeeper, Norman or Basque—all such distinctions were now lost in the eyes of the law. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, written and widely publicized in August 1789, had proclaimed sovereignty to reside essentially in the nation. Yet coins minted in the sixteen

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months since then still carried the Latin abbreviation, “Lud. XVI D. G. Fr. et Nav. Rex” (“Louis XVI, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre”). “We have produced a great revolution,” scolded Mirabeau, “and we have not known how to make a national money!”6 The “spirit of France,” he recommended, should take the pen from History’s hand and show her a coin press; henceforth, “our history” should be depicted in a language—that of pictures— even small children could read. Moreover, since “our money is specially meant for our fellow citizens,” its inscriptions should be in French rather than Latin: “if we want to educate them by means of a historical money . . . we should use the language they can and must understand.”7 Yet national money—like national language—was largely a foreign idea in eighteenth-century Europe.8 Much as German courtiers spoke French and the French mass was performed in Latin, gold and silver coins had an international currency regardless of the specific forms they took. Two types of rupees; écus from Malta, Hanover, Lubeck, and Sweden; Tunisian piastres (and the more familiar Mexican ones); Russian rubles and Austrian florins: French money changers converted these coins and hundreds of others for livres tournois on the basis of weight and metal content alone.9 Law may have prohibited the French king’s subjects from using foreign coins in domestic transactions, but it also allowed—and at times actively encouraged—the import of such objects.10 Moreover, while some early-modern moneys were effectively transnational, many others were regional or subnational. Much as individuals in some parts of the French kingdom spoke Alsatian, Flemish, or a dialect barely intelligible to Parisian ears, so they trafficked in kreuzers or patars.11 In a society with comparatively little social or geographical mobility, class and status could be as important as place in determining the money one used: day laborers and landless peasants might easily live their entire lives without ever seeing a gold coin. All along the kingdom’s borders, mints produced both golden louis for the import- export market and small change for their own hinterlands.12 The situation in the chronically cash-poor overseas colonies was perhaps even more complicated. In calling for a “national money,” Mirabeau and his collaborators were imagining a currency space far more homogeneous and bounded than the one in which they lived. Most of their recommendations for creating it—shared images, common inscriptions, a single language—

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operated on the level of cultural practices. While Mirabeau in his proposal recognized that great disparities of wealth existed within the nation, he never suggested that liberty or love as a uniform symbol might yield equality as tangible social change. Instead, he classified human needs into three levels (daily subsistence, clothing and shelter, longdistance trade) and identified three kinds of coinage (copper, silver, gold), each suitable for one of them. “Since,” he said, “there are many more poor people than rich ones,” copper ought to be minted in the largest quantities. “What does it matter if it is a base [vil ] metal,” he asked, if it is the one used by most Frenchmen? While he left the Old Regime distinction between precious metals and vile copper unchallenged, he expected new iconography to soften inequality’s edges. “The people,” he asserted, will be “consoled for their lack of riches” by a new, copper, half-sous coin bearing Louis XVI’s words, “My people can count on my love.”13 They might be destitute and the metal content of their few coins would still be considered worthless, but the king’s sentiment would unite the poor with the rest of France. Within Mirabeau’s proposal, as in so many revolutionary texts and debates, an emergent political language of universalism coexisted with very blunt statements about socioeconomic difference. “Common and shared,” that is, did not mean anything like “uniform and equal.” So while the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen stated that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” the seventeenth declared property to be “sacred and inviolable.” On the one hand, the French people were envisioned as unitary, forming a single indivisible nation. On the other, it was recognized that some French individuals had considerable personal or family fortunes while most did not. Few in the first years of the Revolution perceived any confl ict or contradiction between these two positions. In the spring of 1791, for instance, the Paris city government reminded workers that while they now all had the same legal status, they would never be equal in talents or abilities (and hence not in wealth) since “nature did not want it that way.” Carpenters, typographers, or others should therefore not expect or demand equal pay. To plan strike actions or otherwise orga nize among themselves would be “unjust,” tantamount to reviving the Old Regime guilds so recently abolished.14 When combined with lawmakers’ aggressive commitment to free trade, the new political vocabulary of citizenship, liberty, and love raised

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expectations only to disappoint them. Social differences, formerly taken for granted, became obvious in new ways—no longer woven into the fabric of daily life, they stood out sharply against equality’s monochrome background. Political life and discourse, I would argue, neither radicalized on their own nor in obedience to some internal logic (pace François Furet). Rather, radicalization occurred as the ideal of national unity— something expressed by ordinary working people as well as by elites— came into sharp contrast with individuals’ daily experiences of buying, selling, and working.15 Instead of creating shared emotions, national money magnified social inequalities. In response, lawmakers nonetheless repeatedly put their faith in symbols, expressing the hope that further cultural changes would make economic differences more tolerable and, in some ways, less visible. A week after Mirabeau’s death in early April 1791, for instance, the National Assembly’s Coinage Committee returned to the idea of new imagery on money. Noting “copper coins are chiefly the money of the poor,” the committee’s report concluded “the unfortunate” would gain “a sense of their importance” if the reverse side of sous and liards depicted a fasces and a pike topped with a liberty bonnet and encircled by a wreath of oak leaves.16 If uniformity might add value to symbols (as Périsse Duluc had argued about the assignats), symbolism, the committee implied, might also make values more uniform. Yet by making the symbol’s message more egalitarian while leaving social relations unchanged, such mea sures had the unintended effect of identifying equality as a hope for the future rather than a condition of the present. This, it would seem with hindsight, was no way to end a revolution.

Over the past thirty years, scholarship on the French Revolution has been transformed by attention to political culture. Historians have rightly insisted that the Revolution was made through symbols, images, and language; they have stressed that the new political practices it introduced are as significant as the social structures it was once said to have transformed.17 Building on this work, the cultural historian is tempted at this point to focus on the various emblems gracing French money in the revolutionary decade and to analyze coinage as part of the new symbolic order forged in the 1790s (as, indeed, it was). Such an analysis would be shortsighted, however, if it limited itself to monetary iconography or

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treated money as of a piece with statues, wallpapers, or dress designs. Unlike any of these latter items, money was mass produced. Circulating more widely than any other symbol and found in the hands of the poor as in the wallets of the rich, the coins and papers of the Revolutionary era were both cultural products and social mediators. Louis XVI’s portrait on the assignats may have been meant to underline the bills’ status as money, but when the king attempted to flee France and a stable master recognized him on the basis of his resemblance to a fifty-livre assignat, the image’s effect was not the intended one. Far from projecting sovereign authority, his likeness had turned into a “wanted” poster.18 A comparison with one of the few other mass-produced symbols, the pleated circle of ribbon called a cockade (cocarde), will be instructive here. In her groundbreaking Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt wrote, “The French did not start out with an orga nized party or a coherent movement . . . They invented their symbols and rituals as they went along.”19 This is undoubtedly true—and distinguishes 1789 from many revolutions that came after—but conceiving all symbols as “invented” in the same fashion obscures the very real differences in how snuffboxes and bonbons, ribbons and money are actually produced and consumed. After all, with the notable exception of Jacques-Louis David (the artist who orchestrated many republican festivals and served on the Committee of General Security during the Terror), few individuals now known to historians can have placed “invent symbols” high on their list of daily priorities. Among other famous revolutionaries, we know the Marquis de Lafayette did give inventing the cockade some thought or, at least, he claimed to have done so. 20 As a military man, Lafayette was part of a culture in which such insignia already mattered greatly: when, during the American War of Independence, he had taken over a newly orga nized division of light infantry, he had been so pleased with his troops’ abilities that he rewarded all commissioned officers with “an elegant feather, cockade, and epaulets.”21 Such embellishments had practical as well as morale-building effects: at a time when military dress was still far from uniform and when two opposing armies might both include mercenaries from the same poorer regions of Eu rope, a man’s cockade was among the better ways of distinguishing friend from foe. As the sample usage in the Académie Française’s 1765 dictionary explained: “You could tell by their cocardes that they were part of the French army.”22

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Figure 14. “Louis XVI arrested while eating pigs’ feet” (1791). At the Sign of the Runaway, the undercover king sits absorbed in his meal but he is easily recognized by this National Guard who compares the inn’s customer to the image on an assignat.

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When the magistrate and would-be urban planner Guillaume Poncet de la Grave argued voluntary contributions to the state should be rewarded with a distinctive fleur-de-lys button—“the King,” he asserted, would thereby “imprint on good French people a sign separating them from the selfish ones”—he was simply adapting a model common among agronomists as well as military commanders.23 When an anonymous pamphleteer proposed France’s financial problems could be resolved if those who sacrificed the most were given a fine medallion to wear, he or she was only extending military “best practice” to daily civilian life.24 In and of itself, that is, the tricolor cocarde of 1789 was not an especially revolutionary or inventive bit of symbol-making activity; the booming ribbon trade and decades of war had made such items widely familiar. Too, merchants in several trades (hat makers, dry-goods dealers, ribbon makers) were already established in manufacturing and distributing them. When officials in Marseille settled accounts arising from the Spanish royal heir’s formal entrance into their city in 1742, they paid one merchant over 1,600 livres “for ribbons and cockades” (more than they spent on the city aldermen’s damask robes or on hiring musicians).25 By the 1790s, cockades (like coins) may have been symbols to be invented, but they were also goods to be bought and sold. People had a sense of their exchange value, as well as of their uses. In one of the lesser known episodes contributing to the drama of July 14, 1789, a boy of fourteen was nearly lynched when he threatened Parisians in the neighborhood of the Bastille with a gory end, if they did not buy the cockades he was hawking. Moreover, witnesses stated, he had had the temerity to charge an écu (sixty sous) for his wares, when anyone could see they were worth no more than twenty-four sous each! Dragged by city watchmen and “men of the people” to the Hôtel de Ville, the boy was eventually imprisoned and his goods and profits confiscated “for the benefit of the poor.”26 Nor was he the only one to whom “making up symbols” seemed chiefly a lucrative business opportunity: Augustin Liébert, a dry-goods dealer who had declared bankruptcy only a year earlier, saw in the tricolorribbon insignia a way to revive his own failing fortunes. 27 Assiduously marketing his creations throughout 1789–1790, he offered a subscription scheme guaranteeing a clean cockade each month and proudly announced when the military committee of the Paris city government endorsed his latest model. Establishing sales outlets in the shops of a dozen hat makers, Liébert ensured his cocardes could be found in the Palais

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Royal and in the faubourg Saint Germain, on the rue Saint Jacques and the rue Saint Antoine.28 If the national cockade became such an enduring symbol that it could still generate impassioned legislative debate for much of winter and spring 1799, it was not only because “symbols” were how revolutionary power was exercised. 29 Much more specifically, it was because tricolor cockades were easily manufactured, widely distributed, and fairly cheaply sold. If some were homemade, many more were not. An Englishman, arriving at Calais in summer 1792, “immediately procured” one and then changed his guineas for assignats; another writer implied cocarde vendors in that port city saw recently arrived visitors as a captive market and priced their goods accordingly.30 Sold in shops, at market stalls, and in the streets (where women with baskets of cockades quickly became common), the circles of ribbon became literal consumer necessities when a September 1792 law mandated all adult men publicly display one. Largescale production may not have been the norm but it also was not unheard of: in central Paris, inhabitants of the rue Greneta complained when wholesale dealers in cocardes and billfolds [portefeuilles] began trading before dawn and blocked the street to other traffic. 31 The politics of nation-state building put pressure on the cockade as sign that often ran contrary to the demands of a market economy. In their search for customers, manufacturers varied their products: one entrepreneur created leather ones, while another made his of striped ribbon. 32 Made of silk, a cocarde shimmered; made of wool, it lasted longer—it was up to consumers to choose. This era of overt competition was fairly short-lived, however: when war broke out and many feared foreign troops would burn the capital to the ground, the mayor called on Parisians to wear only “the military cockade” and threatened to arrest those who did not. Jeanbon Saint André, sent as representative on a mission to Brest and Lorient in 1793, prohibited the wearing of silk cockades because they were not colorfast, and even the staunchest patriot, exposed to the rains of coastal France, could quickly find himself wearing a scandalously white insignia (the emblem of the royalist counterrevolution). Only wool ones could be allowed.33 Merchants with a stock of silk ones were at best out of luck (at worst, jailed as counterrevolutionaries). Fraught enough when the object in question was a circle of pleated ribbon, the tension between a symbol’s status as merchandise and its role as sign could erupt into open rebellion when money was at stake.

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Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, critics of divine-right monarchy on both sides of the English Channel—from John Locke to the encyclopédistes—had insisted that while coins bore the king’s portrait, his image was not the source of money’s value. Rather, as Louis de Jaucourt asserted in his Encyclopédie article on the topic: “money does not receive its value from public authority . . . it is its material which gives money its value.” Coins, he added, were in this way like wine, and while a label on a wine bottle was certainly convenient, it had no effect on the quality of its contents.34 In contrast, other writers cited the seventeenth-century apologist for absolutism Jean Boizard to support their claim that money itself was the convenience. Ever since the patriarchs of the Bible, benevolent leaders had minted metals in order to facilitate trade among their subjects.35 Absent the ruler’s stamp, commerce remained a matter of barter, simply the exchange of so many lumps of metal for so many head of cattle. It was the sovereign’s sign itself that gave the economy life, as it had been God’s breath that transformed the dust of Earth into the first man. Money was not money without the sign. Writers such as de Jaucourt challenged absolutist monarchy by distinguishing the material stuff of coins from the imagery of money. The first, found in nature, was for them the true source of money’s value; the second, only a local convenience. In a well-managed polity, the two ought to converge but they often did not. A monarch, for example, might “abuse” his power and decree a quantity of silver that would sell for only five livres on the international market was worth six in France. A coin, by its nature, was hence both “merchandise” (a piece of silver) and “sign” (six livres). Nearly all members of the revolutionary patriotic elite—be they littérateurs and technocrats such as François de Neufchâteau, international bankers like Le Couteulx de Canteleu, or radical journalists like Prudhomme—shared this understanding of money’s double nature. In 1784–1785, Calonne’s revaluing of France’s gold coinage had provoked a major outcry; when, in the face of angry popu lar opposition, the National and Legislative Assemblies later insisted money was a form of merchandise like anything else (and hence should be allowed to find its “natural price” through market transactions), they were still fighting that old battle against ministerial caprice. 36 In claiming minted metals were a commodity like any other, eighteenth-century writers challenged the king’s right to manipulate the

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“exchange rate” between physical coins and the money of account. By continuing to make such arguments in 1790–1792, however, French lawmakers inadvertently undermined both themselves and those political ideals with which we most often associate them (national sovereignty, human rights, formal equality before the law). As long as money’s value was understood as determined by market mechanisms, the nation was not really sovereign over it. And as long as the law allowed—in fact, encouraged—individuals to trade in money as they did in any other good, formal legal equality was largely meaningless in the marketplace. One consumer’s sixty livres in paper and another’s sixty livres in coin would not, for most of the 1790s, buy the same quantity (or quality) of goods. Distinguishing money’s supposedly “natural” value as silver from its “arbitrary” meaning as sign had once been an effective way to dispute royal authority and hence quickly found echoes within revolutionary discourse. Yet insofar as such claims depended on the idea of gold and silver’s intrinsic value, they implied money’s worth was a natural phenomenon—something hardly specific to France alone. When Mirabeau drew on ideas of natural law to assert “sound doctrine” would one day make it possible to say of money, as Cicero had of law, “it is the same in Rome as in Athens; it is one, it is universal,” he pointed the way to a paradox. France could have a national money or it could have a natural currency. It could not have both. 37

National Money and the Paper of the People Insisting money’s value inhered in the metals of which it was made, eighteenth-century authors thought only in terms of gold and silver and consigned base-metal small change to the margins of their arguments. Made from various alloys, the lowest denomination coins routinely had face values that exceeded the market worth of the metals composing them. As a report by the National Assembly’s Comité des Monnaies explained, a piece of silver with the intrinsic value of half a sous would always be too small for convenient use and “too easily lost in the pockets of hurried and distracted people.”38 Mixing the silver with another metal, such as copper, made it possible to generate larger coins with the same silver content, but it also required a far more elaborate and expensive production process. So whereas mint masters and the state made

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money on the minting of gold and silver coins, they lost it on small change, which was therefore only produced under pressure and as a sort of “public ser vice” or welfare mea sure. Small change, with its metal content worth less than its face value and its production costs greater than both, was hence—as Thomas Sargent and François Velde have demonstrated—a “big problem” for medieval and early-modern economies.39 It also made money into an almost irresolvable conundrum for revolutionary ideas about formal equality before the law. For if money’s value stemmed from its material base, surely this ought to be true of every coin, regardless of denomination? Talleyrand, for one, expressed horror that the “laboring people and the least comfortable classes” had only monnaie mensongère [“lying money”] in recompense for their toil, but he nonetheless advised leaving the currency untouched for the time being.40 Schemes calling for reminting the coinage with nationalist symbols—such as Mirabeau’s—conversely suggested it might be possible to make small change less “false” without actually altering its metal content. Small-denomination coins would still be “purely marks of convention,” but beauty and perfect regularity would give them value. Workmanship, rather than raw materials alone, might enhance their worth as merchandise. In autumn 1790, France’s actually existing small change and its newly created assignats had little in common. The circular disks of metal and the rectangular sheets of paper sounded different and looked different; they shared neither material nor shape. Their connotations could not have been more distinct: concern about the public-health hazard posed by verdigris poisoning had tarnished the reputation of copper coins and cookware alike, while references to bountiful land planted in grain and grapes enhanced the assignats’ value. Much small change—coins good for two sous and less—was so worn and discolored it could pass for nail heads (and vice versa).41 In contrast, the assignats’ novelty, their prominent place in public debate, their identification with the Revolution, and their backing by properties envisioned as solid and immovable all clearly distinguished them from the old monetary regime’s most inglorious productions. Size mattered, too. At fifty livres, the “small” assignat introduced in October 1790 had twice the value of the largest coin in standard circulation (the gold louis, worth twenty-four livres since 1726). Fifty livres was a thousand sous.

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A significant gap between people subtended these material and numerical distinctions. Paper circulated widely in eighteenth- century France and may have made up 80 percent of the money supply, but comparatively little of it moved outside the narrow circles of finance and court, overseas trade and empire. Since even a fabulously wealthy merchant like Abraham Gradis of Bordeaux used coins for smaller transactions (in his case, “small” meant under 1,000 livres), it seems unlikely a manual laborer (who might earn a bit more than one livre for a full day’s work) ever encountered a bill of exchange or a formal obligation. Given that a woman hired by the day would have been lucky to earn a quarter of that amount, a huge gender differential clearly shaped familiarity with paper money as well.42 In short, different people had different money— and most elites, at least, saw this as a simple fact of life. As the Finance Committee’s Lebrun (de Grillon) put it as he opposed the issue of more assignats, workers and bakers did not need paper. Rather, they required “more rustical values [une valeur plus grossière]; they need a money that can be weighed.”43 The assignats could not be weighed. They palpably were not “small change.” Yet lawmakers on the revolutionary Left responded to the political and economic crisis of late 1790–1791 by increasingly assimilating assignats and small change into the single category “national money”— money that would not, or could not, leave the country. In February, the granting of passports to the king’s aunts made the continued fl ight of aristocrats and other wealthy individuals from France into a pressing public concern. For many, this alarming movement of people inevitably entailed the transport of money. On the same day that most of the Parisian sections petitioned the Assembly to prevent the women’s travels (and disingenuously stated the royal relatives “would certainly not, like other ungrateful citizens, disperse outside the fatherland the riches they were not given for that purpose”), members of section Mauconseil halted a stagecoach bound for Lille and announced the discovery of three million livres being smuggled from the country.44 Emigration, they implied, posed a double threat to the National Assembly’s work: bad enough that antirevolutionary pressure groups and even armies were forming outside France, without them also draining the country of gold and silver.45 Many, such as the Finance Committee’s Vernier, had long suspected enemies of the new order were betting on fi nancial collapse; from this

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perspective, it was easy to see the departure of people and the disappearance of money as all part of a single phenomenon. “Bankruptcy, counterrevolution, and kidnapping the King: these are the only topics of conversation among the émigrés”—so believed one Lyonnais merchant already in the autumn of 1790.46 In spring 1791, the “shortage of money” showed no signs of abating and the Paris Jacobin Club called for a law against emigration (which it defined as the shortage’s “original and principal cause”). The crisis affected deputies personally, and rumors reached far into the provinces of a riot, perhaps a new revolution, occasioned in Paris by the disappearance of silver.47 “There are no more écus to be seen here,” reported one clerical member of the Assembly in a letter to his nephew and heir. Alarmed by this turn of events, he thought his colleagues would therefore endorse an issue of small- denomination assignats to be used in place of coins. Since the latter would therefore become less necessary, people would have fewer reasons to hoard them. Paper would act as a magnet to pull the remaining metal from its hiding places. “If this fails,” abbé Rousselot concluded, “I don’t know what else we can do.”48 For Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, the Protestant pastor and radical who single-handedly put the matter of small-denomination assignats on the Assembly’s agenda, the problem’s causes—as well as its solution—were clear. Framing his remarks with reference to the needs of domestic manufacture and the realities of international trade, Rabaut de Saint Etienne asserted nothing could be done to keep gold and silver in France. Grain had to be imported, foreign bankers had to be paid the rentes they were owed, and the balance of trade was (and was likely to remain) generally unfavorable to French interests. Since “coins are not people we can chain down and force to remain in the country,” they would continue to leave. France would have to live without them. Making an argument that largely paralleled sections of Rousseau’s On the Government of Poland, Rabaut then turned international hostility to paper money into an unexpected blessing. He granted that foreigners would refuse the assignats, but from this he concluded paper would prove “more solid” than silver since the prejudices of others would keep it “fi xed and imprisoned” within the kingdom. As long as French men and women accepted assignats (and foreigners did not), France would never want for money.49 Far from accepting that metals made for “sound” currency but paper did not, Rabaut implied that France in the future would flourish

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thanks to its new double standard (money backed either by silver or by land). Explaining his position, Rabaut suggested that while “our own habitual prejudice, a prejudice formed since childhood” led us to imagine silver had an inherent value, this was a habit of thought that could, should, and would have to be overcome. When we set aside our childishness, he proposed, we will see we want silver coins not because they are silver (merchandise) but because they are money (signs). So saying, he implied both that money’s value derived fundamentally from others’ perception of it—what would be the point, after all, of a sign that signified nothing to anybody else?—and that “we” must all share a single reaction to it. With no intrinsic message or meaning of its own to convey, money’s value was simply in the eyes of its beholder. It would therefore never be enough for an individual patriot in his or her own heart to value the assignats; as signs, they had to have meaning for the nation as a whole. Much more than money was hence at stake in the ensuing debate over replacing large- denomination assignats with smaller bills. Over and over again, the issues of how the nation was formed and what it meant to belong to it arose in different forms and guises. In that same week, Rabaut de Saint-Etienne reported for the combined Constitution and Military Committees on the future orga ni zation of the National Guard. Robespierre intervened vigorously in the latter discussion to say all Frenchmen, regardless of wealth, should participate in defending the nation; the former duke de Noailles, who shared this position on the National Guard, then also spoke ardently in favor of issuing small- denomination assignats. Played out in two apparently distinct domains—taking up arms and using paper money— questions about social difference, political participation, and monetary measurement bled into one another like the colors in a rain-soaked piece of silk ribbon. 50 Throughout the debate, no one challenged the necessity of gold and silver for international commerce (an assumption haunting even Rabaut de Saint-Etienne’s manifesto for national money). Those who opposed the issue of small- denomination assignats, such as the former baron d’Allarde, simply generalized from the special case of foreign trade to a defi nition of all money: since a naval war could land French forces “in another hemisphere . . . [where] our fictional values would be useless,” even

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the national money had to have an “intrinsic” value.51 In contrast, Jacobins such as Rabaut de Saint-Etienne and Charles Lameth suggested that precisely because silver circulated abroad, it was inappropriate as national money in a time of revolution and potential military conflict. Reminding his listeners of the high prices being paid for silver all across Europe and of the “great conspiracy” between foreign kings and French “fugitives,” Rabaut concluded his second major speech on the topic with a stirring plea: Let us create a national money . . . A money that will be good enough for our own needs; that will circulate among us and for us . . . We must create a money that cannot be taken from us. They want to destroy our trade, ruin our manufacturing, and excite our workers to rebellion. Well, then, let us stimulate commerce and encourage production . . . It is time to recognize the advantages of a national money, one that will not be so unstable as the one that flows from the country in a thousand streams . . . Will we never make everyone understand that the assignats are our true national money, the money par excellence? The assignats are ours; they represent our lands, they are the sign of our properties; there they are, fi xed and unchanging. 52

Conceiving the national money as circulating but contained, flowing yet fi xed, Rabaut envisioned the nation as itself inclusive and exclusive. It included all those who knew that the assignats were “our true money.” It excluded all those who did not. 53 Like the “inestimably valuable” assignats, the kingdom’s “worthless” small change—the sous and liards that were heavy to move and bereft of intrinsic value—neither could nor would cross the borders. By “its very nature,” noted Noailles, “small change does not enter into our foreign trade relations . . . by that fact alone, we can call it ‘national’ as we do the assignats.”54 Under the resonant category of the “national,” Noailles and others thereby united the notes imagined as rural property and the coins closely associated with urban working people. It was a conceit based on a double misperception—the biens nationaux were, in fact, largely urban in character and five livres was still going to be a week’s wages for many day laborers—but it was powerful nonetheless. For very much like the new defi nition of “revolution” that emerged in the summer of 1789, this evocation of “national money” united two hitherto largely distinct phenomena. While the modern meaning of “revolution” combined popular

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uprising (the storming of the Bastille) with political transformation (the Tennis Court Oath), “national money” combined small change (the money of the poor) with the state’s commitment to honoring its inherited debts (the assignats). In both cases, the combination proved effective but also highly unstable. The coins with supposedly no intrinsic worth and the paper backed by land would now theoretically form a single entity: French national currency. In practice, however, the people and the assignats did not fit seamlessly together. Rabaut de Saint Etienne might speak in protorepublican terms of one money for all, but—as with Mirabeau’s proposed inscriptions—symbolic uniformity would not literally make social differences disappear. Instead, explicit policy initiatives collided with previously unstated assumptions. The deputy, Gabriel de Cussy, for example, intervened to suggest working people simply had no place carrying paper money. Defending his position, he insisted innumerable problems would arise if the Assembly put “a written money in the hands of people who cannot read, a fragile money in the hands of people who are careless, an easily dirtied money in the hands of people whose condition is inseparable from filth.”55 A member of the Jacobin Club and later of the National Convention, Cussy was no counterrevolutionary reactionary. Yet his life experiences—from a merchant background, he had purchased a post as director of the Caen Mint and then concentrated on expanding his family’s landed estates—left him with strong emotional prejudices when it came to dealing with money and ordinary working people. Others were little different: though they supported the assignats in principle, the idea of them being handled by “the people” provoked a visceral, negative reaction. As Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, editor of the widely read Moniteur universel, ou Gazette nationale, put it: “To ask if the assignats have real value today is as if one were to doubt the constitution’s success . . . yet this paper will become unrecognizable if it passes through the hands of the people . . . its circulation will be disagreeable. . . . It is likely to inspire all sorts of disgust.”56 Still others within the Assembly rationalized their reactions and, with new-found attention to practical difficulties, turned their repugnance into perceived external obstacles. The Finance Committee’s Montesquiou, for instance, had ever since the nationalization of the Church lands enthusiastically called for a series of enormously complicated mea sures. Yet only the centralized issuing

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of paper “small change” struck him as “a venture beyond the power of human beings [une entreprise au- dessus des forces humaines].”57 Overwhelmed at the thought, he proposed the Assembly instead officially endorse the billets de confiance. Even the former baron de Cernon, who enthusiastically supported the issue of five-livre assignats, asserted small-denomination bills would have to be materially distinct from those already circulating for larger sums. Speaking for the Finance Committee, he argued “the five-livre assignat, destined often to be in the pocket of the most hardworking class” would have to be made of different paper. The new ones would have to be “more solidly constructed than those intended for a wallet . . . thin paper will not work; nor will large sizes, since large bills would have to be folded to fit in a pocket and would thereby crease and eventually tear.”58 For Pinteville- Cernon, as for Cussy and for Pancoucke, the French nation as an abstraction was a wondrous thing. In August 1789, he wrote to his brother that “the French have developed a great patriotic character . . . it will astonish Europe or, rather, the entire universe. . . . France is nothing other than a society of equal individuals.”59 Yet these men had also always lived in a world where different people had different money. For them, envisioning “the people” as part of a single physical network of exchange brought the latter far too close. Contiguity, even when mediated by paper, threatened to make the nation altogether too corporeal; dirt, sweat, and grease might block its arteries and clog its pores. Anxiety, if not outright revulsion, was the response. Logistical hurdles did certainly exist: to remove any single thousandlivre note from circulation would require that 200 five-livre assignats be printed, stamped, numbered, and signed in order to take its place. Where once 100,000 or so objects had been planned, now there would be 20,000,000. Reporting on the anticipated increase in production, the Assembly’s Assignat Committee noted at least 120 additional men would need to be hired to sign and number the new bills.60 If these employees worked ten-hour days and did five assignats every minute, the manuscript side of production would just about keep pace with the mechanical procedures of printing and stamping. For each individual “assignataire” (as Cernon named them), this represented a six-fold increase over the rate at which Joseph Duruey had signed the original assignats; given the enlarged work force, the system overall produced 720 percent more signatures each day.

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In little over eighteen months, the issuing of assignats had shifted from a conceptual question debated in the vocabulary of political economy to a material problem of labor management and space constraints. (Men make their own money, we could say, but they do not make it just as they please.) “We have no facilities big enough,” continued the Assignat Committee’s report; meanwhile, one of the Assembly’s financial experts implicitly pushed his colleagues to find a different solution when he argued it was crucial to employ “the smallest number of workers imaginable” in order to limit opportunities for fraud, theft, or counterfeiting.61 Throughout spring 1791, it largely remained axiomatic among revolutionaries that France had been saved by the creation of the assignats and the sale of the biens nationaux. In the words of Pierre Hubert Anson (a former receiver-general), “no other mea sure would have given you [the Assembly] the means of changing the entire disastrous system of taxation and destroying the venality of office which dishonored justice and degraded patriotism . . . [nothing else] would have allowed you to pay off the debt weighing on the people.”62 The assignats had, that is, apparently succeeded as an answer to the state’s most pressing problems— problems that were financial but also ethical and temporal (insofar as they hinged on avoiding a dishonorable bankruptcy while immediately reimbursing holders of venal offices). Yet the assignats’ large denominations and their painstakingly slow production meant both employers and consumers continued to face a severe “shortage of money.” Besieged with demands for a currency small enough for use in daily transactions, the Constituent Assembly approved the proposal to issue five-livre assignats; persuaded by arguments about the incompatibility of artisanal craftsmanship with the money of the poor, the Assembly grudgingly agreed that small-denomination notes would carry engraved and printed, rather than manuscript, signatures. Though joined conceptually as emanations of the national will, the new assignats and the old differed in physical form. The lower value assignats, ostensibly because of their smaller size, carried no indication of the law creating them. Unlike all the notes for fifty livres or more, they did not obviously depict the king (though his embossed portrait meant he was present to those sufficiently discerning or tactile to notice). The traces of individuality characteristic of Old Regime circulating papers (and of the first assignats) became, with the later and smaller assignats, harder and harder to detect. And while every assignat ever made bore the

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words “domaines nationaux,” the lower denomination ones did not indicate how they, as pieces of paper, related to those properties, whereas all the larger ones specifically stated they were “hypothecated upon” them. In short, the creation of assignats for five livres and less (those for as little as ten sous were eventually issued) unintentionally reinscribed onto paper the Old Regime’s division between the intrinsically valuable coins of the rich and the worthless conveniences used by the poor. At the same time, however, all assignats—whatever their physical form and denomination—formed the lower tier of a two-tier system much like the one described by Mirabeau. Different though their expected audiences and production values might be, all assignats were at best national, rather than international, in the circuits they traced. Defined as “our national papers” and understood as valuable to the nation precisely because no one else would want them, the assignats could be of little use in foreign trade. Individual merchants and the French state still relied on imported goods, however. Grain came from the Baltic; brass tools and pinchbeck shoe buckles from Birmingham; tobacco from the United States. Even much of the copper destined for making small change came not from melted down church bells but from the mines of Wales and Cornwall. France’s paper money might be national—but its economy was not.

The Cost of Free Trade In summer 1791, lawyers, tax collectors, and ordinary citizens awaited the five-livre assignats “like the Messiah.”63 By late August, the first had been issued in Paris, while department-level officials from Normandy to the Vivarais were left to petition the National Treasury—as well as the Interior Ministry, the taxation minister, and anyone else they knew in the capital—for their own supply. In Romans, the stocking weavers could not be paid; in Dunkirk, the salt cod could not be unloaded; in Cherbourg, no more mirrors would be made: and all for the want of small change. Damaging to various sectors of the private economy, the shortage disrupted public ser vices as well.64 Paying poor relief, supporting disabled veterans, making change for taxpayers: administrators could do none of these things with large-denomination bills. As officials in Burgundy—little pleased when their allocation for paying priests and maintaining buildings included only a single five-livre assignat—noted:

Figure 15. Large- denomination assignats were also physically large and were printed only one or two to the sheet, whereas smaller- denomination ones were printed (and sometimes circulated) in multiples such as these.

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“It is not possible for us to do anything, until we have some petits assignats.”65 While a shortage of small change had been a regular feature of life all across early-modern Eu rope, revolutionary upheaval exacerbated the problem.66 In a time of political, social, and economic insecurity, new credit relations became difficult to establish and even old ones could be hard to maintain.67 Cash was hence widely required, but those same uncertain conditions, combined with the large denominations of the first assignats, made people extremely reluctant to part with whatever coins they had. Consider the plight of an elderly Parisian rentier, Nicolas Guittard. If in the 1780s he had often had to wait six months or even a year or more for the rente payment owed him by the state, he had nonetheless been assured of eventually getting his income in a mix of coins: some écus with which to pay his wine dealer, a few more with which to pay his tab at the baker’s, perhaps some gold coins to store for a rainy day or a trip abroad. In June 1791, by contrast, Guittard noted prompt payment in his diary but he also remarked on receiving just a single 500-livre assignat (and this despite requesting payment in smaller bills). Had he been lucky enough to receive one of the new assignats for five livres (decreed the previous month), he might well have been reluctant to spend it— and had he wanted to do so, even that could prove difficult. With cherries at twelve sous per pound, he could either buy eight pounds of the highly perishable fruit or try to buy just a single pound and risk getting into a yelling match with the greengrocer.68 On a daily basis, all across France, the proliferation of large bills—and even five livres was a lot of money when it came to buying fruit—made claiming to have “no change” into a tense game of marketplace “chicken”: who would yield first? Such tussles between individuals could quickly turn public. The novelty shops of Paris’s Palais Royal, for instance, did a brisk business throughout much of the Revolution, and when one shopkeeper there said she could not make change for a five-livre assignat, her would-be customer’s surprise is understandable. That he then called her a “bitch” (garce), a “whore” (putain), and a money seller was enough to attract a crowd, however. When the local police commissioners eventually arrived, they searched him and—fi nding he did, in fact, have plenty of small change himself—incarcerated him for the rest of the day.69 As tradesmen became increasingly reluctant to sell on credit, consumers found they needed cash and employers needed lots of it. Simply

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getting usable currency became a major chore. People queued for coins or small- denomination paper as they did for bread in times of shortage. Since November 1789, when rioting had broken out at the Caisse d’Escompte, Paris city officials had not trusted this delicate business to market mechanisms and had created a municipal office to deal with it— thereafter, anyone wanting to cash one of the Caisse d’Escompte’s bills had first to get a number from Paris City Hall. As the assignats eventually replaced the Caisse’s bills and as the five-livre ones slowly entered circulation, an expanded version of this office made small change available to those who had time to spend and bills to exchange. Any individual could get change for a single five-livre assignat; an employer, if authorized by the office’s director, could get change for one hundred livres. Located on the rue Vieille du Temple, in the heart of Paris’s manufacturing districts, the office opened for the public from 10:00 A.M.–2:00 P.M., but its work actually began at 6:00 A.M., when numbers were distributed to the many people already waiting in line. For every hour it was open, the staff counted out more than 8,000 livres—and still could provide change for perhaps at most 2,000 people each day, in a city of more than half a million.70 (Since it is not clear how many of those in line were there as individuals and how many as chefs d’entreprise, the number receiving change may have been closer to 350.) Frustrated by the ever more tedious and difficult business of buying and selling, yet buoyed by the language of rights and freedom—“In spite of liberty,” one Parisian theater entrepreneur remarked to his son, “the shortage of money always makes itself felt”—individuals made small change into a focus of popular protest and a source of sustained administrative concern.71 In Besançon, fortifications workers went on strike and threatened to pillage bakeries unless they were paid in small change; in Limoges, a similar crisis was barely averted.72 An English author’s claim—that when “peasants, shopkeepers, servant maids, and . . . formidable fishwomen” lined up to exchange large assignats for small, “Babel was . . . comparatively to this, a place of retreat and silence”—might be taken for patronizing exaggeration, if overwhelmed French administrators did not say almost the same thing.73 In Cambrai (Nord), district-level officials reported that despite their policing efforts, they were “at every moment attacked by groups of women who make a terrible hubbub and fray [tapage] outside our offices.” Regular recourse to armed troops had little effect on the crowds. “Every few hours,” the officials noted, “they

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come back again.” Day after day, hour after hour, for much of February and March 1792, there they were: dozens of women (and sometimes men), all with assignats in hand, angrily demanding change.74 All across the country, people physically stopped shipments—or what they believed to be shipments— of money, much as crowds in times of high bread prices routinely impeded the movement of grains. In December 1789, National Guardsmen from the activist Cordeliers district intercepted silver ingots being sent from the Caisse d’Escompte to the mint in Limoges; in August 1790, city officials in Bar halted a shipment of coins as it passed through town on its way to Strasbourg.75 In summer 1791, 483,000 livres intended for the Swiss canton of Solothurn was stopped first in Bar-sur-Aube and then in Elfert, before coming to rest semipermanently in Belfort. Ordered to release it, the mayor instead yielded to crowd pressure and refused to do so, saying the supposed law allowing silver exports was “probably a counterfeit . . . they could have printed anything they liked in Troyes.” Locked up for safekeeping in the town hall, the money was still there five months later when Narbonne, the minister of war, went to oversee its export personally.76 Whether rioting for small change, beating up money changers, or stopping shipments of gold coins and silver tableware, communities mobilized around the problem of money. This was a popu lar revolution, one made in the streets and market squares of communities all across France. While it may seem banal to say people protested about money, the individuals involved in these episodes neither begged for handouts nor called for higher pay. Nor can their protests be exactly assimilated to the “taxation populaire” of an Old Regime food riot (in which crowds paid only what they believed to be the just, fair, or customary price for a certain good). When 200 men under the leadership of a National- Guard captain and with the knowledge and support of the mayor marched on the market in La Neuve-Lyre (Eure), they did so to force farmers to sell their “wheat . . . wood, cider, and other items” not at a lower price but at a single price, regardless of whether payment was made in coins, assignats, or billets de confiance. In other words, the protesters’ concern was less with prices than with currency’s liquidity and fungibility (or lack thereof ). If we are all one nation, the crowds in effect said, all our money should be the same. Prices certainly mattered, but getting the assignats and billets treated fully as money mattered even more.77

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Popular concern with differential pricing and anger over vendors’ discounting of assignats converged in hostility toward the trade in money. While anyone willing and able to spend coins would have experienced only a modest rise in prices during the first years of the Revolution, very few people (and perhaps even fewer government institutions) were in a position to do that. For them, it was the price of money—the rate at which assignats were commercially discounted when they were broken for coins—that seemed to be going up the fastest of all. Already in the autumn of 1790, even the National Assembly paid a 7.5 percent commission to exchange two assignats (in this case, in order to be able to pay the firemen who guarded its meeting place).78 By the following spring, people commonly paid nearly twice that, and by December 1791, newspapers were listing the “price of money” in the capital as 20 percent or even more.79 Stigmatized in early 1791 by the Paris sections (at least one of which decided to “deprive of the vote and chase from its bosom” any member found selling money), the currency trade provoked repeated outbreaks of verbal and physical abuse in rural as well as urban settings. In a remote small town in Brittany, an angry crowd nearly hanged a local official who was known to keep 6 percent when he exchanged largedenomination assignats for smaller ones and 10 percent when it was a matter of converting a five-livre assignat into coins. Only the belated recognition that the man they had abducted was not the district’s trea surer, but its secretary, convinced the group to desist.80 The assignats were legally money. By law, they should have circulated as easily as coins did. Yet everyone knew they did not. Throughout 1791 and 1792, the ideas of the nation and of national money formed an increasingly chiastic, or x-shaped, relation: as the former’s political and rhetorical stock rose, the latter’s nonetheless fell and fell. For all who supported the constitutional monarchy, the assignats’ decreasing value was a source of almost daily frustration, a repeated reminder that everything was not yet right in the new and regenerated France. “My patriotism is saddened,” remarked a young military volunteer, “to lose on a paper backed by the Nation.”81 While few expressed themselves so clearly in writing, many others must have had similar feelings. Material shortages and political anger fed into each other to forge new social alliances: the crowd protesting the assignats’ discredit at the market in La NeuveLyre included journeymen and artisans but also members of the local elite, such as doctors and lawyers. For the latter, as for the young soldier,

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Figure 16. “The money seller beaten in the Palais Royal” (1791). “On Saturday . . . one of the money sellers was set upon by the people and beaten with canes . . . if it were not for the intervention of the National Guard, he would surely have perished. Until the next time!”

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accepting the assignats at face value was an article of patriotic faith. Refusing or discounting them was as much a national insult as an economic hardship. By winter 1792, hostility toward the Assembly’s “decree making money into merchandise” had become a rallying point for radicals across the country.82 The Jacobin Club of Lorient required its members to take an oath of loyalty to the assignats and orga nized a petition campaign calling for “revocation of the resolution which freed the money trade.” Clubs in Poitiers, Bergerac, Toulouse, Toulon, Auxerre, and Le Havre quickly did likewise.83 In one of its very first actions, Paris’s radical municipal government of summer-autumn 1792 (the “commune insurrectionnelle”) called for money sellers to be subject to the death penalty; when that demand met with no success, it was repeated and hence figured among the Commune’s final actions as well. Over the following winter, the Paris sections reiterated the demand both individually and collectively, culminating in the march of all forty-eight sections on the Convention in February 1793. “We come once again [encore une fois] to ask the Constituent Assembly’s decree making money into merchandise be overturned,” stated their spokesman. “It has been a veritable Pandora’s box from which all sorts of evils have escaped.”84 In the minds of most lawmakers, however, there was nothing to overturn. With remarkably little fuss, usury had been abolished as a criminal category; with a bit more contestation, deputies had stated money was a “good of fi rst necessity” and merchants were free to sell whatever they liked—an attitude shared across the political spectrum from the future Montagnard Goupilleau to two of the Assembly’s most conservative commoners, Lachèze and Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély. When the last asserted that laws protected all commerce and therefore no special decree was needed to protect or authorize the money trade, his fellow deputies voted in overwhelming support of his statement.85 It would, many agreed, have been impossible for the Assembly to make money into merchandise since it inherently was merchandise. Not law, but nature, made money something to be bought and sold. For the deputy Vernier, setting a “fi xed price” for the exchange of coins and assignats was no more plausible than converting lead into gold.86 From the historian’s perspective, we can say that when provincial Jacobins demanded that the law making money into merchandise be revoked, they misrecognized deregulation or nonregulation as one of regulation’s

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effects. We can also say that when liberal lawmakers remained steadfast in their support of free trade in money, they enunciated a position based on a paradoxically similar premise. Both sides saw positive law—the law made by man and not by nature—as a threat to French prosperity. While the Jacobin Clubs blamed such a law and the legislators refused to introduce one, both insisted that positive law somehow violated the nature of money. After decades in which many had viewed the monarchy’s attempted control of the grain trade as the cause of (rather than a response to) high prices and in which smuggling and fraud had been rampant, regulation was in poor repute.87 Perceived as the cause of so many difficulties, no one could imagine that it might be the answer. Even as demands accumulated and popular anger erupted into repeated episodes of crowd violence, a host of powerful voices remained adamant in supporting “liberty of money.” After hostile Pa risians had beaten a Palais-Royal money changer nearly to death in early 1791, Jacques Peuchet, journalist and future police administrator, took to the pages of the Moniteur to explain the free-trade position. He encouraged readers to remember that since money was a form of merchandise like any other, the labor of carrying and counting it had to be recompensed. Threatening the lives of those in that business only made the work more difficult and hence drove up the price. No positive law, Peuchet insisted, had (or could) make money selling a legal or an illegal activity: “A man sells his money simply by exercising the right he has over his own property.”88 Several months later, the widely circulated Feuille villageoise used a dialogue format to bring the same point home to rural people. When one character protests that “selling money is infamous,” the other instructs him that monopoly is wrong but free trade is good: “And so since everyone can now sell meat, they can also sell money.” Similar arguments were reprised on the floor of the Assembly, in the pages of Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris (usually considered among the more radical of early revolutionary newspapers), and in the debates of the Paris Jacobin Club.89 The political elite’s commitment to free trade in money was so strong that when the royal family attempted to flee France in June 1791, they did so under cover of being a shipment of silver.90 In many respects, of course, the money-trade question simply extended debates long central to eighteenth- century political economy. Regulation or liberalization of the grain trade had for decades pitted consumers against reforming administrators, the provinces against Paris, and

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Figure 17. “No trea sure, just a few fat sous” (1791). When the royal family attempted to flee France, the soldiers accompanying them claimed to be guarding a shipment of gold and silver. Here, the carriage’s contents are revealed to be nothing precious. One Guardsman holds coins marked with a dolphin (or dauphin, the sign of the French heir to the throne) and the word “Antoinette,” and the other displays the king’s head on a coin.

some (but not all) parlementaires against royal authority. When, in the first years of his reign, Louis XVI had completely freed the grain trade— permitting merchants to sell wheat outside centrally managed markets, to price it however they wished, and to ship it wherever they liked—a veritable “Flour War” had resulted, in which violent disturbances rocked more than eighty market towns and 200 villages and some 25,000 soldiers were deployed to reestablish law and order. The return to regulation that came when the king replaced the Physiocrat-sympathizing Turgot with the Swiss banker Necker as controller-general had been one major source

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of the latter’s popular appeal; conversely, the National Assembly’s own freeing of the grain trade in late August 1789 was among its most bitterly contested decisions. For if advocates of deregulation saw bread and money as goods like anything else—“How often must we repeat those eternal truths,” they asked, “that grain must circulate just as money does?”—many others argued bread’s centrality to the French diet made it fundamentally different from other commodities. Flour in a sense was sacred, since without it human life would perish. And how was anyone to get bread or flour without money?91 When the majority within the National Assembly endorsed free trade in money as in grain, they pushed deregulation to its breaking point.92 As their critics observed, selling silver “for whatever price you want” meant it no longer consistently represented the value of other objects. According to administrators in the department of the Landes (where proximity to Spain and Spanish silver put strong downward pressure on the assignats), allowing individuals to set their own equivalences “arbitrarily” might constitute a sort of freedom, but it also announced the breakdown of “civilized society. . . . Without a fi xed and invariable sign of value, there can be no real sales, only barter, and in consequence both credit and commerce will be lost.” In their own petition, the citizens of Bedarieux (Hérault) made a similar observation: “Minted silver,” they stated, “is not a form of merchandise, whatever some might think. It is only a sign, the means by which exchanges are made. This sign must be sacred. . . . It is marked with the seal of the national will, which [alone should] guarantee its value.”93 As these petitioners and others recognized, radical monetary liberty meant the breakdown of money as a social mediator. When custom no longer played a reliable role in making transactions, transactions became much more difficult to make. The “information costs” of operating in a system with ever multiplying mea sures of value were extremely high (even if that is not the language a tavern keeper in a garrison town would have used). Explicitly negotiating the terms of each exchange—how many assignats for how many copper coins? how many bills issued by the Paris-based Maison de Secours for how many assignats? and so on—made formerly habitual interactions into matters of conscious, often contentious, decision making. By decreeing the assignats should circulate “like coins” while simultaneously clinging to the idea of intrinsic material value, lawmakers in the National Assembly created an unworkable double standard.

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Public paper’s new qualities—its status as a sort of quasi-metal, one to be valued nationally because internationally worthless—produced a host of contradictions. When more familiar sorts of paper (such as bills of exchange) circulated, they did so with a “due date” (usance), a date at which the letter could notionally be cashed (though often at that point one bill would just cancel another in somebody’s account book). To transfer or cash a bill before it matured, its holder generally accepted something less than its face value, since the sum on the bill was what it would be worth at a particular date in the future, not what it was worth in the here and now. Assignats, too, were paper tools for moving wealth across both space and time: at maturity, they would go to their fiery death, but along the way they would “serve as money” and might be exchanged for gold coins, silver ones, or other objects. As of October 1790, however, they differed from regular bills of exchange in being payable “to the bearer” rather than “to the order of ” a named individual. So while the transfer of a bill of exchange was only legitimate if both parties signed on the back and some indication was made of what had been given in exchange for the bill, assignats were valid in the hands of whoever held them (hence the widespread concern about postal theft). While the terms of their transfer had meant that a fairly finite number of bankers and merchants had been in the business of discounting (that is, cashing) bills of exchange, a potentially infinite number of individuals could make change for assignats. In liberal theory, these money changers ought to compete with each other, lowering their rates in order to attract customers. In practice, the collapse of credit networks meant that comparatively few individuals were willing to part with coins; the resulting competition resembled gang warfare as much as it did commercial equilibrium. It was in this sense—in saying the assignats should circulate “like coins” without mandating they would circulate at par—that the National Assembly “freed the trade in money” and made money “into merchandise.” The consequences were dramatic. For while the same lawmakers genuinely embraced the idea of “national sovereignty,” their understanding of money made the nation’s needs largely irrelevant to the domestic economy. Article 17 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) termed property “an inviolable and sacred right,” but interpreting that article as sanctioning the “sale” of a three-livre coin for a five-livre assignat could not help but undercut the latter’s legal status

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as a national currency. A very long tradition, beginning with Aristotle, had identified money with sovereignty and the minting of currency with the making of laws.94 When the Monneron brothers (three of whom had served in the Constituent Assembly) went into business importing and distributing copper medallions that looked suspiciously like coins, or when soldiers refused to be paid in assignats, both symbolic coherence and the public peace were put at risk.95 By allowing—or, rather, forcing—individuals to reach their own conclusions about any coin’s or bill’s worth, the Assemblies’ extreme version of free trade encouraged what we might call an “agnostic” attitude toward money and an agonistic attitude toward the state. At the very same time, however, the assignats were widely being hailed as France’s salvation. Even the irreligious Hébert wrote: “We were screwed and we were screwed again, without the assignats. Then they appeared and France was saved.” 96 Those who doubted, devalued, or discredited the assignats were hence heretics as well as profit seekers. At a time when smalldenomination assignats were “awaited like the Messiah,” nonregulation turned market transactions into a war between faiths. While municipal officials “reiterated their prayers” for small change as “the only hope of maintaining peace,” currency crises could easily degenerate into civil war. In the eyes of many, those who bought and sold the nation’s paper should be driven from France as Jesus had chased the money sellers from the temple.97

In trying to strengthen the economy, lawmakers weakened the state. Revolutionary patriotism combined with forms of laissez-faire economic policy to create a situation in which the needs of the nation were paramount while the nation’s money was nonetheless devalued and discredited. The latter derived not from paper’s inherent worthlessness—only a few years earlier in Spain, state-issued paper had circulated for more than its face value—nor simply from over issue.98 Rather, the Assemblies’ ideological choice of monetary deregulation at a time of cultural and social dislocation proved profoundly unsettling. Individuals’ heightened sense of uncertainty had calamitous effects on an economy largely based (as they all are) on trust, habit, and credit. A feedback loop of sorts was established: “freedom” of money disrupted economic life; that disruption made liberty and equality seem all the more elusive and desirable;

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supporting liberty meant defending the free trade in money which, in turn, led to further uncertainty and disruption. If the nation, as an abstract entity, was imagined as giving credibility to its money, it could not do so in the absence of customary structures or effective governance. The ever-widening gap between enunciated political norms and the actual functioning of daily life radicalized individuals in a way neither could have done on its own. Economic life had definitely changed: many tradesmen refused to sell on credit, the price of some goods had skyrocketed, and the market for luxury goods (from elaborate carriages to ornate fans and man-made pearls) had all but completely collapsed. Yet those most affected would not have made the demands they did had it not been for the simultaneous emergence of a new vocabulary of citizenship and legal equality. “We have sworn to defend the Republic,” said a deputation of the artisans and shopkeepers who made up the Gravilliers section in March 1793. “For four years we have been in revolution . . . and liberty is still only a phantom . . . the decree that made money into merchandise has caused public misfortune, speculation, brigandage, and hoarding.” “The sale of money offends the laws,” argued their neighbors from the Lombard section just two days later.99 By endorsing the circulation of gold and silver coins alongside national paper bills without mandating equal exchange between them, the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies created a monetary version of the distinction between active and passive citizenship. Like an active citizen whose wealth, age, sex, and domiciled status qualified him for the vote and to hold elected office, a silver or gold coin had supposedly intrinsic qualities that earned it its role as money. Silver was “durable”; adult men with permanent homes and a certain income were “responsible.” In contrast, passive citizens (all women and children, the homeless or itinerant, and those whose yearly tax payments fell below a certain level) were like paper money: they belonged to the nation but they lacked the supplemental attributes that produced a differential position in the market as well. Active and passive, metal and paper, all had the same stamp—all were the same before the law—but for the latter group of citizens this would prove a poor consolation prize. The provincial Jacobins and Paris-section militants who challenged the free trade in money demanded that their equal legal status (and that of their currency) translate into money having quantity without qualities. All money, in the vocabulary of revolutionary citizenship, should be

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“active.” Their position, in other words, actually embraced what William Reddy has called “the liberal illusion”: classical economic thought’s tendency to treat money as universally substituting and substitutable, as a quantity without qualities.100 They called, we could say, for an equality of money that would make the liberal illusion into a substantial reality. Theirs would have been a nation—and a national economy—forged through pure signs, one in which the rich as well as the poor derived solace from the king’s love and from the nation’s concern for their well-being. Given that international trade depended on gold and silver, this was also implicitly a vision of France as self-sufficient to the point of autarchy. The nation imagined by Paris sans-culottes or provincial Jacobins hence no more actually existed than did Rousseau’s fantasy of a self-sufficient and moneyless Poland. Instead, currency’s qualities remained as important as its quantities. As during the Old Regime, different people had different money, but the advent of market freedom meant nothing any longer guaranteed denominations or substances could be exchanged for each other. Five livres in assignats might be three livres (an écu) in silver or it might be half that; a baker might accept some billets patriotiques and he might reject others; a handful of copper coins might buy a pair of shoes or they might not. The particular version of civil collapse that is monetary breakdown made every exchange into a potential occasion for dissension and dispute. For would-be public servants as for ordinary workers and consumers, lawmakers’ dominant economic philosophy made the political ideal of national unity almost impossible to achieve.

5 Civil Wars in France As for the right of minting money, it is of the same nature as law, and only he who has the power to make law can regulate the coinage. Jean Bodin, Six livres de la république (1576)

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was not a good time to be an inspector of assignat manufacture. Within the paper factories of northern central France, workers demanded higher pay and opposed the introduction of the new, “republican” week (nine days of work followed by one day of rest). Nearby, hundreds of people from fifteen villages armed themselves with farm tools and rifles. They marched first on the papermaking facility and then on City Hall and the local Jacobin Club, all the time demanding that silver and copper ornaments be restored to their churches. Chanting “off with the Jacobins’ heads,” they dragged the assignat inspector—a prominent Jacobin—with them; had it not been for the timely arrival of 3,000 soldiers, inspector Frezet felt sure his hours were numbered. Yet when he explained all this in a letter to Paris, the only response was a cold “I cannot tell from your note how much paper you will be able to include in the next shipment.”1 For the workers in the newly centralized confection des assignats in Paris, the winter was little better. Subject to increasingly rigid workplace regulations and intense public scrutiny, they spent their days and nights making money and yet had little of it themselves. Those who printed, stamped, and counted assignats were at least sure of work but they were also guaranteed the hostility of those who had none. “The assignat workers are all well off and aristocrats . . . they conduct themselves indecently . . . INTER OF 1793–1794

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it would be best to overhaul that administration completely”—so muttered citizens on the streets of Paris and within earshot of the Ministry of Interior’s secret agents.2 Heightened security concerns brought new safeguards, each of which itself had to be protected. Simply keeping track of the unprinted sheets of paper involved the labor of an inspector, an auditor, and multiple counters for each denomination of assignat; in September 1793, the “Office for Assignat Paper” alone employed fortysix men and three cats.3 In the republican calendar, 1793–1794 was the Year Two. In histories and legend alike, Year Two is the year of “the Terror”—the year of Robespierre, of mass executions, of the guillotine.4 The Law of Suspects, declared in September 1793, meant anyone merely suspected of being the Republic’s enemy could be imprisoned indefinitely; the law of 22 Prairial II (June 10, 1794) denied legal counsel to those accused of counterrevolutionary offenses and restricted the Revolutionary Tribunal to only two verdicts, innocence or the death penalty. The people’s representatives, sent “on mission” from the National Convention in Paris to the provinces imposed revolutionary justice and republicanism as best they saw fit—some jailed and executed women and priests, others orga nized firing squads, and still others focused their energies on tax collection and poor relief. Within the National Convention, the Committee of Public Safety arrogated executive functions and took a dim view of any who opposed it. Among the Committee’s members, temperamental differences and intellectual priorities became matters of life and death. Personal feuds were recast as political differences; political differences were interpreted as moral failings; moral failings threatened not just an individual but the nation at large. Those to the right of Robespierre and the Mountain were denounced, jailed, and executed for indulging in counterrevolutionary sentiments and actions; those to the left, called mad men (“enragés”) and zealots, met a similar fate. If it was not the best of times to be an inspector of assignat manufacture, it was also, most agree, not a good time to be anyone else. For over two hundred years, contemporaries and historians have struggled to make sense of the Terror. A punishment infl icted by an angry and righteous God; an understandable reaction to war, civil war, and ongoing popular unrest; a skidding out of control of the metaphorical revolutionary vehicle; a structure inherent in the Revolution from its beginning—these, and hybrids between them, have been offered as expla-

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nations. For much of the twentieth century, many academic historians saw the radicalism of 1793–1794 as the product of an unstable alliance between ideological purists in the Convention (the lofty Mountain, with Robespierre at its peak) and grassroots militants from the Paris sections and political clubs (the sans-culottes). In this model, the Montagnard Jacobins relied upon the sans-culottes to help them wrest political control from their Girondin opponents, while the sans-culottes gave their support only in exchange for specific economic concessions (such as the imposition of wage-and-price controls). The two groups’ interests, it was asserted, had been as distinct as their social positions; the “bourgeois” Mountain’s desire for power and the working-class’s hunger for bread were made to coincide only briefly and only through force. By the 1980s, however, this social analysis had generally lost favor, thanks both to general trends in scholarship and to research showing the most politically active sans-culottes to have been master artisans, major retailers, and even prosperous entrepreneurs—in short, men no less “bourgeois” than many in the Convention. No longer understood as the result of a shortlived collaboration between two distinct social classes, the Terror came instead to be seen as inherent in revolutionary ideology itself. Proposed by François Furet, this interpretation was given its most arresting formulation by Keith Baker, when he asserted that the National Assembly had already “opted for the Terror” in its debates of September 1789. By deciding France could be constituted afresh on the basis of political will alone, the Assembly’s majority (according to Baker) contributed to the creation of a political culture distrustful of representation and intolerant of difference. When, in a vocabulary echoing Rousseau’s Social Contract, they identified national sovereignty with the direct expression of a unitary and inalienable general will, they left no possibility for contestation, no space for compromise. 5 Though in most ways irreconcilable, this discursive explanation and the previously dominant social model of the Terror agree in separating politics and economics. The Assembly, Baker writes, preferred a political discourse to a social one and adopted a vocabulary “of unity, rather than of difference; of civic virtue, rather than of commerce.”6 On his reading, “civic virtue” and “commerce” must be incompatible languages, as different as the interests of the Montagnards and those of the sans-culottes. The dichotomy Baker establishes in this passage between the political and the commercial, the symbolic and the substantial, can appear almost

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self-evident, and it in fact underpins much scholarship on the Revolution. We see it, for instance, in the near total differentiation between political and economic historians and even in the distinction made by the former between ideological Jacobins (Robespierre, Saint Just, Couthon) and their techno- or neo-counterparts (Robert Lindet, Lazare Carnot, Prieur de la Côte d’Or).7 In contrast, this chapter emphasizes that many of the most important choices made by revolutionaries were at once economic and political. 8 While other historians, such as William Sewell and John Shovlin, have perceptively analyzed how seemingly economic categories were used to political ends, that is not my goal here.9 Rather, this chapter argues political decisions had profound economic effects, and it was in the course of daily economic life that individuals formed some of their strongest political opinions. Money was the hinge holding the two together, the pivot around which politics and economics opened and closed onto each other. It was in this period an especially swollen and creaky joint. Any time someone made a purchase or a sale, whenever taxes were to be paid or collected, whenever a marriage contract was written or an estate was to be divided among heirs— on all these occasions and on thousands of others, the problem of what constituted “money” (and of who had the right to issue it) could easily arise. Even the down-and-out and the demimonde could not avoid these concerns. The Parisian pickpocket whose latest haul consisted of billets de confiance from the Auvergne, the prostitute whose client had only large-denomination assignats, the beggar surprised to receive paper alms—they, too, would have found their day-to-day existences snagging on the sharp edges of a fractured monetary system. While social historians of the Revolution have paid attention to money, they have treated it merely as a quantitative mea sure. Throughout much of the 1790s (and beyond), however, money’s qualities mattered as much as its quantities. Revolutionary commitment to “liberty of commerce” allowed and encouraged the production of multiple moneys and quasi-moneys but no one wanted to think of his or her own wealth belonging to the latter category. No holder or issuer of billets de confiance in 1792 wanted to be told that his bills were irregular; no soldier or seamstress or stonemason who had been paid in assignats wanted to think of his or her wages as a substitute for “real” money. On the other hand, all these individuals were legally free to regard other people’s money

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in whatever manner they liked. For most of the 1790s, no tavern keeper or shoemaker had to take assignats at face value; no café keeper or baker had to make change; and no tax collector should have accepted billets de confiance (though some did). Monetary freedom was, of course, socially circumscribed—the farmer with hay in his barn, chickens in his barnyard, and wine or cider in his cellar could be more discriminating about the currency he accepted than could a day laborer—but it was legally open to all.

Figure 18. The Pa risian, Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, chronicled the Revolution in cardboard cutouts meticulously painted in opaque watercolors ( gouache) and perhaps intended for use in a shadow theater. Here, a farmer has sold his crops for vast sums in assignats and exchanges his paper for metal. Note that though the money changer has a scale for weighing out coins, he has to rely on his eyes to determine the worth of the assignat he carefully inspects.

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The money individuals had (or agreed to accept) marked them in social, regional, and political terms as clearly as any cockade ever would. Those who willingly use any particular currency form a community of believers: they have faith in particular objects and assume all their cocommunicants share their basic convictions. We rarely describe such groupings of people as “faith based” because in conditions of monetary stability their trust is usually tacit and their community appears to exist simply as a matter of fact. In truth, however, such communities are constantly being re- created on a daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute basis as individuals buy and sell, spend, and save. If something happens to make those regular transactions more difficult or to change their modality from an automatic habit to a conscious choice, the community starts to splinter. If monetary beliefs are contested, if neighbors have competing visions of the path to security and salvation, the community loses cohesion. Relations of trust break down. Major fault lines have certainly appeared within communities over monetary quantities—across early-modern Europe, people felt justified in taking what they believed to be overpriced goods and paying only “the fair price”—but those that emerged during the Revolution over money’s qualities marked a far more profound break.10 For most ordinary people and many members of the political elite, the monetary policies and practices of the revolutionary era produced overwhelming uncertainty. Apparent stability sometimes arose, but it was repeatedly—and, yet, always unexpectedly—short-lived and ended by leaving individuals in renewed and intensified insecurity. For more than a decade, no “new normal” was established in which money and monetary transactions could again become quasi-automatic and largely unthinking. Instead, as money and its meaning continued to demand conscious action and thought, no one could feel certain about how future transactions would go or about how value would be established. This doubt often felt like a failure of the objects that individuals held in their pockets and wallets; lawmakers and ordinary citizens hence responded to the pressures on them by fantasizing that new money-things could resolve the problem. Yet the troubles through which they lived (and in which some of them died) arose more fundamentally from a breakdown in what people could expect of each other. The monetary liberty and revolutionary creativity of 1790 through early 1793—the proliferation of bil-

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lets, the minting of coinlike tokens by private enterprises, the use of assignat interest coupons for payments, the issue of new and hastily produced small change, the pervasive concern with counterfeiting—left people to deal with a bewildering variety of things that might be money and hence prompted them to look at even established relations and signs with new skepticism and doubt. Individuals struggled to make sense of this variety through familiar, established categories. They looked for signatures on pieces of paper and they listened to the tones made by coins, but these inherited traditions were of limited use when confronting objects made in new ways. By tracing the collapse of ordinary monetary trust through the first half of the 1790s, this book argues against the idea that anyone in the early months of the Revolution could have “opted for the Terror” by choosing the discourse “of civic virtue, rather than of commerce.”11 In 1789, I would instead suggest, most supporters of the Revolution did not conceive of “commerce” and “civic virtue” as distinct world views. Rather, many imagined the two were so fundamentally compatible as to be nearly identical, that political liberty and economic freedom (that is, deregulation or nonregulation) would of course be mutually reenforcing. When this thinking was made into monetary policy, however—when money was treated as merchandise and when more than a thousand bodies issued their own version of small change— confl icts over money became daily occurrences. If these disputes were in some way the completely unintended consequences of decisions reached in 1789, they resulted as much from embracing “commerce” as from spurning difference. For many, it was the fractious and factionalizing effects of commercial liberty that made “civic virtue” in all its forms an increasingly appealing idea.

Economic Individuals and Universal Patriots In winter 1792, writing to his godmother from the frontier town of Sierck (Moselle), a young soldier described his many roles in the Second Volunteer Battalion of the Meurthe. Thanks to his extensive formal education, his commander called upon him to draft letters, while his Rousseauean upbringing suited him to a host of other tasks. Reared largely by that same godmother—a woman who was close friends with the liberal

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journalist Joseph Cérutti and whose husband contributed articles on military topics to the Encyclopédie— Gabriel Noël had been raised to try his hand at anything. “Cooking is a dirty and boring job,” he wrote. “For six sous, I could have somebody else do it. It’s not essential; if I didn’t do it, I would not be failing in my duties as a soldier and a patriot. Still, I feel that I ought to do these things in good humor, for the sake of setting an example. . . . And without bragging, I must say that I never eat such good soup as when I have made it—and everybody else agrees. When we are poor, we will eat good soup that I will make for you, Nana [mémère].”12 A soldier, an artist, a cook, and an untiring correspondent, Noël was also, by his own description, “the apostle and predicant of the assignats.” Every day, he reported, he preached a sermon on the subject, reminding his fellow volunteers that defending the fatherland (patrie) meant honoring its money, as well. With hindsight, it may seem that everyone in revolutionary France must always have been skeptical of the assignats but Gabriel Noël’s letters tell us otherwise. For him, trusting in the paper’s value was simply part of being a patriot. Emotionally expressed, Noël’s patriotism was nonetheless consciously chosen. As did many others, he dated his letters of 1792 “Year Four,” thereby marking 1789 as the beginning of a new era in both France’s history and his own. A committed constitutionalist who saw either political extreme in animalistic terms—radical journalists did nothing but “bark” and the émigrés were “yapping lapdogs”—Noël understood France’s future as dependent on law and reason. While his fellow volunteers picked the “good old boys [bons garçons]” to be officers, his own ideal candidates were “enlightened, peaceful, and sane minds.”13 From his emotionally charged (yet highly rationalist perspective) others’ rejection of the assignats was a source of both practical difficulties and profound moral dilemmas. For if butchers and bakers did not want to accept payment in assignats, could it really be legal to require them to do so? Deeply anxious that forcing anyone to accept an assignat would violate his or her individual liberty, Noël set out to convert skeptics instead. As the elected head of his mess group, or chambrée, it fell to Noël not only to cook but also to do the grocery shopping. In principle, he was as happy to do the second as the first but the retailers of Sierck discounted assignats by 20 percent or more. Since volunteers were paid in a combi-

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nation of metal and paper, many of his fellow “chiefs” chose to buy communal foodstuffs with coin and left the assignats to the soldiers, but Noël worried that doing so meant others took the loss (about which they inevitably grumbled). He chose, therefore, to pay butchers and bakers with assignats and return coins to his fellow soldiers, even when that left him to cover more than his share of the collective costs. This strategy, born of the same impulse to exemplary self-sacrifice that motivated his soup making, quickly reached its practical limits however. Less than a week after describing it to his godmother, he wrote to her, “I don’t know what to do about the assignats. The butchers and bakers have decided not to take them under any circumstances, even discounted 30 percent. . . . It’s a coup des aristocrates.” After several days of standoff and an appeal by Noël’s commander to the mayor, municipal authorities intervened: they set two legal prices for meat (one for purchases made with coins, the other for those made in assignats) and threatened to shut down any butcher who refused to comply. Relieved when he finally, at 8:30 at night, had something to cook for the next day, Noël was also guilt-ridden and worried. “All of this,” he wrote, “seems to me hardly in keeping with the principles of the Constitution or those of liberty. Can we justly [raisonnablement] force a merchant to sell or not to sell? Isn’t he the master of his merchandise and isn’t it property like anything else?” In anguish, Noël concluded his letter: “I truly fear I have done something that contradicts liberty. I am sorry . . . but what was I supposed to do?”14 Desperate to do the right thing, Noël simply could not. Though volunteers stationed elsewhere might make a great patriotic show of agreeing to be paid completely in assignats, Noël and his fellows were at the border where retailers were all enmeshed in transnational networks.15 The butcher who bought a cow a mile or two away in Luxembourg could not pay for it in assignats and therefore had little cause to accept them from his customers, while tradesmen who sold in the German lands knew they were guaranteed payment in coins. Caught between his literal position on France’s border and his liberal stance on political economy, Noël faced what he rightly called “an invincible difficulty.”16 If merchants had to accept assignats at face value, then they were no longer free to dispose of their property; if merchants were at liberty to refuse the nation’s bills, then the nation’s volunteers would suffer. Individual liberty (so conceived) and the forced circulation of assignats could not be reconciled. The contradiction could be

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resolved only by escaping its terms: Noël reported with relief when it was announced the Army would reduce volunteers’ money salaries and pay them with meat and bread rations instead. Reiterating a lesson he had probably learned from Cérutti’s Feuille villageoise (if not from the editor directly), Noël formulaically told his godmother: “If a merchant sets too high a price, he will not sell and others will find it advantageous to price their goods cheaper. It is in the merchant’s interest to offer his goods at a moderate price in order to attract customers, but he cannot be constrained to do so.” He understood economic life, that is, strictly in terms of individual wills—as long as it was a matter of buying and selling, of consumers and producers, society consisted of autonomous and anonymous beings all of whom were (and ought only to be) motivated by their own interests. Yet when Noël turned his attention to the French nation’s fate, his tone changed considerably. He replied to another of his godmother’s letters From the human point of view, you may be right that it would be best [if war were not declared]. But from the point of view of France and our descendants, I do not think so. Our patriotism languishes; it needs to be heated up. . . . Many of the volunteers here weigh their own interests [intérêt particulier] against that of the fatherland. They grumble about their officers, grumble when they are given orders, complain when they are asked to do the least thing. When I speak to them, I tell them in vain that we are not here to enjoy the pleasures of life, but for the salvation of our threatened fatherland and that we ought to take some trouble for it. . . . This is why I hope fighting breaks out soon.17

Like many other committed supporters of the Revolution, Noël actually lived and breathed both the discourse of “commerce” (which described the behavior of ideal individuals in economic situations) and that of “civic virtue” (which applied to the metaphorical life of the nation). He did not describe his beliefs in those words, of course. Moreover, while the putting into practice of the fi rst contributed significantly to his frustrations—it was the early Revolution’s embrace of extreme commercial liberty and extension of “free market” ideas to money that made Noël’s shopping trips so difficult—he did not see things that way. Rather, like others at the time, he trusted that freedom would allow individuals’ needs and the nation’s well-being to coincide automatically. That it did not was, as Noël’s letters indicate, a source of both practical difficulties and political radicalization.

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In attributing retailers’ refusal of assignats to an “aristocrats’ coup,” Gabriel Noël was not alone. The ever widening gap between new political values (liberty, freedom, national unity) and the no-longer-functioning norms of daily economic life made thinking in terms of plots and villains not just easy but almost necessary. Neither the discourse of politics in and of itself (pace Furet) nor the conditions of material existence alone (pace Soboul), but the disjunction between the two intensified suspicion and heightened moral outrage. Petitioners from the radical and overwhelmingly poor Gobelins section explained this contradiction to the Legislative Assembly: “The abolition of trade barriers promised us a happy future, it showed us the promised land. We were expecting to get there.”18 Since then, however, sugar prices had more than trebled and assignats were discounted by 40 percent—hence they concluded that hoarders and speculators must be at work. Known to historians as part of the “sugar riots” (l’affaire des sucres), the petitioners’ demands actually touched on all aspects of daily commercial life. Sugar was expensive but so too were coffee, bread, and money that everyone else recognized as money and accepted at face value. Taking matters into their own hands, women in the faubourg Saint Marcel (of which the Gobelins section formed a part) seized sugar as it was being transported from the city, sold it at what they considered to be the normal price, and gave the money to the wholesalers to whom the sugar belonged. Elsewhere in the city, women attacked the house of an accused assignat counterfeiter, recently escaped from jail, saying “since they allow all who make fakes to get away, we will take justice into our own hands”—thereby showing the same ethos of monetary self-help that had motivated the sections to issue their own billets. In both contexts, officials tried but largely failed to reclaim authority for themselves. The Paris judiciary attempted to allay popu lar concerns by issuing a statement clarifying the whereabouts of accused counterfeiters—they had never been held in the Conciergerie Prison, it was claimed, but in another, more secure locale—but only a month later, Mercier and Carra’s Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France reported counterfeit assignats were being made in the prison itself.19 In the pages of the Courrier français, Gorsas meanwhile concluded it was “nearly all nobles, gentlemen, and bad priests who counterfeit assignats and pass them into circulation . . . after having hoarded all our money and gobbled up all our coffee and sugar.”20 As tensions continued to grow and several wholesale grocers were pillaged, speakers in the Legislative Assembly and

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the Jacobin Club attempted to calm the unrest by terming sugar and coffee “luxuries” and inviting good patriots to give them up voluntarily—in other words, by acts of individual willpower. That same strategy was of little use when it came to money.21 During the winter and spring of 1792, as calls for war on the Revolution’s enemies mounted, the defense of France and of the assignats became increasingly entangled in many people’s minds. From the German- Swiss border, Gabriel Noël wrote to his godmother that surely his battalion would march within a week, if only to destroy the émigrés’ “fabrique de faux assignats” in Coblenz (reported by Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris in December 1791, the same “counterfeit factory” was later described by Goethe in his Campaign in France).22 In the Legislative Assembly, the former lawyer Joseph Delaunay denounced “a great conspiracy against the assignats.”23 Claims, such as those Roederer made in the Paris Jacobin Club, that the assignats traded at less than face value only because foreigners refused to accept them, took this perspective and made a conspiracy of criminals into a law of international economics. In clubs across France, other Jacobins swore loyalty to the assignats and vowed to shame those who discredited them. The ongoing budget crisis was no reason to avoid war, many argued, since military success would prove the solidity of France’s revolution and force foreigners to take its assignats. A few shots of cannon fire would suffice to clear from German minds any doubts about paper money.24 Restoring full value to the assignats was no one’s primary war aim but nonetheless it featured in nearly all supporting justifications. In a sense, it had to do so, since the still cash-strapped state had no other way of paying for a war. Without assignats, there could be no war; without war, the assignats might depreciate yet further. As Clavière explained in a long article in the Chronique du mois (“On the Conspiracy Against our Finances and the Means of Halting its Effects”), “our territorial money” was the only money France had, such that both individuals’ lives and the Revolution’s success depended upon it. The assignats’ plummeting international value, he proposed, ought to have meant a great rise in French exports, whereas French imports should have dropped to nothing. The resulting foreign-trade imbalance, Clavière insisted, should have had a positive effect on the assignats’ exchange rate; that it had not done so clearly revealed a plot to be at work. “Only by throwing into the fire everything written about the effects of trade imbalances and the causes of

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changing exchange rates; only by rejecting everything written about the advantages of France’s soil . . . only, in short, by denying the sun shines,” he concluded, could one understand the assignats’ discredit as anything other than an act of economic sabotage. Were the French suddenly to become Spartans, they might defeat this conspiracy by outlawing speculation and severely punishing greed, but in their current state, Clavière concluded (shortly before becoming finance minister), “our first financial operation must be a war against the allied princes.”25 For him, as for many other prominent voices, declaring war on the money’s foreign enemies was the most direct and palatable option available. War made it possible to address the ongoing monetary crisis while simultaneously upholding both the economic ideal of individual choice and the political vocabulary of national salvation. No Lacedaemonian self-sacrifice was required. Members of the political elite, such as Clavière, were not completely mistaken when they joined with well-educated patriots (such as Noël) or anonymous sans-culottes in suspecting a conspiracy to discredit the assignats.26 The Revolution did have enemies who did, in fact, endeavor to undermine the currency. Yet even if plots contributed to the assignats’ falling value, their discovery and foiling did little to reverse it. Each new revelation sowed further doubts. With every new poster explaining the identifying features of the latest fake, every merchant had twenty more details to notice (and every counterfeiter had a handy guide to his mistakes).27 In March 1792, the much-discussed arrest of counterfeiters in the Paris suburb of Passy both confirmed people’s suspicions and deepened their concerns. “Is it true,” Noël asked, “that they arrested thirty forgers and are still looking for more?” Rumors—such as those relayed by Marat in his Ami du peuple and by Georges Couthon in his letters—of Marie Antoinette’s personal involvement in the counterfeiting ring made discussions of monetary policy into criticism of the monarchy; as the regime’s dwindling credibility heightened the general anxiety level, the detection and break up of plots seemed all the more urgent. 28 With the spectacular failure of the Maison de Secours, a Paris-based issuer of billets de confiance, at the end of the same month and the declaration of war in April, the crisis became critical. Throughout 1792, fi nancial instability and political collapse fed into each other. Reluctant to imagine “liberty” as potentially problematic, national lawmakers long refused to introduce positive law (that is,

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regulation) as an active tool for building systemic monetary stability. Authorities in various parts of France responded to popular pressure by reregulating the grain trade on an ad hoc basis, but if doing so mollified consumers, it also greatly increased tension between local and national government.29 When ordinary people tried to defend the money they had—by attacking suspected counterfeiters, beating money sellers, imposing their own prices, refusing various bills and coins, or demanding the law making money into merchandise be overturned—they took basic policing functions into their own hands. When elected or appointed officials attempted to resolve such episodes, their own legitimacy was at stake: they had no way to know in advance whether their efforts would be hailed as maintaining liberty or condemned as violating popular sovereignty. As authority fragmented, disputes over its exercise proliferated. Consumers fought with shopkeepers; local officials, attempting to adjudicate such conf licts, often found themselves at loggerheads with national authorities. Within Paris, where neighborhood, municipal, district, and departmental administrations all coexisted but did not coincide (and where, of course, the king lived, the ministries were based, and the nation’s representatives met) the contest over legitimate authority was especially fierce. A polity that could not and would not regulate its currency looked increasingly unstable. The resulting uncertainty about the country’s future made financial security both all the more desirable and much more difficult to attain. Especially after Louis XVI was deposed on August 10, 1792, France experienced a near complete breakdown of governance: there was no king, and the Legislative Assembly, elected as the representative body in a constitutional monarchy, was perforce also obsolete. In the six weeks it took to elect and convene a new body charged both with governing and with drafting the constitution for a kingless France (the National Convention), the central state effectively did not exist—and this at a time when Prussian and Austrian troops were within a hundred miles of the capital and France’s most famous general, Lafayette, had defected to the enemy. Contemplating an unsure and frightening future, people feared for themselves, their families, and their money (much as the Marquis de Ferrières had done in summer 1789). In mid-August, members of the Ponceau section urged renewed attention to the accused counterfeiters held within the capital’s prisons. Some rumors had it that criminals brought their creations with them into captivity; others, that

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production actually continued there—in either case, everyone “knew” counterfeit notes were pouring from the jails. “The lock-up register,” the Révolutions de Paris later concluded, “has for these people been their ticket to impunity. Sheltered within our secure facilities, they pass their time making faux assignats and planning counterrevolution . . . We are supporting an [enemy] army at great cost within our midst.”30 As an immediate mea sure, section Ponceau proposed that prisoners be allowed no visitors and a citizens’ guard be set to watch all jailers; meanwhile the Paris Commune demanded a separate, high-security prison be established exclusively for “counterfeiters and traitors.”31 The following week, hundreds of Parisians stormed into the jails, conducted brief and extralegal “trials,” and then brutally killed over a thousand people. Reporting on the tragic events to the Legislative Assembly, Jean-Lambert Tallien noted the crowds had chosen for their first victims those jailed for defending the monarchy on August 10 and then those accused of counterfeiting assignats—in other words, those seen as actively supporting the former sovereign regime and those equally energetic in undermining the new. “It was,” Tallien concluded, “the just vengeance of the people.”32 A week later, section Ponceau changed its name to “Amis de la Patrie” (“Friends of the Fatherland”). That some of those involved thought they were defending their money and avenging themselves on those who discredited it does not excuse, or even fully explain, the events known now (and shortly after the event) as “the September Massacres.” It does, however, reveal a widely shared attitude, one that resonated as much with highly educated women as it did with the men of the faubourgs. Rosalie Jullien, for example, a solidly middle-aged and middle- class merchant’s daughter, wrote to her husband that all “would have been lost” had it not been for the killings. “I tell you,” she insisted, “it’s the difference of one to a thousand between those victims—people already condemned as murderers or for false assignats—and the likes of Robespierre, Pétion, Dubois- Crancé or . . . you, me, one of the children.”33 Assimilating prominent revolutionaries into the family she defended, Jullien also collapsed the distinction between crimes against persons and crimes against property. Murderers and counterfeiters alike, she believed, deserved the punishments they had received. The prison killings did not, of course, put an end to the monetary and political uncertainty that Jullien and millions of others confronted.

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Six weeks later, with a Republic declared, some battles won, and the National Convention hard at work, Henry Bancal des Issarts (a member of the Convention from Clermont-Ferrand) worried that two ongoing crises—outrage over the collapse of the Paris Maison de Secours and demands for vengeance against Louis XVI—left the city still dangerously agitated. Two months after that, in early January 1793, the physician Nicolas Chambon de Montaux was halfway through his brief stint as mayor of Paris, and he, too, blamed the billets of the Maison de Secours and the trial of the former monarch for causing citywide “fermentation” and “interminable discord.”34 Bancal and Chambon were right: though not causally linked, the literal bankruptcy of the bankers and the metaphorical one of the king had similarly destabilizing effects. The first more obviously disrupted market transactions and the latter transformed political configurations, but both meant daily life certainly did not go on as it had six, nine, or twelve months ago. Instead, everyone—from ordinary working people to Madame Jullien and the members of the Convention itself—faced a world in which neither political authority nor monetary value could be taken for granted. For the Convention, the failure of the Maison de Secours meant legitimating its own rule and asserting authority over money came quickly, yet largely unintentionally, to coincide as goals. Like some number of the other caisses patriotiques, the Maison de Secours had been a private, for-profit enterprise only ever partially disguised as a public ser vice. Never claiming to have a great mass of assignats under lock and key, the Maison’s founders had instead issued billets against their other assets, which they amassed by running two pawn-shop-like operations (“pawnshop-like” insofar as one of them accepted real estate as pledges) and an auction room. Located in central Paris’s financial district, just off the rue Vivienne, and with mass-produced billets printed on the presses of Brissot’s Le Patriote français, the Maison had in barely six months become a fi xture not just in the capital but across much of north and central France. 35 In spring 1792, word of its administrator’s disappearance and presumed emigration provoked consternation in Nevers, alarm in Orléans, panic in the Paris central markets, and a near riot at the spring fair in Beauvais.36 Fearful of another large-scale popular uprising and desperate to calm the crowds, the Legislative Assembly—after a chaotic debate, in which the presiding member twice put on his hat (indicating the

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session had ended) and in which charges of calumny and calls for a rollcall vote were repeatedly shouted across the hall—agreed on an emergency loan of three million livres to the Paris municipal government to cover the value of the billets.37 That sum was gone within months, but billets for at least that amount remained in circulation. At stake in that contentious vote (March 30, 1792) as in the Convention’s later, extended debates over granting more funds to Paris for the same purpose was a version of the conundrum Gabriel Noël faced on the frontiers. The Maison des Secours’ bills had been privately issued; no existing law prohibited them or told people how to react to them. In legal terms, their credibility (or lack thereof ) was purely a matter among individuals, an area in which the state had no concern. Yet the billets were also widely distributed across not just Paris, but the surrounding countryside, Normandy, and even well into Burgundy. They were in the pockets of theatergoers and the hands of fi shwives, in the purses of secondhand- clothing dealers and the cash drawers of provincial grocers.38 By their sheer number, they had become a national phenomenon of sorts or so, at least, argued Paris’s radical mayor Jérôme Pétion (de Villeneuve). “It is not a matter,” Pétion pleaded, “of helping an individual, of protecting a bankrupt. This is about the fate of a crowd of citizens, of workers. . . . Need and public opinion have consecrated these billets . . . and have the effect of law.” For him, as for the Montagnard Jacques-Alexis Thuriot, the bills became “public” by being in the hands of “the public.” What had initially belonged to the domain of individual commerce was now a matter for civic concern. Others, however, argued that those same merchants, workers, and market women were not the sovereign public at all, but merely a collection of private interests. They were some people, but they were not “the people.” The debate split often on regional lines—in March, Jean-Barthélemy Cazes from the Haute Garonne called for a roll-call vote, saying “our constituents [commettants] will see whether the interests of Paris should outweigh those of all the other departments”—but even more crucially over how deputies related individuals’ economic needs to the common, political needs of the nation. When Rosalie Jullien’s husband asked, “How can we reject a petition from a class so deserving of our interest? . . . Don’t we owe them our help?” another member of the Convention replied, “We owe them laws.” And when Jullien insisted that, as the “representatives of the poor and

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the fathers of the people,” the Convention had a duty to back the billets, Ignace Brunel replied that such “laudable sensitivity” should not be allowed to interfere with pursuit of “the general good.”39 As the members of the Convention debated how to define “the public good” in the context of the Maison de Secours’s collapse, the convergence of individualist economics and universal politics could no longer be taken for granted. Instead, the former seemed to stand in the way of the latter as clearly as the butchers and bakers of Sierck had prevented the free circulation of assignats. When Cazes spoke of France’s nonParisian population, he used words (nos commettants) that today translate as “our constituents” but that he and his listeners would have additionally (perhaps chiefly) understood as having commercial significance: commettant, according to the Académie Française’s dictionary of 1762 (as well as the later edition of 1798), was “a business term; he who charges someone else with a task.” Cazes, it seems safe to say, saw the situation as one in which he had been tasked with defending the economic interests of the provinces, interests he saw as distinctly different from those of the capital. Why should tax moneys collected in the south and east go to covering the costs of fraud in Paris? Yet, conversely, why should Paris face further riots and unrest if other cities were peaceful? Even in the capital itself, interests were far from unified. With consumers, retailers, and wholesalers all desperate to spend the Maison’s bills and no one willing to accept them, the “general” (in the sense of what was common among many individuals) and the “public” (in the sense of what was agreed to and shared) most definitely did not coincide. Consumers blamed market women, the market women blamed the wholesale dealers, and the wholesalers blamed the city government of Paris; all could agree only in focusing their anxiety on the Maison’s bills and in directing their anger at the Convention itself. Since all parties legitimated their demands by claiming to speak in the name of the public, the net effect was a further fracturing of authority. In the aftermath of the September Massacres, many in the Convention equated Parisians’ repeated demands with attempted mob rule and delinquent bookkeeping with renewed anarchy. Bernard Lidon’s invoking of martial rule— “We have a law against rebels, we should use it,” he asserted, when the Paris Commune again failed to deliver the Maison’s ledgers—may seem a heavy-handed way of dealing with an overdue audit, but the missing account books in a sense symbolized the more profound breakdown of ac-

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countability produced by the ongoing revolution itself. The Paris Commune that petitioned the National Convention for aid in October was literally not the same body as the municipal government that had borrowed money from the Legislative Assembly in April; when the Convention demanded to see the municipality’s books, the members of the Commune therefore denied they had any responsibility for those accounts. No one, it appeared, was responsible for the Maison’s bankruptcy; no one would pay its bills. Facing the very real threat of further insurgency but with no consensus among its own members, the Convention responded in early November 1792 with mea sures effectively dividing France along class, rather than regional, lines. Pierre-Joseph Cambon, a former merchant from Montpellier and one of the Convention’s acknowledged fi nancial experts, presented a draft decree on the billets. Less than two months earlier, he had assured his colleagues that no “positive law” would be required to drive the billets de confiance from circulation—they would “disappear” automatically once enough small-denomination assignats entered circulation. In contrast, after six weeks of dealing with the renewed Maison de Secours crisis, Cambon’s own attitude and that of the Convention had moved significantly away from free trade in money. Quickly voted into law, the new decree outlawed any further billets, called on those who had issued them to destroy the plates from which they had been printed, and prohibited their use in commerce as of January 1793. Anyone releasing new billets would be charged with counterfeiting and subject to the death penalty; anyone still holding a billet in 1793 would have no right to demand its reimbursement. If, in the aftermath of the Maison disaster, no one imagined every issuer of bills actually had the requisite sum in assignats safely locked away, the “interests of the public trea sury” nonetheless mandated that the nation itself would not cover the costs of redeeming the billets. Instead, in every instance in which accounting revealed a shortfall of funds, a progressive forced loan would be introduced to recover the sums necessary from the local rich. Wealthy Parisians should pay for Paris’s scoundrels as affluent Toulousians covered their own city’s crooks. In voting to ban all billets de confiance, the Convention generalized from one par tic u lar case (the 10,213,500 livres’ worth issued by the Paris Maison de Secours) to all instances of “private” papers.40 The Convention defi ned all the bills— even those issued by public entities such as

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municipalities, districts, or departments—as the product of private enterprise. In so doing, it asserted itself as the only legitimate monetary authority, an apparent simplification that in the context provoked further conflict and greatly complicated the process of getting the former billets out of circulation.41 Since all the billets de confiance had to be removed and since all had been issued by different “private” interests, each individual bill had to be returned to its own issuer in order to be redeemed for small-denomination assignats. The merchant in the Nièvre who had them from Besançon, Riom, and Melun; the innkeeper in Rennes who had accepted bills issued in Nantes and Saint Malo; the volunteer garrisoned in Champagne who had them from his home district in Brittany—all had to send off their money and hope to get some assignats in return.42 Petitioners from Varzy (Nièvre) were among the many to recognize the complexity of the resulting process and to plead for an extension to the January 1793 deadline. “Commerce,” they wrote, “has carried many billets far from their birthplace”; it would take time to “return these lost children to their true fathers.” Many districts were, in fact, still sending bills (most for no more than a few sous) back to their issuers more than two years later.43 Had the bills—initially hailed by the National Assembly as evidence that individual initiative could solve a national problem (that “commerce,” in effect, was “civic virtue”)—been categorized not as private but as just so many different manifestations of a single general phenomenon, the situation would have been far simpler. Administrators in the Côtes-du-Nord, for instance, observed to other departments, “The fraternity that unites all true republicans makes it a duty for us to support each other,” and proposed they all agree to convert each others’ billets (as well as their own) into assignats.44 Logistically much more straightforward, this proposal was nonetheless politically unthinkable. For by invoking “fraternity” and suggesting the bills be treated as each others’ siblings, the Breton authorities implied a common parentage among them. That parentage, of course, could only be that of the sovereign nation, the very entity in whose name the billets were being withdrawn in the first place. Throughout the first years of the French Revolution, many had genuinely seen the nation’s shared well-being and individuals’ economic selfinterests working hand in hand. Their vision for the future may have often been self-contradictory but it was not hypocritical. As Patrice

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Higonnet has pithily observed, “Bourgeois universalists were, before all else, bourgeois individualists.” Comparable tensions can hence be found animating many other aspects of revolutionary change: divorce, for instance, was legalized in the name of allowing individuals to enter and exit contracts at will, but many saw its actual practice as endangering the family, the Republic’s basic building block.45 The monetary case proved especially vexed, since the metaphorical bonds of national unity were also a material necessity for the state. To pay clerks, administrators, or soldiers; to build bridges, canals, or telegraph systems; to supply the army with horses or the National Convention’s committees with pens— all required money. The discrediting of the assignats affected the Republic as a functioning entity in much the same way it did ordinary French men and women. If some individual representatives were shielded by stores of personal and familial wealth, the Convention as a body was not. Even as its members claimed to be motivated only by concern for the general good, its Finance Committee’s reports made the state’s specific economic interests only all too apparent. When Cambon, in spring 1793, finally moved that the money trade be outlawed, he did so saying the Republic could no longer afford to buy gold and silver coins at the going rate. Opposed by the Girondins Vernier and Genissieu and repeatedly interrupted by the Committee of Public Safety’s report on the remaining members of the royal family, Cambon persisted, insisting that nothing less than “the salvation of the state” was at stake in banning the sale of money and decreeing the Republic would pay its suppliers only in assignats. Backed by Robespierre’s extremely brief intervention, “the state must be saved [il faut que la chose publique marche],” Cambon’s proposals passed into law with little further debate—and no mention of the petitioners who had for two years begged for such mea sures.46

Money: Stuff and Politics In the face of war, civil war, and the nearly complete collapse of governance in some parts of western and southern France, the National Convention began its existence with little political or monetary authority. Instead, created by repeated instances of popular mobilization and crowd violence in summer 1792, the Republic long risked being undone by the same means. Struggling to establish a monopoly over the use of force (on the battlefields and in the streets), the new Republic similarly

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fought to position itself as the sole legitimate maker of money. Both confl icts meant expanding the French state’s previous role. As Jean- Clément Martin has noted in his book on “the Terror,” little of the violence endemic to eighteenth-century culture—the duels of noblemen, the brutality of the slave trade, the brawls of drunken apprentices—had been truly controlled by the state. The same can be said of paper money. Paper had circulated widely in Old Regime France, but most of it had been private and none of it had been forced. For the purposes of economic life (payments to be made, debts to be honored, deals to be struck), a host of instruments—rentes contracts, obligations, bills of exchange—functioned basically as money. If they did not have the same legal status as the coin of the realm (they could not be used for tax payments, for instance, and a forged signature on a bill of exchange did not constitute lese majesty), they nonetheless were a familiar means of exchange. The proliferation of billets de confiance and other quasi-public papers in the first years of the Revolution needs to be understood in this context, as does the depreciation of the assignats. When the National Convention finally moved to claim that only its paper constituted money and that the assignats had to circulate on an equal footing with coins, it did so defensively, not offensively, and from weakness rather than strength. Over the first years of the Revolution, nonstate entities such as the issuers of billets de confiance inadvertently competed with the central government for monetary legitimacy. Used to pay workers or for retail purchases, the billets at first remained in the domain of the private economy and encountered little official resistance. Yet when it came time to fulfi ll a Frenchman’s “most sacred duty,” many felt certain the billets ought to be accepted for tax payments as well. That the billets were not accepted slowed the rate at which taxes were paid and worsened relations between local populations, local tax collectors, and the central state. Simultaneously, revolutionary governments further undermined their own authority by defending the free trade in money, thereby allowing the paper they issued (and accepted for tax payments) to lose value in comparison to gold and silver coins. In autumn 1792, ordinary people’s experience of dealing with the currency crisis largely on their own came into abrupt confl ict with the newly declared Republic’s attempt to claim a monopoly on issuing currency. The billets, hailed only a year earlier as a commendable show of patriotism, were now rejected as “unfaithful and wanton money.”47

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Unintentionally weakened from within, the French state’s monetary authority was challenged much more deliberately from without by its political and military enemies. Emigré armies on France’s eastern borders carried “assignats” that announced themselves as “backed [hypothéqués] by the properties of Jacobins” (local revolutionaries scoffed in response that true Jacobins had no property). In the western provinces of the Vendée and Brittany, rebels made much more sustained attacks on monetary sovereignty. Members of the “Royal and Catholic Army” systematically passed counterfeit assignats and altered republican ones.48 Even as they occupied villages and pillaged houses, they asserted their own legitimacy by carefully performing outward shows of formal legality. They issued receipts and promulgated decrees, always making sure to specify they acted in the name of France’s rightful king (the child, Louis XVII, coincidentally in the second year of his “reign” in the Year Two) and of “Jesus Christ crucified.” By mimicking the state, its opponents both mocked the Republic and claimed authority for themselves. Counterfeiters, too, used the arts of imitation to challenge the Republic. What sort of sovereign was it, after all, whose money could be so easily reproduced? In a basement off London’s Sloane Square, Calonne’s brother and son-in-law directed dozens of émigré priests as they printed counterfeit assignats. Chastised by the former bishop of St. Pol de Léon for their “odious, shameful” and clearly illegal activities, they replied they had done nothing wrong. The original assignats, they averred, were the illegal ones. “The paper money of rebels and regicides,” argued one émigré clergyman, “cannot be anything other than a fake sustained by force, violence, and the violation of property.”49 The logic of this argument was one of simple inversion: if the assignats themselves were illegitimate, then imitations of them were perfectly legal. Those issuing the “true” assignats were the real criminals, since they had usurped the right to make money from the king and stolen the biens nationaux from the Church. The priestly counterfeiters saw themselves not as secular criminals but as Christian martyrs, doing whatever was necessary to restore the one true faith to France and its rightful possessions to the Church. Faced with a host of deliberate, as well as many much less intentional, challenges, the revolutionary state attempted to legitimate itself by making the assignats the only legitimate money. 50 Like the petitioners who recommended making the assignats a different shape or advocated knitting them from silken thread, many legislators understood

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the material and the symbolic as intimately related and identified changes to the bills’ physical form as the most effective way of increasing their value. From their loosely Lockean perspective, an individual’s right to dispose of his property inhered in the definition of both “individual” and “property”—actively prohibiting the sale or refusal of assignats would therefore have been a violation of human rights. Yet it was also a central tenet of this world view that all complex ideas were based on sensory perceptions. It followed that altering objects ought to transform individuals’ responses to them, and it should do so without requiring any “interference” in the workings of the market. New printing techniques would forestall doubts mechanically; new devices would render counterfeit detection a matter of simple routine. As they mandated new guidelines for making money, lawmakers envisioned trust in its value emerging automatically, without obvious coercion or even the passing of time. Ideologically averse to regulating use or consumption, legislators moved toward regulating production instead.

The needs of the state eventually persuaded the members of the Convention to renounce their commitment to free trade in money (April 1793). Before then, however, confl icts over the assignats’ physical form had turned bitter, even deadly, since it seemed only through perfecting the material objects could their exchange value be enhanced. Yet the demands of mass production immediately invalidated most existing understandings of “perfection” and created seemingly endless logistical hurdles. For example, the December 1791 decision to replace many large-denomination assignats with ones for fifty sous or less entailed the production and distribution of at least 280,000,000 new objects. Meanwhile, the roughly 30,000,000 hundred-livre assignats already in circulation had to be accepted in exchange, stamped in three places as “annulled,” counted, bundled, sent to Paris, counted again, and then burnt. (On average, this should have translated into each official “annulled” stamp being used 300,000 times.) A year later, over thirty million livres’ worth of cancelled bills filled the National Trea sury to the point of overflowing. Protesting they had no time to verify that the chests and barrels they had received actually contained the supposed amount (31,692,380 livres, 10 sous, and 3 deniers) or that each bill had been appropriately stamped, the staff of the assignat burning office (bureau de brûlement)

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had refused to accept them and instead sent them back to the Trea sury for storage. 51 As the work of exchanging, stamping, and burning dragged on, legislators raised their voices to call for an even more extensive refonte (literally, melting down and reminting) of existing assignats. First outlined by Claude Dorizy on behalf of the Assignat and Coinage Committee in early February 1792, the new goal was to foil the Revolution’s counterfeiting enemies (“those who spare no means to return us to the Old Regime”) with “procedures unknown to other nations.” Planning to use technology to fight a political battle, the report called for creating assignats both easy to recognize and, nonetheless, impossible to imitate. To make objects that could be readily seen but never reproduced would require dividing production into steps, breaking manufacture down into “several procedures that follow one after the other.” Marked with an embossing stamp that would itself be the product of chance (the die having been cracked in an acid bath before use) and hence impossible to reproduce, the newly perfected assignats—like the report itself—would be the work of an entire team of artists and scientists. 52 Envisioned as a fully collaborative effort, such that no one involved could repeat the entire process on his own, the manufacture of assignats became in Dorizy’s report the utopian underside of alienated, divided, labor. Heretofore, “perfecting” assignat production had depended largely on layering one technique on another. This multiplication of possible sites of truth and falsehood had made the assignat code increasingly difficult to decipher. When Roederer, as Paris city prosecutor, named a special committee of experts to deal with suspected counterfeiting, he therefore appointed (among others) paper manufacturers (including both Reveillon and a rival wallpaper magnate, Robert-Jean-Jacques Arthur); engravers (Gatteaux, Saint Aubin, and Lorthior); printers (AnissonDuperron and Gorsas); and the city’s preeminent typecaster (Firmin Didot) as well as the artist Jacques-Louis David and a sizeable presence from the Académie des sciences (the chemists Berthollet and Lavoisier and the mathematician-economist Vandermonde). Since the first assignats were in so many ways hybrids, all these experts proved necessary: no individual was sufficient. Yet getting these forms of technical know-how to work together also required building political coalitions and making personal compromises, neither of which was easy in 1792–1795. The meetings of Roederer’s committee (if, indeed, it held any) cannot have

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been particularly “fraternal”: it included two men eventually executed for their ties to the Old Regime, another guillotined as a Girondin, and two who achieved considerable notoriety as “terrorists.” Though it called for the continued participation of France’s premier talents, Dorizy’s report—voted into law that same morning—therefore anticipated shifting veracity into a different register, one in which the great names would be anonymized and mechanical exactitude would transcend factional politics. Throughout the months that followed, this desire to overcome the most clearly human elements of assignat production reappeared in a variety of guises. In spring 1793, for instance, the Convention contracted with the instrument maker Jean-Godefroy Mercklein to supply every tax collector’s office in the Republic with a “machine for verifying assignats.” Patented by Mercklein, the new device was a grid or template to be placed over any suspect bill. By covering most of an assignat, the “machine” directed the observer’s eye to a few key spaces and a few crucial elements. If the emboss stamp did not appear centered in the circle provided for it, if the words “Domaines Nationaux” did not fit in their designated rectangle, if the lettering leaned too far to the left or right—then the bill being checked was almost certainly a fake. Designed as a way of easily ensuring a note’s authenticity, the device (Mercklein argued) would produce uniformity in the nation’s population as well. Experts, such as those Roederer had named, would no longer be necessary. “Any man who just has some common sense [tout homme qui n’a que du bon sens],” wrote Mercklein, could use the machine and detect “at a glance and without difficulty, even the most minor differences. . . .” The tool would standardize perception: “It will be the same from one corner of the Republic to the other . . . and even if they are a hundred miles apart, two verifiers working on counterfeits from a single source will write identical reports.” So obvious were the advantages of this “mechanical and certain means to keep the eyes from straying,” that Mercklein could only blame a “disastrous coalition” of his enemies when the Finance Committee repudiated his contract and left him unpaid for his labors. 53 Perfect uniformity, both of bills and of people, remained a powerful fantasy for the assignats’ producers, an ideal made only all the more appealing by the sheer, frustrating impossibility of putting it into effect. In the case of Mercklein, not his professional or political rivals but the directors of assignat manufacture themselves explained to the Convention

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that the regularity on which his machine was premised simply should not be predicated of actual assignats. Since the paper had to be dampened before printing, shrinkage was inevitable and also inconsistent; since the paper was rolled between two cylinders for stamping, slippage occurred and the emboss stamp was often irregularly placed. In short, even among the true assignats, there was “infi nite variety” in everything except the sovereign body authorizing them. And that body’s own claim to sovereignty was hardly unchallenged. In the face of the overwhelming variety of money-objects produced in the Revolution’s first years, the fantasy of uniformity was nonetheless too strong to go away. In the following winter, it reappeared in a more streamlined guise with the promise that the newest assignats could be quickly verified by “superposition”: Any assignat will serve as an instrument to verify any other of the same denomination. . . . This process is as easy as it is fast and certain. Simply place two assignats of the same sum one on top of the other, so the light and dark areas produced by printing line up and cover each other to the point of blending into one. Held up to a lamp or to the daylight, they will present to the eye only a single image. All parts of the two bills coinciding one by one, the result is a fast, simultaneous, and perfect comparison attesting to the validity of the two assignats. 54

Whereas earlier assignats had been produced by combining typography with copperplate engraving and manuscript signatures, those newly created in the Year Two used the novel technique of polytypage to print each assignat in its entirety from a single plate. With polytyping— or, as it is usually called in English, stereotyping—the typesetter combined the various elements of a single printed page in a frame and pressed the entire thing into a bed of softened clay or plaster. When the latter hardened, it was used as a mold and from it a cast was made of the whole page. That cast, rather than the original elements, was then used to print the assignats. As one of the first historians of the technique described it, “there was no disparity to fear between printings . . . the plate formed in the mold was all of a single piece, like the planks of wood with which they made engravings in the 1440s. . . . But the characters in the metal plate are not irregular like those in a woodcut; they are as equal and identical as any typesetter’s letters in a particular size and font.”55 In the stereotyped assignat, movable type was immobilized—rendered as immovable as land in an effort to fi x value as well.

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Figure 19. The first notes supposedly susceptible to verification by superposition reveal their own status as fantasies by the text they bear: “Created by law of the seventh of Vendémiaire Year Two”—a date that existed only proleptically, since the republican calendar was not created until more than a month later.

Translating the recurrent ideal of standardization into something vaguely like reality by early spring 1794 required using politics to resolve technological disputes and technology to silence political opposition. Major changes—centralizing production, disciplining the work force, depersonalizing manufacture—did not happen overnight or without confl ict. Throughout spring 1792, for instance, Etienne Clavière and others who supported centralized assignat production as faster, more cost efficient, and more secure competed with those concerned that the assignats should not be treated as a routine part of state administration. The latter argued that the assignats, originally monetized as an emergency mea sure and meant to exist only for so long as there were biens nationaux to be sold, were intrinsically a temporary expedient. To standardize production would mean monumentalizing them, not finishing the Revolution but expanding it. 56 In June, with war declared and security concerns paramount, the former triumphed. Claims for safety, speed, and “perfec-

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tion” henceforth trumped those arguments framed with reference to original purpose. Yet for more than a year previous (November 1790–June 1792), the pressures on assignat production had been more centrifugal than centralizing. Paper manufacture had spread to four sites in the greater Paris area, and as many printers had taken over from Anisson-Duperron’s presses in the Louvre. If some printing contracts, such as that to Pierre Didot, were awarded on the basis of professional prominence, political motives contributed to other decisions. While historian Carla Hesse describes Didot as “the eldest son in the most distinguished branch in the greatest family in eighteenth-century French typography and printing,” the same could hardly be said of other assignat printers such as CharlesRobert Patris (who in 1789 quit his job as a schoolmaster to become a full-time revolutionary) or Anne Elizabeth Marais, the widow LeJay (who had been Mirabeau’s publisher and one of his many mistresses). 57 For all of them, whether they printed assignats from political commitment or from familial pride, the job both provided a source of income and guaranteed regular dealings with government officials who might have other, potentially lucrative, contracts to offer. At a time when the deregulation of the book trade had hit many of the capital’s most established publishing houses especially hard, these were not minor considerations: Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours may have been one of the National Assembly’s most outspoken and consistent critics of paper money, but he still set up one of his sons in the printing business and got him hired to print the ten-sous assignats. 58 With the decision to centralize assignat production, the various printers, printers’ assistants, compositors, and foremen were physically moved from their scattered workshops into the former Capucine Convent just off the Place Vendôme (the site, in the late 1790s, of Robertson’s famous “Phantasmagoria” show).59 No reconsideration of “free market” ideology accompanied this initial concentration of production in a single building, however. Instead, though their manufacture was no longer spread across Paris, the assignats continued to be printed by private firms on the basis of contracts awarded over the past year. Each denomination had its own separate atelier and individual printers still covered incidental costs, hired their own workers, and competed with each other for further work. It was with real pride, verging on smugness, that Irénée Dupont reported only his workers were so collegial that they dined to-

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gether after a day spent in mandatory patriotic festivities and had been joined by the director of the whole establishment.60 Some of those who moved to the Capucines did not come from printers’ shops, however. Instead, they came from the offices and outposts of the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire, where all assignats had been embossed, numbered, and signed since the bills’ creation in winter 1790.61 For these men, moving location also meant a change in job status, as they went from being royal functionaries to state-employed manufacturing workers. Resisting what was, in effect, a form of proletarianization, they quickly orga nized among themselves. They complained when the director doubled the number of inspectors named to survey their work; they protested loudly when fines for missing or miscounted assignats were subtracted from their pay; and they fought bitterly against the mechanization of their work. Loudly and repeatedly they denounced the “notary’s clerk” Simon François Delamarche, whom Finance Minister Clavière had appointed as director of assignat manufacture in late summer 1792.62 In attacking Delamarche, the signers, numberers, and their allies used the common revolutionary strategy of transforming biographical details into evidence of concerted misdoing. Delamarche had, they said, been saddened by the violence required to overthrow the monarchy; he had gone with suspicious ease from being a notary’s second clerk to administrative prominence; and he had run the city’s central office where assignats were exchanged for small change, instead of leaving that work for each section to manage on its own. While some of the accusations levied—such as that he mentioned his mother fondly but never referred to his father—are obvious pretenses, others entangled workplace grievances with personal enmities and maneuvering for local political power.63 Delamarche’s administration subjected these men to forms of shopfloor discipline (such as fines) they had not previously encountered, but it is also clear that his putative Assistant Director Vincent Ollivault Duplessis was out to get him from the beginning. Differences of temperament certainly played a considerable part: the meticulous archives and careful accounts Delamarche produced as director of the smallchange office suggest a man with few overt political commitments but strong dedication to his job. In contrast, Ollivault Duplessis and others who denounced Delamarche, such as James Rutledge of the Cordeliers Club, were great spinners of projects and seekers of public attention.64 Delamarche regularly worked late into the night and often cited his

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responsibilities when declining social invitations, while his attackers spent much of their time in political clubs (and, if Delamarche’s supporters are to be believed, napping in their desk chairs).65 In short, while the director’s attitudes and talents may have been ideal for running the municipal small-change office with its eighteen employees, transposed to a barely converted convent with nearly a thousand workers they revealed him as a perfectionist unwilling to delegate tasks and ill-suited to managing troublemakers. By the time he was guillotined in November 1793 in the company of Madame Roland, the specific charges against him barely mattered. Caught in the factional conflicts of the first year of the Republic, Simon François Delamarche went to his death because of his links with Clavière and other Girondin “conspirators.”66 For months previous, however, his accusers had attacked him for introducing engraved and printed signatures onto assignats. This charge was patently false—the National Assembly had approved their use on five-livre assignats in June 1791 and those bills had been in circulation for almost a year before Delamarche was appointed—but its remarkably broad traction indicates the sorts of resistance provoked by the increasingly centralized production of paper money. The controversy was not over replacing coins with paper but one paper with another. Robert Jean-Jacques Arthur, a Paris wallpaper manufacturer and committed political radical (later executed as a terrorist), first accused Delamarche of debasing the assignats with printed signatures in a speech to the Paris Jacobin Club, and Tallien (another terrorist, though one who survived Thermidor) then repeated the charge on the floor of the National Convention. Several months later, however, not the Montagnards but their “federalist” enemies in Nantes, Caen, and elsewhere demanded a return to the hand signing and numbering of assignats.67 Creating more uniform currency by standardizing manufacture altered workplace relations and violated many people’s understanding of how paper money worked. The use of engraved signatures touched a nerve both among Paris militants who advocated some sort of direct democracy and among provincials who accused Paris of tyranny. Sworn enemies of each other, the two parties nonetheless converged in seeing changes to the assignats’ physical production as evidence of despotism and grounds for protest, denunciation, and even the death penalty. The two groups used the matter to their own ends, of course. In the former

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case, personal interests played a significant part in mobilizing individuals against Delamarche: the assignat signers and numberers had jobs on the line, Ollivault Duplessis wanted to be promoted, and Arthur had formerly been almost flirtatiously friendly with Delamarche (writing it was more difficult to see or make an appointment with him than with a pretty woman). Those grievances alone did not suffice to get Delamarche arrested and imprisoned, however.68 In fact, the first complaints against him, concentrating specifically on the mechanical numbering of bills (which Delamarche did actually introduce), fell largely on deaf ears. For while the numbering device was a more innovative technology—it produced difference whereas the engraved signatures simply ensured sameness—it challenged fewer cultural expectations. In eighteenth- century France (and elsewhere), men and women assumed signatures associated with large sums of money belonged lawfully to specific individuals; numbers did not. Laid- off assignat numberers therefore found it difficult to make their complaints into a politically compelling case until they added their voices to the chorus protesting the use of engraved signatures on large-denomination assignats. Like other denunciations, the charges against Delamarche specified an enemy. In this case, they made him personally responsible for what had been a collective, legislative decision.69 Arthur began his accusation on this point: “Today,” he told his fellow Jacobins with horror, “the manufacture of assignats has been entrusted to a single individual.” Treating Delamarche’s position as itself grounds for concern, Arthur’s opening resonated with claims about the division of labor’s security-enhancing benefits and at the same time expressed implicitly democratic sentiments. Repeated insistently—“I ask you if making the signs that represent the totality of public wealth should be in the hands of only one man?” Arthur demanded elsewhere in his brief speech—this language defined individual responsibility as a central focus for worries about the assignats.70 In the words of other petitioners, Delamarche was “the author of all the disorder” and the Genevan Clavière must “truly hate the French to confide this administration, the most important in the Republic, to a single man [italics in the original].” 71 Slipping seamlessly from Delamarche’s role in assignat manufacture to the names on the bills themselves, the accusations continued to circle obsessively around the question of personal responsibility. The assignats, they protested, depended for their credibility on signatures; in their understanding, bills belonged

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by definition to an authored genre. “Unless he were known to be mad,” asked another of Delamarche’s critics, “what would . . . [we say] of a merchant who issued bills of exchange without a signature?”72 At stake in the attacks on Delamarche as the “only author” of the nation’s paper was hence not a rejection of individual responsibility but a continued fetishization of it. Like the petitioners whose proposals so infuriated Périsse Duluc in 1790–1791, Delamarche’s enemies implied that the assignats were really bills of exchange. As such, they ought to be issued not by an abstraction like the nation but by named individuals. In both their depiction of Delamarche’s role and their account of the assignats’ functioning, such denunciations produced individual authors where they had not previously existed.73 After all, it had been an anonymous vote in the Constituent Assembly that introduced the offending technology. And even before summer 1791, when the assignats had been individually signed in ink, no referential relationship had tied the signature on a bill to the person bearing that name. In the words of a decree naming thirty men to sign assignats: “. . . notwithstanding their signatures, the above-named are not obliged [engagés] for any sum.”74 The signatures on assignats may have looked like those found on bills of exchange, but they did not signify the same source of legitimacy. For while the manuscript scrawl on a bill of exchange identified some particular individual as accountable, those on an assignat did no such thing. Rather, the signatures on an assignat were much more like the women’s names the Royal Lottery had printed on its tickets in the 1770s and 1780s. On those tickets, names were paired with numbers as antifraud devices: it was easy enough for a ticket holder to alter a printed number (a single pen stroke could make a 0 into a 9), but it was far more complicated to alter a number and a word. A 63 on a printed ticket could easily be transformed into a 68, but the name beside it would still be “Julie” (whereas 68 was actually paired with “Perrine”). “Julie” did not exist—any more than did Rousseau’s heroine by that name—but her name could both prompt reverie on the part of ticket buyers and ensure a 63 was really a 63.75 In a similar fashion, the words “Jean Philippe Chrétien” written in a distinctive script helped to guarantee a piece of paper was an assignat for two thousand livres but it mattered very little which human being went by that name. Signatures on an assignat guaranteed the “identity” of that piece of paper; they verified it, but they did not refer back to the signers. The labor process in assignat signing, in short, was divided and

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alienated long before it was mechanized. It was also, however, specifically designed to look as if it were not. It was an error to assert any single individual had ever backed an assignat and it was a fantasy to lay responsibility for the use of engraved signatures on Simon François Delamarche. Taken together, however, the two claims made their own sort of compelling truth: the former made Delamarche’s “crime” far more heinous, while the latter made said crime easier to address. In February 1793, citing “the public interest” and “the efforts directed against [him],” Delamarche resigned as director of assignat manufacture. Jailed for months, he was briefly set free, then rearrested and executed on the eighteenth of Brumaire, Year Two.76 The controversy over engraved signatures displaced technological change onto politics and made factional confl icts an effective, if bloody and exaggerated, way of dealing with workplace disputes. It made power struggles into points of principle and conflated personal authority with literal, metaphorical, and legal authorship (the latter only recently defined by copyright law). It also diverted attention from the truly fundamental changes in production and workplace orga nization introduced by Girondins and Montagnards alike. Physically centralized under the former, assignat production was soon thereafter fully nationalized on the basis of a report presented by Augustin Frécine and endorsed by CharlesLouis Antibole. No longer contracting with printers, the state bought 400 presses (at a time when the largest privately owned publishing business had twenty-seven) and began hiring workers directly. Delamarche’s former job was divided among multiple offices, and the posts were filled as much on the basis of political credentials as on that of professional expertise.77 As of spring 1793, all new bills carried engraved and stamped, rather than manuscript, signatures. Three years later, when assignat manufacture ceased, more signature stamps were destroyed (12,408 of them) than anything else.78 By the end of the Year Two, assignat production employed over a thousand people. (Five years earlier, the number had been under ten.) Though at least one worker died on his shift and many others protested either at being locked into the building for the entire workday or kept out of it when they arrived a few minutes late, their protests met with little sympathy.79 Instead, assignat manufacture—like the armaments industry—was declared a matter of national security. Laws prohibited

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printers and papermakers (like gunsmiths and armorers) from leaving their positions; doing so was the equivalent of a soldier deserting his post and could bring comparable penalties. Pushed into law by two men whose later political trajectories could not have been more different (Antibole was guillotined as a Girondin, while the firmly Montagnard Frécine eventually committed suicide in despair when Napoleon proclaimed his empire), the nationalization of assignat manufacture was simultaneously democratizing and repressive. 80 The differences in production qualities that had once distinguished large- denomination assignats from the smaller-value ones disappeared. Yet creating a single French money, a paper everybody ought to see and use in the same way (in other words, a democratized and democratizing paper), entailed regulating production ever more tightly. The perfect identity of objects recommended by Lavoisier and other experts as the “infallible touchstone” of the assignats required trading artisanal individualization for mass production and conscious elements of difference for mechanically reproduced sameness.81 It was as if money, in order to be of use to all of the people, could bear the trace of none of them. What the Republic required was not just a symbol, but a mass-produced commodity. While either might move and circulate throughout society as if made by no one, only the latter could guarantee the absolute uniformity that lawmakers saw as the best protection against both counterfeiting and speculation. If, as Ken Alder posits in his study of the eighteenth-century weapons industry, an artifact’s success depends on “the extent to which its design already takes into account the diverse circumstances in which it will be used,” then individuals must have envisioned the assignats’ circumstances in different and competing ways.82 Stereotypy and other new technologies addressed the widespread concern with counterfeiting, but they also violated many people’s expectations that some specific individual lurked behind each piece of circulating paper. Even after the introduction of printed signatures, those who used the notes persisted in identifying them with named individuals. The five-livre bills issued in 1791 and 1792, for instance, were widely called “corsets” because they had all been “signed” by one Jean Corsel whose l looked much like a t. 83 As late as spring 1795, corsets brought a considerable premium in the money trade, reportedly circulating for twice their face value.84 While republican lawmakers asserted that misguided citizens cherished the corsets

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because of their embossed stamp depicting Louis XVI, it seems just as plausible that people responded to them because their signatures were familiar. Issued after the debates of May–June 1791, the corsets had been the first assignats to carry stamped signatures. Mass produced, basically uniform, and widely circulated, the corsets were, by 1795, recognizable in a way that later issues were not. Endeavoring to foil counterfeiters, the men who replaced Delamarche as directors of assignat manufacture shuffled the stamped and engraved surnames appearing on the bills, reusing some on different denominations. While every assignat signed “Bancey” (for instance) bore exactly the same “signature”—with its curious first letter that resembles an F as much as a B—some bills with that name were good for five livres, others for 10,000 francs. Individuals accustomed to scrutinizing bills closely almost certainly would have found randomized signatures (chosen, we know, by chance) more alarming than reassuring.85

The Convention attempted to establish the assignats as France’s only paper money and ongoing efforts aimed at making the assignats them-

Figure 20. Five-livre assignats came to be widely known as “corsets”—not for their waist-shaping properties but because of the signature they bore.

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selves more uniform. Heterogeneity in general, we might want to conclude from these two examples, had become more threatening than desirable, more to be feared than celebrated. Such an analysis would fit neatly with much other scholarship on the Terror, for historians have often treated it as arising from French republicanism’s abstract universalism and intolerance of difference. David Bell, for instance, has argued that radical revolutionaries saw all diversity as “a deadly source of division.” Tracing their reactions to the model provided by the Catholic Reformation, Bell suggests revolutionaries designed educational policy and cultural institutions with the single goal of creating a more orthodox population. “The legislators in question,” he concludes, “cared remarkably little about giving the French the intellectual tools to act as free, independent citizens. They wanted, rather, . . . to reshape [them] according to a particular, predetermined idea of what a good republican state required.”86 As it moved from Saint Aubin’s painstakingly individualized engravings to the uniformity of signature stamps, assignat manufacture certainly seems to have followed the general trend toward orthodoxy and sameness that Bell and others have identified. The causal factors at work had little to do with classical republicanism’s “particular, predetermined ideas” of what a citizenry should be, however. During the first three years of the Revolution, French men and women had in fact been actively encouraged “to act as free, independent citizens” when it came to money; they responded by issuing their own papers, minting their own tokens, and even making their own decisions about what currencies to accept and at what rate to discount them. The National and Legislative Assemblies’ extreme version of monetary liberalism (shared by the Convention in its first months) allowed the varieties of currency in circulation to proliferate. Certain the market alone would eventually guarantee that assignats and coins traded on par, revolutionary legislators repeatedly refused to intervene in the political and interpersonal dynamics of the money trade. Instead, misrecognizing social conflict as a design flaw, they focused on changing the money objects. If all assignats were perfectly identical, no one would have any basis for preferring one to another. Market mechanisms (the free trade in money) would paradoxically triumph at the moment when there was nothing left to exchange. Historians have heretofore rarely noted the role played by the freemarket illusion in radicalizing the Revolution. 87 True for monetary

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policy, this was the case for other commercial questions as well. Throughout 1793, Jacques Roux and others who advocated outlawing the trade in money also repeatedly called for state-imposed price controls. Eventually decreed in the form of the “Maximum” on grain prices (May 1793) and then on prices for all “necessities” (September 1793), such legislation was long resisted in the name of defending the free market against unnatural interventions. When Marat, with his trademark hyperbolic venom, called on the people of Paris “to pillage a few warehouses and hang a couple hoarders,” he did so because he considered this sort of exemplary punishment less coercive than the state regulation of prices.88 In the August-September 1793 debates, lawmakers explicitly stated that however severely speculators and hoarders might be punished, passing and enforcing laws against them would be far less “violent” than price controls. Executing human beings, argued Girondins such as Féraud and Ramel-Nogaret, was preferable to violating the natural laws of the market. Only Danton, with his talent for verbal prestidigitation found a way to combine an appeal to the natural order with actual support for price controls. “Nature has not abandoned us, let us not abandon the people,” he proclaimed (echoing his call of the previous spring for the government to be terrible, “so the people will not have to be”).89 The French Revolution’s “reign of terror,” like the unofficial guerrilla warfare we today call “terrorism,” is usually identified with a single set of protagonists (be it the Committee of Public Safety, the Irish Republican Army, or Al- Qaeda). When we pay attention to a longer chronological context, however—that is, when we show proper historical skepticism about revolutionaries’ claims to have started the world over again in the Year Two—the idea of “terror” ruthlessly imposed by a few fanatics becomes increasingly implausible. In a helpful corrective, Jean- Clément Martin has recently questioned whether such blunt categories as “the Terror” are really of much analytic use to the historian. Demonstrating that throughout the 1790s “multiple, chaotic, and contradictory” forms of violence were used against each other, Martin challenges the idea of the Year Two as somehow distinct or revealing a coherent revolutionary logic already present since 1789. For Martin, those months usually called “the Terror” are instead better seen as a period when “the authority of the state was so uncertain [si peu assurée], every group could claim to incarnate it for its own ends.”90 The French Republic’s very real institutional weakness, he suggests, and not its sporadic fantasies of strength,

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accounts for the widespread eruption of violence and civil war after 1792. Martin’s analysis helps us to make sense of Year Two’s “economic terror,” as well. As we reconsider the Montagnard and sans-culotte alliance that social history put at the heart of the Terror, we find the former’s needs were as material as the latter’s were symbolic. Twenty years ago, William Sewell argued that the pervasive references to starvation, hunger, hoarding, and poisoning in the “sans-culottes rhetoric of subsistence” said as much about the political rhetoric of the 1790s as they did about the era’s social reality. Following Sewell, we can describe the demands made by the Paris sections as being just as “political,” even symbolic, as any power struggle within the Convention. The converse is also true, however: Cambon’s reports on finances—what we might call the “Montagnard rhetoric of austerity”—arose as much from material need as from any Rousseauean culture of self-sufficiency. When the members of the National Convention outlawed the trade in money or endorsed wage and price controls, they did so in grudging acknowledgement of the weakness of their own position and the desperate condition of the state’s finances. The Republic could no more afford to buy gold and silver coins on the open market than could ordinary citizens; its armies were as hard hit by rising bread prices as were the sans-culottes. The socalled “economic terror” did mark a dramatic reversal from previous commitments but it was also only one of many skirmishes in a multifront monetary civil war. Thinking of monetary policy in these years in terms of civil war lets us see the politics in political economy and reminds us that failed states and failed economies often go hand in hand. In the Convention, the language around financial mea sures was often about ending the war, bringing the past to a close, making history disappear. The consolidated debt, for instance, was introduced as “the tomb of former contracts, the unique and fundamental title of all creditors.” By refinancing the state’s accumulated borrowing at a single, standard rate, the temporal as well as statutory differences between various loans would disappear. “It will no longer be possible to distinguish debts contracted by despotism from those contracted since the Revolution,” observed Cambon, “and I defy Monsignor Despotism, should he rise from the dead, to recognize his old debt when it has been blended and confounded with the new.”91 Yet no matter how final and definitive such mea sures were intended to be,

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further political upheavals rendered some of them temporary while others produced unexpected, undesired results. At the time, of course, no one could confidently predict which policies would be implemented and which rejected in a year’s time as an insult to liberty or the work of a counterrevolutionary faction. For the men charged with putting all the various policies into place, the effect was more work, more anxiety, and, eventually, likely disillusionment. The point here is a simple one, but after a generation in which most scholarship on the Revolution has focused on political discourses, it bears repeating: actually creating a centralized and functioning state in the 1790s proved to be a far, far more difficult thing to do than anyone had ever dreamed. It is in this context that Patrice Higonnet has suggested we understand “the Terror” as the product of “lucid but desperate and bitterly disappointed men and women.” The revolutionaries of 1793–1794 were not, in other words, madmen, but people whose whole sense of themselves and of the world they inhabited had been traumatically ruptured by the collapse of the constitutional monarchy, the resurgence of religious warfare, and the breakdown of the microtechnology of daily trust that we call “money.”92 Recognizing this allows us to see that frustration and fear did as much as ideological commitments and discursive logics to motivate individuals’ cravings for complete uniformity or their aspirations to total control. When, in spring 1793, Finance Minister Clavière wrote to administrators in the Loire Inférieure asking “how it could possibly be” that they had not yet compiled the tax rolls for 1792, his exasperation arose as much from the weekly grilling he faced in the Convention as it did from the silence of officials in Nantes. Meanwhile, from the latter’s point of view, the minister’s ire was only one of the threats they confronted, along with the more immediate dangers posed by the outbreak of civil war in the neighboring département, the influx of refugees, and the victories of the insurgent Royal and Catholic Army in nearby Saumur and Angers. Six months later, the Republic’s victory in the battle of Nantes allowed departmental officials to think again about tax collection, but by then Clavière had been arrested and jailed as a Girondin. Hence, they wrote to his successor, explaining that many of the master tax rolls had been lost in a fire during a recent insurrection.93 In the overheated politics of the capital and the near anarchy of the rest of France, the constant interruption of government routine

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made progress on even the most mundane tasks both immensely difficult and almost absurdly important. Meanwhile, in a building adjacent to the centralized assignat-producing facility, François “Publicola” Deperey, the French Republic’s first and only verifier general, went about his daily tasks. He recognized fakes, legitimated misprints, and collated information about known and suspected counterfeiters (whose whereabouts he tracked on a large-scale wall map).94 The idea that this single individual could see and verify as true or false any suspect assignat was surely a fiction but it was also a powerful and almost necessary belief. His existence, as the one man in France whose pronouncements on the assignats had to be definitive, allayed fears and regulated difference. In this one figure, who could not possibly have seen, much less recognized, even the smallest fraction of all the assignats manufactured, French men and women nonetheless placed enormous confidence.95 That he remained in his post, neither denounced nor disturbed, throughout all the changes of this tumultuous and dangerous era suggests how important the ideal of undivided authority could again become, as society splintered into factions and the actual production of money depended more and more upon the division of labor.

6 The Revolution That Would Not End The mandats [the paper currency that replaced the assignats in 1796] were created by one of those magicians who shows us how he makes the ball disappear. It was the mandats that destroyed the magic which presides over any government, for there is more of what is called magic—a multitude of effects with hidden and invisible causes—in government than there is in anything else. Once the causes are known, the whole thing collapses. Louis Sébastien Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris (1798)

I

N EAR LY 1796,

nothing could be taken for granted. Prices rose “from one morning to the next” and even from hour to hour. Dockworkers earned in a day what they had once been paid for a year—yet they still could not live on their incomes. Perpetual rentes, for so many decades the safest and most certain investment to hold, became the worst. “One does not know what will happen next and can see no end to any of this,” wrote one overwhelmed and disgusted Parisian in his diary. Others muttered that the nullity of the assignats meant the Republic was only an illusion.1 So mutable was it all, one Italian traveler simply despaired of describing France in the winter of Year Four. “Regardless of the different ways we see and understand things,” he asserted, “the disparity in the value of objects is so great and the change in their prices so continual . . . that we find we rarely agree even with ourselves and much less with anyone else.” From this, he concluded that anything that might be true one day could not, almost by definition, be so the next.2 When they turned their attention from the “capricious” jumping of prices and the “never before seen” spectacle of famine in the midst of plenty, other observers found underlying patterns—patterns that were

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hardly comforting. “We can only repeat what we said yesterday and the day before and what we will possibly say again tomorrow,” asserted the Ministry of Interior’s informants as they introduced the familiar theme of misery into yet another daily bulletin. Despair ran as a constant refrain through the agents’ commentaries in 1795–1796 and erupted occasionally into anguish and outright confrontation. “To all those reading this, whatever your authority,” ended another report, “reflect on the actual state of the Republic. Do you not know the people everywhere are gripped by hunger and desolation? . . . Has a delirious fever suddenly infected the blood of all public servants and made them see the social order’s broken links as a new order that will somehow establish itself and last?”3 For the police, as for those on whom they spied, the ongoing breakdown of monetary trust and of economic life with it heralded nothing less than society’s complete collapse. Popular culture often assimilates the trauma of the French Revolution to the violence of “the Terror” and the specter of the guillotine. Yet attention to stuff and money suggests the supposed return to normalcy “after the Terror” was for many people hardly an improvement. Rather, in the aftermath of Robespierre’s fall on the ninth of Thermidor, Year Two, daily life for many French citizens slid from terrible to worse. The war went on—as it would do, more or less without interruption, until 1815. The Republic continued to execute its political enemies (now known as “terrorists”) and to shut down sites of direct democracy. In the National Convention, former Montagnards turned again to questions of political economy as they struggled to distinguish themselves from their one-time friends and allies. Choosing deregulation in the name of “liberty,” the Thermidoreans (that is, those who came to political power after the ninth of Thermidor) revoked the General Maximum, reopened the stock exchanges, and again legalized the sale of gold and silver. Lawmakers thereby effectively abandoned the assignats. While the bills remained legal tender by the letter of the law, the mea sures that had briefly enforced their circulation no longer applied: there was nothing to stop a money changer from selling a six-livre coin for 500 (or 5,000) livres in assignats, nothing to prevent a grocer from setting one price for goods purchased with metal and another for the same items bought with paper. Between the end of Year Two and the middle of Year Four (August 1794–March 1796), the assignats’ “price” in silver, gold, or copper went down to nothing while the price of anything purchased with paper—the

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Figure 21. Two more of Lesueur’s cardboard cutouts, paired either by the artist or by a later collector. On the left, a woman cooks a cabbage and turnip stew, which she sells for the outrageously high price of 50 sous per bowl to workers (note her pocket stuffed full of assignats). On the right, a shady looking money seller gives two aged rentiers a few coins in exchange for the final remnants of their silverware and jewelry.

only money most people had—rose dramatically. If, in some sectors of the economy, profits increased as well, wages rarely kept pace. For those on fi xed incomes (such as rentiers or the state’s employees) and for the state’s tax revenues, the situation quickly became desperate. In spring 1796, lawmakers ordered the destruction of all materials used in the production of assignats and the creation of a new “territorial” paper money, the mandats. Within a few months, they gave up on the mandats as well. Throughout the 1790s, the growing discrepancy between paper and metal made numbers increasingly meaningless as numbers, even as it gave added significance to mea surement units and contractual details. In 1786, the estate of a building contractor’s widow had been valued at the

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sizeable sum of 33,229 livres, most of which (25,429 livres) was in furnishings and other movables; at the time of her death ten years later, her estate, consisting of roughly the same objects, was valued at 644,055 “livres assignats”—an increase by 2,500 percent in numerical terms.4 When the hotel keeper Charles Jean Soldato died in Vendémiaire, Year VI (September 1797), he owed approximately fifty livres to his tailor and back wages of 300– 400 livres to several employees. He also owed nearly 30,000 livres for assignats borrowed in 1793–1794, but the two sets of numbers could not be simply added together. 5 “Judging the value of money by the numbers in which one records a sum,” wrote a physician in Nantes, one would say a thousand écus in 1789 equalled a thousand écus today (February 1798). Yet it was a definite and well-known fact (constant et notoire), he continued, that a thousand écus now was more precious than six times that number in 1789.6 Difficult enough for ordinary individuals to negotiate, monetary instability made the state’s most basic fiscal operations almost impossible to execute. As of early in the Year Three (late 1794), the numbers a clerk entered on his charts could easily refer to at least four distinct systems of computation. In some columns, a period (.) was (as we would assume today) a decimal point, indicating whole francs to the left of it and centimes to the right. In adjoining columns, however, the same mark meant different things. It might, for instance, signify other units of currency, separating livres from sous from deniers, but since there were twelve deniers to the sou and twenty sous to the livre, the points were hardly “decimal.”7 Where payments were made in major grains (the only goods legally accepted for in-kind taxes), the same punctuation divided quintaux from livres (livres here being a unit of volume), except in those cases where the clerk recorded the market value of the grain, rather than its bulk. And, where precious metals were seized, and the resulting receipts taken in payment, the period had yet a further meaning, distinguishing marcs from onces and onces from gros. No wonder, then, that a novice tax receiver, forced from office, wrote to his supervisor to express more “thanks” than “complaints” and admitted he had been foolish to accept a position “so far beyond [his] abilities.”8 Others stuck to their jobs, but the tedium of counting and recounting stacks of bills must have been given added pathos by the knowledge, shared by all concerned, that the bills had no value despite their enormous numbers. On a summer day in

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1796, in a department largely untouched by the ravages of war and the brutality of terror and counterterror, administrators faced their own horrors, as they spent two days counting the worthless assignats and mandats that filled their office: 146 bills for 10,000 francs; 5,650 for 2,000; 10,721 (in fifty-four packages) for 1,000; 281 for 750; 15,895 for 500; 796 for 400; 9,283 for 250; and 7,276 for 125. The bills’ face values added up to over thirty-five million francs; their value in commerce was effectively zero.9

Historians have long realized that the monetary crisis of the 1790s is central to the Revolution, but they have generally allowed classical and neoclassical economics to structure how they see it. Within this framework, the failure of the assignats is always described as one of quantity. Over and over again, scholars have concluded that too many notes—that is, notes for a greater total value than that of the biens nationaux—were printed; too much money chased too few goods and inflation “inevitably” resulted. So axiomatic has this explanation become that even historians who have developed sophisticated analyses of eighteenth-century political economy readily invoke it to bring their discussion of the assignats to an authoritative-sounding conclusion.10 The lesson has seemed clear: bad money drives out good, and the printing press is an agent of catastrophe, one that produces inflation as surely as the factory system was once said to have minted the working class. While most historians over the past few decades have rejected the clumsy determinism (and organic metaphors) that defined the proletariat as “the eldest children” of the Industrial Revolution, they have been far less skeptical of other mechanical models of economic change, such as the quantity theory of money.11 It is almost as if historians, once they abandoned economic determinism as an explanation for class formation, were content to leave “the economy” to function on its “own” terms—that is, on terms defi ned and dictated by several generations of orthodox economists.12 The quantity theory of money—simply put, the claim that increasing or decreasing the amount of money in circulation will always have a direct and proportional effect on prices—is central to this orthodoxy and the assignats have been equally central to proving it. Ever since Andrew Dickson White lectured American congressmen on the subject, France in the 1790s has been the textbook example of inflation caused by the

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over issue of paper money.13 Written at a time when public debate raged over his own country’s monetary system, White’s highly readable Paper Money Inflation in France (1876) insisted paper money was bad money because paper (unlike gold) was easy to make. No natural limits constrained a government wanting to issue more of it. The author (the first president of Cornell University and a former history professor at the University of Michigan) spared no metaphor as he sketched the dangers of liquid wealth too easily produced. Further issues of assignats had been “clamored for as a new dram is called for by a drunkard”; they were a “corrosive poison [that] ate out the vitals of French prosperity”; they had the same destructive effect as a Dutchman leveling the dikes in a summer drought. His analogies framed the Revolution in terms of nature’s forces and individuals’ characters. Though a few wise voices had warned against paper money—White approvingly cited Maury and Cazalès—the “rising tide” and “current” of opinion favored it, and the men of 1790 (like so many who followed them) had been unable to resist. Lacking in the Puritan virtues of “self- denial” and “self-sacrifice,” the revolutionaries plunged France deep into the sea of “financial distress and debauchery.” Having tried “to substitute for the natural laws of finance the ability of a legislative body,” the revolutionaries learned too late that “fi nancial laws [are] as sure in their operation as those laws which hold the planets in their course.”14 White’s text taught easily grasped and seemingly self-evident moral lessons (avoid unnatural temptations, abide by nature’s laws, make do with less) and quickly became a minor classic. Reprinted in 1882 by the Society for Political Education, in 1959 by the Foundation for Economic Education, and in 1980 by the Cato Institute, Paper Money Inflation in France can be found today on the websites of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and of the Libertarian Press. Its argument is summarized or its conclusions cited on hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites. Many of these latter have the word “gold” in their name; few, if any, are written or maintained by historians of the French Revolution.15 White’s pamphlet, though undoubtedly useful for understanding the development of economic thought over the past 150 years, tells us comparatively little about the course of events in the 1790s. For it was not revolutionaries’ ignorance of “financial laws” or their attempt to subvert them, but their eventual endorsement of policies defined in such terms that caused the ruin of thousands of families and turned many of the

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Republic’s former supporters into its most bitter skeptics. As Seymour Harris demonstrated eighty years ago, the dramatic price increases of the 1790s actually began before most of the assignats had been issued.16 In other words, the case of the assignats does not so much substantiate the quantity theory of money as it reverses it: because prices rose in autumn 1794, the government had to issue more paper to cover its costs. Money responded to prices, not prices to money. This chapter therefore leaves open the possibility that the relationship between the printing of additional money and the currency’s loss of value may have been as much a product of history as it was of nature— that it may, in fact, have been as complex as the relation between industrialization and class formation. Yet even as I question quantity theory’s claim to explain the crisis of the 1790s in simplistic, transhistorical terms (that is, by treating inflation as “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”), I want to insist that same theory did play a considerable historical role in sealing the assignats’ fate.17 For both before and after the period usually called “the Terror”—but not, interestingly enough, during it—revolutionaries made policy based largely on the quantity theory of money. In the early 1790s, men as politically dissimilar as Dupont de Nemours, Danton, and Marat all warned that printing more assignats would automatically reduce their value. Taking these arguments to heart, the Convention in summer 1793 introduced the neologism “demonetization” into French when it voted that large-value assignats depicting Louis XVI should no longer be legal tender. Explaining his support for the mea sure, Danton said with characteristic folksy bluster, “I don’t know very much about finances but I do know what is good for my country. . . . Food prices are rising because there are too many assignats. May the national sponge soak them all up [que l’éponge nationale épuise cette grande masse] and balance [between the value of goods and their prices] will be restored.”18 In endorsing such policies, lawmakers treated money as a commodity like any other, behaving as if its credibility depended solely on the laws of supply and demand. Grain was cheap when it was widely available but expensive when it was not. Many assumed the same pattern held for assignats: reduce their number and each would become more valuable. Yet while for most goods, a decline in quantity had little necessary effect on the quality of the products remaining—an ill-timed storm could destroy crops in one place but leave a neighboring village’s fruits and vegetables

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untouched—the same was not true for money. By announcing largedenomination assignats “with royal faces” were “as of this decree’s publication” no longer money (July 31, 1793), the Convention instantaneously reduced the money supply by 1.7 billion livres. It also inadvertently cast doubt on all the remaining assignats. After all, what was to ensure a similar decree would not soon strike those faceless assignats still in circulation? If authorities announced they were destroying half the harvest because it was contaminated with an invisible and lethal poison, would anyone believe the other half was safe for human consumption? By trusting quantitative measures to enhance the assignats’ dwindling credibility, legislators further exacerbated an ongoing qualitative crisis. From the very beginning, defining the money’s legitimacy and its worth had been truly questions of political economy, a subject for which the politics of the Revolution mattered at least as much as the nascent field of economics. For conservative counterrevolutionaries—men like Nicolas Bergasse or the abbé Maury—there could be no question of even a single assignat having any value, since the properties supposedly backing the bills still rightfully belonged to the Catholic Church.19 As the energetic counterrevolutionary pamphleteer Antoine Ferrand wrote in June 1790, “These properties [the biens nationaux] are sacred and do not belong to the Nation . . . they are consecrated to the First Estate by centuries of use [des siècles de jouissance], by the express and constant will of the Nation and of sixty monarchs, by authentic titles, by laws, and by all that is most respectable in civil society.” From this perspective, any assignat could only ever be “the sad fruit of sacrilegious theft” and every assignat was but a scrap and a “rag.”20 It was not the quantity of bills issued, Ferrand and others insisted, but their qualities that mattered. The depreciation of the assignats owed as much to the more or less conscious choices of political actors as it did to the intangible laws of economics. If we have few statements from grain merchants as explicit as Ferrand’s, we nonetheless know many priests told their congregations it would be a sin to accept assignats, and even some “patriot” members of the political elite did not scruple to speak ill of the currency in an attempt to drive down prices for the biens nationaux (which they then purchased).21 What is often called “the first modern hyperinflation” should therefore not be understood as the origin of some general pattern later repeated, largely unchanged, in Weimar Germany or post–World War II Hungary. Rather, each episode of hyperinflation needs to be addressed

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on its own terms, as an economic manifestation of a specific political and social crisis.22 In the case of revolutionary France, the monetary crisis hit ordinary people hardest in 1795–1796, when the quantity theory of money became predominant. As prices rose dramatically in 1795, the Thermidorean Convention (and its successor regime, the Directory) was increasingly at a loss for responses and at risk of losing any authority it had. Citing the quantity theory of money and blaming high prices on the assignats provided lawmakers with the simple causal model and the convenient scapegoat they desperately needed. Small matter that many of those same lawmakers had defined the assignats as “the money of liberty” just a few months earlier.23 While the demise of the assignats tells us less about the “natural laws of finance” than has often been asserted, it nonetheless indicates something important about the relation between partisan politics and national policymaking in the revolutionary era. Throughout the 1790s, claimants to state power struggled to establish their own authority and often did so by tarnishing their predecessors’ reputations and repudiating their policies. The move from laissez-faire economics in the first months of 1793 to attempted state management of the economy that autumn and then back again is with hindsight an especially obvious but hardly unique example of such shifts. At every juncture, lawmakers justified their actions by appealing both to circumstances—that is, to the history of their particular moment—and to some set of immutable principles. No one consciously wished for chaos or intended to provoke further uncertainty. Nonetheless, policies introduced in the name of stability turned out to be socially disruptive. Over and over again, efforts to end the revolutionary process proved, in fact, to be profoundly destabilizing. Every attempt to resolve matters once and for all brought new shocks and created its own stumbling blocks; each effort to define the Revolution’s ultimate goals transformed previous answers into new obstacles to be overcome.

Money, Nature, Politics Reflecting in June 1795 on six years of revolution, the elderly Parisian rentier Nicolas Célestin Guittard wrote in his diary: “All has been overturned: the throne, the nobility, the church.” In the following sentence,

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he continued his chronicle with a list of high prices: “An egg sells for 15 sous, stockings for 50 or 60 livres . . . a hat for 80 to 100 . . . cherries are 40 sous the pound and green peas, three livres or more.”24 For Guittard, as for many other French men and women, the monetary chaos of the 1790s was as central to the Revolution as was the nationalization of the church or the fall of the monarchy. Revolution had somehow turned everything upside down, making socks expensive and princes into commoners. Historians today tend to analyze the French Revolution in terms of political and social transformations, but contemporaries experienced and understood those upheavals as inextricable from questions of currency and value. While commitment to “the Revolution” (whatever an individual took that to mean at any given point in time) and trust in the assignats did not necessarily correlate exactly, they nonetheless served in many ways as measures of each other. For instance, the bookdealer Nicolas Ruault had at first enthusiastically welcomed both the events of 1789–1790 and the assignats, writing to his clergyman brother that the latter would leave France truly debt-free without any increase in taxes. Five years later, however, his tone had changed considerably. Insisting to the same brother that the assignats’ falling value meant he could only survive by selling off his personal belongings week by week, he described himself in spring 1795 as “an atheist in matters of revolution,” ready to leave Paris and go live somewhere “as a quiet country rabbit.”25 The timing of Ruault’s disaffection with the Revolution, like Guittard’s, bears consideration. Neither man was a Montagnard and both certainly found the denunciations and counteraccusations, the executions, and the bloodshed of Year Two difficult to bear. Yet it was the assignats’ complete collapse in Years Three and Four, rather than the ascendancy of Robespierre or the dominance of the Committee of Public Safety, that pushed both to the breaking point. Guittard, for example, reacted to the September Massacres by deciding, “It is sad to have to take such extreme mea sures, but it is better to kill the devil than to be killed by him,” and commented on the bloody months of Pluviôse and Messidor, Year Two only by recording the names and ages of those guillotined in his diary. During the course of the Revolution, he had learned to use words (and the act of writing them) as buffers against physical violence. Yet words were an ineffective shield against the depreciation of the assignats: “Butter is 100 livres the pound and salt is fifteen,” he wrote in November 1795 (Brumaire, Year IV). “Everything is more expensive

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than it has ever been since the world began. It makes you shudder with horror [Cela fait frémir].” The following month, he inserted in his diary a hand-drawn chart, which he labeled a “woeful picture [tableau affligeant].” Listing the price of goods, ser vices, and especially of money—a six-livre coin sold for more than a thousand livres in assignats— Guittard concluded the capital and all of France had fallen into true anarchy: “No more order, no more police, everyone is master to sell whatever to whoever wants it. . . . The Convention [sic; he meant “the Directory”] does nothing. It seems the time has come to die of cold and hunger.”26 For Guittard (who did, in fact, die shortly thereafter), everything fell apart in the Year Three. Neither the royal family’s attempted fl ight from the country nor the later overthrow of the monarchy—both of which he pronounced “forever memorable”—so profoundly disrupted his sense of the world and of his own place within it as did the rising prices of the period after Thermidor. While he could (and did) narrate those earlier episodes as events with distinct and recognizable actors, his experiences of 1794–1796 were both less discreetly eventful and more personally jarring. Like many other diarists, petitioners, and officials, Guittard in this later period slipped into a methodological and historiographical stance we might call “apocalyptic empiricism”: the almost compulsive rendering of unforetold and unforeseeable horrors as a list of details and numbers. At its limit, this attitude shaded into rejecting empiricism, as individuals simply gave up all hope of understanding markets or reporting on them accurately. Responding, for instance, to a survey circulated in spring 1795, the agent national in Tarascon (Arriège) reported to Paris: “I cannot tell you anything certain about the price of food. The prices are subject to daily variations, such that I can no more tell you anything about this than I can answer any of your other questions.” Others, attempting to complete the same survey, noted that while the prices they recorded were accurate at the time of observation, they would no longer be so when the report arrived in the capital. “You should not count for even an instant,” wrote one, “on the prices reported here remaining the same.”27 While many agents nationaux (men appointed as each district’s direct connection to the central government) responded to the Interior Ministry’s questions in similarly uncertain terms—“despite the research I have done,” wrote another, “I have not been able to come to a definite opinion

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about what is causing the excessive rise in prices”—others were much more decisive.28 Some gave a causal role to war and requisitioning; some told stories, supported with evidence, of foreign plots and priestly counterfeiters; while others cited the recent experience of the United States as proof that all could be explained by the quantity theory of money. As the number of credible causes proliferated, the problem only grew worse; a respondent who diligently compiled all his “observations” on the matter produced an answer that quickly collapsed into non sequitur. Within a brief paragraph, for instance, one agent jumped from high prices to general political turbulence to very specific comments on a local industry; another stated authoritatively that high prices should be blamed on “extreme shortages, the shadowy actions of evildoers, the alarming discredit of the assignats, and the scandalous greed of landowners.”29 After laboriously tallying hundreds of such answers, central authorities would have learned that high prices were caused by shortages, by the war, by counterfeiters, and by the greed of individuals; that they were attributed to human weakness, to foreign conspiracies, and to the hailstorm last month. The net effect of these accumulated certainties was more uncertainty. No more sharing an explanatory model of economic life than they did a political philosophy, individuals understood rising prices in as many different ways as they did the Revolution itself. In a culture without the concept of “inflation”—the word existed in eighteenth-century French but it was a specialist medical term (meaning “tumor” or “swelling”) with no economic connotations—individuals could and did envision money’s relation to prices in multiple ways. In certain contexts, for instance, price increases were interpreted as good news adding to assignats’ value. 30 The former duke de Noailles concluded in 1791 that people’s eagerness to purchase the biens nationaux and the high prices they paid for them indicated both widespread trust in the new system and “the incontestability of our territorial money.”31 In the Year Two, with international and domestic confl icts raging on at least four fronts, many found the elevated sale prices of the biens nationaux a cause for celebration: it was with great excitement that the agent national in Calais noted that an emigré’s property, estimated to be worth 148,360 livres, had actually sold for well over twice that amount. 32 As many understood it at the time, every sale of some bien for more than its estimated value meant it (and, by extension,

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all other unsold properties) was actually worth more than anticipated. Higher sale prices meant greater values for the biens and hence more collateral for the assignats.33 With more than one way to think about the crisis came more than one way to imagine resolving it. High prices, when understood as the result of real shortages caused by an ongoing and expanding war, called for patriotic self-sacrifice; attributed to the criminal greed of individuals, they were best addressed by legal regulation and exemplary punishment; traced to counterfeiting and other acts of economic warfare, they could only be met with continued military effort. All these understandings had some reasonable basis in fact, but the facts apparent to a local official who was also charged with military recruitment were not necessarily those that struck a farmer, an urban working woman, or a rentier as the most salient or conclusive.34 While everybody concurred that the assignats had depreciated dramatically, agreement on this one point could not produce consensus in terms of policy.

Legislators’ eventual decision (reached in early spring 1796) to abandon the assignats was not a foregone conclusion. Instead, it emerged in the course of 1794–1796 as members of the political elite defined “the Terror” as an era and a set of policies distinct both from the Revolution’s earlier moments and from their own actions and confl icts. In the aftermath of Robespierre’s death, the five hundred or so remaining members of the Convention hastened to distinguish themselves from “terrorists” in any way they could: they scapegoated and executed their former friends, they denounced the dead as would-be dictators, and they proclaimed a return to “freedom and liberty.” Central to this last, they revoked regulatory mea sures introduced in 1793–1794: wage and price controls (the General Maximum), the law forbidding the sale of money, and the law mandating equivalence between coins and assignats. Over two years (September 1794–August 1796), lawmakers renewed their commitment to a form of economic liberalism and allowed the ideal of “free” markets to cover for the many unfreedoms that characterized public life under the Thermidoreans and the Directory. 35 In the process of “ending the Terror” (and, not coincidentally, exonerating themselves) these men distanced themselves from their own earlier decisions and from the Revolution’s legacy of legitimating popular pro-

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test. Tallien, for instance, now distinguished the people’s revolution, which was insurrectionary, from the Convention’s, which he defined in almost opposite terms as the obligation to uphold the law. While the former was an act of war, the latter was an act of justice; while the first was a “revolutionary act [that] in itself turns things upside down,” the second, he asserted, aimed to establish society on a secure and solid foundation. Defining terror as “an unthinking fear of persons” and justice as “a reasonable fear of the law,” Tallien’s speech worked both to differentiate the Year Two’s “reign of Terror” from the institutions through which it had functioned—many of which remained in existence throughout Year Three—and to mark popular protest as something other than legitimate political action. 36 While in his presentation on the September Massacres two years earlier, Tallien had condoned crowd violence as “just vengeance,” his political and personal survival now depended on separating justice from terror and law from the people who were expected to obey it. The dead and vilified Robespierre, whom the Thermidoreans treated as almost exclusively responsible for the newly labeled “system of Terror,” had never played any significant role in financial debates. Nonetheless, in the Year Three, the French economy and the state’s finances were discussed as if he had personally sent them to the guillotine. Giving testimony about the brutal repression of dissent in Nantes, for instance, one witness asserted that “following the principles of the Héberts, the Chaumettes, the Roussins, and the Robespierres,” Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative en mission there, had “assassinated commerce in order to enslave France.”37 Barely a week after Carrier’s trial and execution as a terrorist, a member of the Convention labeled the Maximum “more homicidal than punitive” and suggested that it resulted from a time (happily now passed) when “terror was the entire order of the day and . . . a sort of delirium took the place of reason.” For this speaker as for many of his listeners, wage-and-price controls constituted an episode of terror, “a violation of principles, an arbitrary act.” When the former armaments worker, Noël Pointe, dared claim that repealing the Maximum could easily lead to abuses and that “terror . . . has just changed hands, now it is the rich shopkeepers who insult the people in their poverty,” the Convention erupted into chaos and verged on physical violence. Silencing Pointe and his supporter, Raymond Gaston, other lawmakers responded to their challenge by immediately passing mea sures to deregulate the

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grain trade and annul all legal charges arising from enforcement of the Maximum. 38 No one at the time referred to the specific category of “economic terror”—a term that seems to have originated in Georges Lefebvre’s Paysans du Nord (1924) and to have been generalized by historians of the Soviet Union—but the marking of the Maximum as a product of “the Terror” had the rhetorical effect of turning all who supported economic regulation into “terrorists.”39 Chronological coincidence made it easy to depict any state participation in economic life as “violence” against the free market. Lawmakers in winter-spring 1795 were far more likely to proclaim that trade had again been “liberated” than they were to acknowledge their own involvement in the now caricatured events of a year ago, but they were still left to explain why “liberation” further aggravated popular misery. Confronting the dilemma that had so vexed Gabriel Noël in spring 1792—requiring assignats to be accepted at face value violated individuals’ property rights, while allowing them to be rejected seemed to doom the nation to nonpayment of its bills—legislators converged on the quantity theory of money. Insisting the assignats were not problematic per se but there were simply too many of them, the dominant voices in the Thermidorean Convention outlined a seemingly natural, mathematical, or quasi-ecological explanation for the paper’s shrinking value. Throughout Year Three, arguments for reducing the quantity of paper money in order to enhance its quality dominated financial discourse—even as the scale of the Republic’s military efforts and the relentless rise in prices meant the very same lawmakers authorized a trebling of the nominal value of assignats in circulation (from 7.6 billion livres in August 1794 to 19.7 billion in November 1795).40 Rejecting forced demonetization (such as that of July–August 1793), most speakers tried to design ostensibly voluntary mea sures. On behalf of the Finance Committee, for instance, Cambon recommended an enormous lottery, which would sell tickets for four billion livres in assignats.41 As a lottery, no one would be obliged to participate and no one’s property rights would be infringed. Individuals, instead, would freely surrender their assignats, and it was expected they would do so in large numbers since the lottery guaranteed every purchaser at least the hundred or thousand livres he paid for his ticket and promised a few lucky winners much larger sums. Even after the lottery had been drawn, this plan would substantially reduce the value of assig-

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nats in circulation because winners would be paid “old style” assignats— bonds bearing 3-percent interest and good only for the purchase of biens nationaux (when accompanied by money-assignats of the same value) or for investing in the nation’s consolidated debt (which paid 5 percent). Questioned by some on the grounds of expense and by others for its complicated logistics, the planned lottery stumbled most fundamentally on the impossible imperative of removing large quantities of assignats from circulation without simultaneously depriving people of their property.42 Of course, no mea sure could have satisfied that goal: the assignats had been money, they still were money, and to say they could no longer be used for certain transactions was to say they would not be money in the future. French men and women were being asked to give up what they had today for the promise of less tomorrow. The puzzle could not be solved. That some lawmakers in this period manifested a renewed enthusiasm for collecting taxes in kind (a mea sure eventually decreed but never fully implemented) indicates just how frustrated many became with monetary problems in all their forms.43 Personal and factional politics played a central role in all debates during this period. Throughout 1793–1794, Cambon’s personal reputation for probity and his rhetoric of austerity and accountability had made him the de facto minister of finances, but that very status—and his scornful, vehement opposition to Thermidorean leaders such as Fréron and Tallien44 —in 1795 heralded the end both of his own political career and of various mea sures associated with his name. In the debates over how best to reduce the quantity of assignats in circulation, for instance, both the military Montagnard Dubois- Crancé and the corrupt and monarchist-leaning Bourdon (de l’Oise) framed their proposals as rejections of the “crimes” sanctioned by Cambon and the Finance Committee during the Terror.45 Both Dubois- Crancé and Bourdon had been members of the Convention in that period, both sufficiently trusted to be sent as its representatives en mission (to the army and the rebellious West, respectively). For them, as for many others not obviously innocent of complicity, denouncing Cambon as the assassin of free trade was among their easiest routes to personal absolution. A turning point in the politics of Year Three, Cambon’s fall from political grace coincided closely with that of sans- culottisme. Based on the last six years’ experience, the men and women of Paris thought they knew how to participate in revolutionary politics. In Germinal and

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again in Prairial, Year III (April 1 and May 20, 1795), they drew on this accumulated knowledge: they took to the streets in large numbers, they marched on the National Convention, they demanded “bread and the Constitution of 1793.” Roughly united by their slogan (which some chalked on their hats as supplements to their cockades) and present in intimidating numbers, the Parisians followed an established pattern: as one spokesman observed, “you see before you the men of July 14 [1789], of August 10 [1792], of May 31 [1793].”46 On these past occasions, orators had hailed the crowd’s interventions as shows of national sovereignty and legislators had yielded to many of their demands. In spring 1795, in contrast, lawmakers treated comparable groups as dissident mobs or ignorant children. “The time when the Convention let a fraction of the people dictate to it has passed,” asserted Tallien, claiming the “good citizens” of Paris would have nothing to do with the protesters. “It was an uprising of bambinos,” the engraver Sergent dismissively concluded, as he tried to distinguish the events of Germinal from the radicalism he had recently supported. “I heard children of fourteen . . . talking about the depreciation of the assignats—I ask you, what could they know about that?”47 Refusing to accept that the members of the crowd constituted “the people” or that their daily experience of shortages and high prices gave them any right to speak on questions of monetary policy, legislators first marginalized them discursively and then, after the violence of Prairial, repressed them with armed force. Turning a deaf ear to the crowd’s assertion that “the assignats are declining in value because of the decrees you passed [such as the abolition of the Maximum],” the members of the Thermidorean Convention instead responded by further deregulating the money trade. Shortly after the Germinal uprising, they voted to decriminalize the sale of gold and silver. They also ordered Cambon’s arrest. (He fled to Lausanne.) As they returned to the extreme version of free-market thinking predominant in 1789–1792, lawmakers again described money as a good like any other. “Really, what would it mean,” asked Jeanbon Saint André, “for us to declare that silver is a commodity? Isn’t it so by its nature? Any law that violates the nature of things must sooner or later be impotent.” Since gold and silver were “universally” valued, Vernier argued, a government that regulated their circulation also cut itself off from international commerce—feasible for the Spartans and the Incas, such mea sures were “inconceivable” for a commercial country such as France.48 From

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this perspective, the concerns of the actual, living men and women of Paris could easily be defined as “unnatural” (as, by implication, were those who expressed them). That the Convention had ever mandated the acceptance of paper and coin on equal terms became, in the course of 1795, simply further evidence of how monstrous “the Terror” had truly been.49 Repudiating their earlier monetary policies and ignoring ordinary Parisians, legislators in the aftermath of Germinal moved to end the Revolution—and thereby silence the Paris crowd—by balancing the Republic’s account books. Explicitly linking the two, the astronomer and antiquarian Charles-François Dupuis asserted, “In inventing a new money, our predecessors thought only of how to start the revolution and not about how to finish it”; when Bourdon de l’Oise suggested that assignats should lose their legal tender status but still be accepted for all sales of biens nationaux, he argued this forced demonetization would be “faithful to the principles of 1789.”50 Reporting for the Finance Committee a month after the Germinal uprising, Vernier implied that completing long overdue transactions would yield both financial order and political stability. Vernier, whose reputation for monetary expertise stretched back to autumn 1789 (and who at this point was also the Convention’s elected, presiding member), recommended that taxes for 1793 be collected in the next month (and Year Two’s taxes shortly thereafter), that the biens nationaux be not just sold but paid for, and that loans made to local governments be called in immediately or charged an additional 20 percent interest. To accomplish this remarkable acceleration of fi nancial time, Vernier proposed severely shortening the lifespan of all remaining “royal” assignats: as of the decree’s publication, all bills bearing any representation of the former king would immediately cease to function as money, but the government would accept them for a further three months as payment for already sold biens and, in some cases, for overdue taxes. 51 Left with no other outlet for their assignats, citizens would have to pay their debts to the state. Voted immediately into law, the decree aimed to move revolutionary administration quickly forward by “turning the clock backwards” on the royal assignats. Like the assignats created in December 1789, the demonetized bills of 1795 would be good for only a limited set of transactions. As soon as the decree of Floréal 27, Year III was published, all royal assignats legally ceased to be money. Since those for a hundred livres or

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more had already been demonetized in 1793, the new mea sures disproportionately affected those mainly holding small bills such as the working poor, small-scale retailers, and military volunteers. Four days after the decree, Parisians from the city’s manufacturing and quasi-industrial districts marched again (as it turned out, for the last time) on the Convention. While they repeated the “bread and the Constitution of 1793” slogan of Germinal, they added a new demand as well: that “the law making money into merchandise” be revoked. “What have you done to our money, you scoundrels?!” the centrist Moniteur reported the crowd yelling, as it stormed into the meeting place. In the hours that the crowd occupied the Convention, various proposals were made: for an end to the death penalty (except in cases of emigration or counterfeiting), for the arrest of reactionary journalists, for a roll call in order to reveal which representatives had fled the hall. Wine was drunk, a deputy was killed, and his head on a pike was promenaded around the room. Throughout the chaos and the violence, the noise and the coming of night, the demand that the assignats circulate on par with coins was repeated again and again. 52 Even when they called for “bread,” the pike-bearing men and barearmed women of Prairial were talking about money. Bread was in fact plentiful in the capital but few residents could buy it. “Every day, food is displayed in front of the people,” stated the spokesman for section Bonconseil, “but it can only be had for its weight in gold.” While he exaggerated—a four-pound loaf of bread sold for less than an ounce of gold—his basic point was valid: the city suffered not so much from a food shortage but from a severe dearth of bakers willing to accept assignats as payment. Even the least populist of lawmakers (such as Bourdon) admitted bread was available for anyone who paid with coins. 53 While the subsistence crisis of Year Three owed something to poor harvests and military requisitioning, it resulted more than anything else from the complete absence of monetary trust. When merchants expected even perishable items such as meat and bread to last longer than assignats, the latter ceased to be a means for storing value. Instead, value seemed almost to slip through the paper. Money in the present but not money in the future, the assignats were fast becoming not money at all. The demonetization of Floréal, Year III put the collection of taxes and other revenues ahead of working people’s needs, but it still yielded no money for the state. By agreeing to accept as payment a currency it

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simultaneously declared to be commercially worthless, the Convention effectively abandoned the idea of selling the biens or collecting taxes in order to generate income. Assignats would come in but they could not go back out again as payment. Collecting them would instead reduce the number in circulation (thereby, it was wrongly imagined, enhancing the value of those that remained), and, of equal importance, it would help close various extraordinary accounts created by the Revolution itself. If the original biens nationaux were paid for in full and if the lottery to dispose of property seized from émigrés were successful, if tax registers for 1791–1795 could be marked as “closed”—then, argued many Thermidoreans, the Revolution would be significantly nearer to completion. Vernier and others anticipated that bringing the Revolution to an end in this fashion would stabilize the state and increase the credibility of its remaining currency. They could not have been more mistaken. The state could not be stabilized by destabilizing its money. Printing and spending ever more paper while simultaneously allowing earlier assignats to become worthless, the Thermidorean Convention (and the Directory, in its first year of existence) produced further insecurity and growing misery. Since the state’s contractors and the nation’s employees were paid in bills that could not be relied on to be money in the future, those in a position to do so (such as military suppliers) either refused to accept assignats or demanded enormous sums. Individuals in weaker bargaining positions, including local administrators, constitutional bishops, and ordinary soldiers, were left to despair of the Revolution they had once embraced enthusiastically and for which they had worked so hard. 54 The demonetization that both responded to the inflationary crisis of 1794– 1796 and drove prices even higher was especially disruptive politically because it hit hardest those who had participated actively in the Revolution. Naysayers such as Nicolas Bergasse might take some plea sure in muttering “I told you so” and living on the remains of their family fortune, but republican officials could take no such solace. With the currency’s discredit came a near complete collapse of governance. Administrators in one department found their job simply undoable “because every day, every hour, every instant is marked by a substantial increase in the price of necessary goods.” Noting bitterly that there was no real shortage of food, they observed that nonetheless they could neither buy provisions for hospitals nor hire wet nurses for orphans if they paid in paper. 55 It was impossible to publicize new laws or announce

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the revocation of old ones when local printers would no longer work for assignats and officials had nothing else with which to pay them. 56 Across the country, many of the Republic’s most dedicated supporters despaired in the face of similar difficulties: mayors quit, soldiers deserted, and clerks—whose wages were paid in paper at a fi xed rate—were reported starving to death. 57 Administrators in Burgundy worried they could “no longer promise the food of hope [l’aliment de l’espérance] to this crowd of civil servants” while others in Normandy bluntly asked, “How are we supposed to administer anything, if we can buy neither paper nor pens?”58

In a key political intervention at the end of Year Two, Tallien had said of “terror” that it “breaks all links,” it “isolates and demoralizes,” it produces “the disintegration of all ideas . . . [and] a true disorga nization of the soul.” His purpose in that speech had been to distinguish “terror” from “revolutionary government” and to lay blame for the former squarely on Robespierre. 59 Yet the emotions Tallien defined as terrible were ones that many people—from Voltaire’s former publisher to the constitutional bishop of Ille-et-Vilaine and the men and women who marched on the Convention in Prairial—felt with as much intensity in the monetary free fall of 1795–1796 as they had in the political repression of 1794. The links holding society together were broken when retailers refused the only money most people had. Any sense of scale or proportion disintegrated when a hat sold for eighty livres (formerly the cost of renting a small Paris apartment for six months) and a balcony seat at the Comic Opera eventually went for nearly a thousand.60 Demoralized when his years of ser vice, months in prison, and fervent patriotism left him with far less than subsistence wages, the Republican priest Claude Le Coz told abbé Grégoire that only his sense of religious duty prevented his “hiding away” like a hermit.61 As a feeling and an attitude toward the world, terror had only just begun when the era bearing that name supposedly came to an end. Recent historians of France “after the Terror” have treated the period 1794–1799 as crucial for creating the institutions and structures through which revolutionary energy was transformed into a more stable form of French republicanism. James Livesey, John Shovlin, and Andrew Jainchill all give the emerging idea of modern commercial society a prominent place in their analysis of these developments, but they have little to

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say about the simultaneous monetary crisis.62 Considering it, however, allows us to understand that this ideology had significant and socially differentiated effects. The ethos of economic and monetary freedom may be a distinctive feature of modern republicanism, but it also contributed to the assignats’ falling value and thereby aggravated social unrest and embittered many former revolutionaries. Meanwhile political scores were settled in ways—such as the abrupt demonetization of late Floréal, Year III—that contributed further to ordinary people’s feelings of economic uncertainty and personal loss. The political transition from the Convention (a single body combining legislative, executive, and constitution-writing functions) to the Directory, with its division of powers and bicameral legislature as outlined in the 1795 Constitution, meant little to the millions for whom the assignats’ ever declining usefulness was, along with war and conscription, the Revolution’s main ongoing effect. Célestin Guittard, after all, complained of the Convention’s inaction months after that government had ceased to exist; other Parisians saw the constantly rising price of food, fuel, and money as evidence France no longer had any government whatsoever. When the Ministry of Interior’s agents called on “Enlightened legislators, executive Directors, and the supreme creators of the laws” to do something about merchants who refused to accept assignats, they simply addressed their pleas to anyone who would listen.63 As had their Thermidorean predecessors, the Councils (legislative houses) of the Directory blamed the politics of Year Two for the social and economic impasses of Year Four. Though the assignats had depreciated considerably further in the course of Year Three, every culprit named or implicated in the Directory’s first report “on the financial situation” (Brumaire 22, Year IV)— the National Food Commission, its agents, the Maximum—was closely identified with the Year Two. Factional politics continued to play a part: the presenter of the report, Joseph Eschassériaux, had himself been a zealous Montagnard involved with formulating subsistence policies in 1793–1794—with this text he attempted to distance his directoire self from his conventionnel past. Two other members of the five-man committee were Girondins who had spent the Year Two in jail or in hiding and had ample personal reasons to blame those they did.64 Outlining a financial and monetary history in which the “terrorists” of Year Two were responsible for the crises of Years Three and Four, all the report’s authors simultaneously denounced

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those who had attacked them and exculpated themselves. Outside the Councils, this account did not go completely unchallenged—in a spirited pamphlet, Cambon questioned the commission’s quantitative evidence and its interpretation of events (while quipping that Eschassériaux had apparently forgotten his own participation in earlier governments)—but it set the tone for further legislative debate.65 Beginning their report with reference to war as an “honorable” cause of shortages and high prices, the Council of Five Hundred’s members quickly shifted their focus to other factors implicitly more dishonorable and explicitly less amenable to policy control. In the Revolution’s first years, they asserted, lawmakers had had no financial plan and had given no thought to the future. With “no principles and no rules,” their predecessors had neglected taxes, left the books unbalanced, and printed assignats to cover every expense. The resulting “complete discord” between prices and values was everywhere attributed to the excess of assignats (“partout la multitude des assignats est dénoncée comme la cause de notre penurie et de nos maux”). Discredited by over issue, the assignats could not be revived by law. “The legislator’s will,” asserted the commissioners, “can do nothing to alter the difference existing between paper and metal.” It was, they concluded, “evident,” that any assignat’s face value was not its value in the marketplace and that, once it had begun, the bills’ depreciation had accelerated as did any freely falling body.66 Announcing they would soon stop issuing assignats, lawmakers nonetheless set a target for final, total emission of forty billion livres—a figure that roughly doubled the nominal value in circulation at the beginning of the Directory (and constituted at least a six-fold increase over that in Thermidor, Year II). During the following months, legislators referred regularly to falling rocks and rising water levels as they explained the assignats’ collapsing value as a natural phenomenon they were helpless to reverse. In spring 1796, citing the “too great abundance of assignats,” they resolved to replace them with a different paper currency, the “territorial drafts” (mandats). Promising “precautions will be taken to insure only 2,400,000,000 [francs] worth will be issued” and “each mandat will be specially hypothecated on the total value of the biens nationaux,” the language used to give value to the mandats echoed that used for the assignats while it nonetheless endeavored to establish differences between the two.67 While largely indistinguishable from assignats as pieces of paper—produced in the same facility and by the same workers,

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the mandats (with their printed serial numbers and signatures, their threatened punishment for counterfeiters and promised rewards for denunciation) marked no great material or iconographic innovation—the new bills did have a different legal relation to the land against which they were notionally issued. Whereas the biens nationaux backing the assignats had been sold at auction, such that competition between wouldbe purchasers could be understood as having driven up prices and hence having allowed the issue of “excess” assignats, auctions were to play no part in the sale of the biens backing the mandats. As the Executive Directory’s proclamation announcing the new paper (Ventôse 29, Year IV) explained: “The mandats have the advantage over the assignats that the bearer can ‘realize’ one [the mandat pouvoir être réalisé—in other words, could be made real, made substantial, made into real estate] at any moment, without competition, complications, or bidding, by the immediate and incontestable apprehension [appréhension immédiate et incontestable] of any national domain he likes, anywhere in the extent of the Republic.”68 Threaded through many arguments in favor of the assignats, appeals to a sense-based epistemology also supported the mandats, as the Directory’s oddly worded announcement suggests. The text said holders of mandats could immediately “apprehend” any of the national domains they wanted, but no dictionary of the time suggests “apprehend” as a synonym for “acquire” or “purchase.” Instead, defined by the Académie Française (in 1762 and again in 1798) as “the idea one has of something without coming to any judgment on it [l’idée qu’on prend d’une chose, sans en porter alors aucun jugement],” appréhension here implied that economic and monetary decisions could become automatic and unreflecting. As ideas formed prior to any judgment or reasoning, evaluation of the lands backing the mandats would be based on sense perception alone. Spared the vagaries of human emotion and social interaction (“without competition, complications, or bidding”) the would-be purchaser under this new system had seemingly only to see a bien national to have it. With truly “territorial” money in its hands, lawmakers dreamed, France could be retroactively saved from the previous six years of its history. “The mandat is worth and will always be worth what a rural property was worth in 1790,” asserted one report from the Council of Five Hundred, while Gatteux’s design for the embossing stamp to be used on the bills showed “Ceres [goddess of agriculture] involving in her work a citizen who has

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just exchanged his republican money for a rural property coming from the Domaines Nationaux.” The Directory promised the French people that with the mandats, “after such a terrible war, after so many violent shocks . . . the Nation suddenly fi nds itself returned to the state of fortunes and resources that it enjoyed at the beginning of the Revolution.”69 With these claims, as with the clauses specifying “payment in minted gold and silver coins and not otherwise . . . regardless of any future laws” (which began to appear in sales contracts and leases in late Year Four),70 legislators and individuals alike attempted to escape from history and into a state of natural stasis fantastically identified by the label “1790.” Based on the hope that prices might remain constant if values were determined by the natural, physical world (which, implicitly, could only be “apprehended” in a single fashion), the Executive Directory’s proclamation at the same time promised the French people that “[their] fate was entirely in [their] own hands.” If men and women “faithfully observed the law on the mandats,” France would “emerge from the Revolution, happy and triumphant” but if they failed to do so “a deep abyss will open under our feet.” 71 The dominant metaphors throughout this text were all corporeal (people’s fate was “in their own hands,” the land backing the mandats was “in front of their eyes,” and even the abyss that might open was “under our feet”), but the various body parts had significantly different implications for policy. The observing, “apprehending” “eye” was not imagined to act or judge, it simply saw things for what they were. In contrast, leaving people’s fate “in their own hands” gave them a far more active role to play. Between the assumed automatism of the first and the voluntarism of the latter—between, in other words, the logic of a self-regulating market and the idea of a consciously chosen contract—an abyss could, and did, appear (one that metaphorical and literal bodies were ill-equipped to straddle). True to their word, legislators left ordinary people to decide the mandats’ fate themselves and did little to make using the new currency obligatory. Well before any mandats had been printed, therefore, rumor had it that no one outside Paris would accept them. The law of Germinal 7, Year IV, introduced fines for those who refused mandats at face value, but the general breakdown of governance made that law almost impossible to enforce. Within Paris, the Ministry of Interior’s agents reported that “the people” complained constantly about the law’s nonenforcement while attempts to do so nonetheless clogged the lower levels of the judicial system (in early Floréal, one Paris

Figure 22. As with the assignats, the process of designing and producing the mandats meant a time lag between their legal creation and their physical existence. In the interim, the more quickly produced “promises for territorial mandats” were to circulate in their place.

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neighborhood alone had more than 300 people waiting to be charged for mandat-related offenses). Threatening a retailer who would accept only coins, workers told police agents that “without a certain degree of terror, we will never be able to get them [the mandats] accepted.”72 As the angry workers implied, a functioning currency is itself in many ways a “terrible” thing, something far removed from freely given consent or rationally formed judgment. Neither consciously chosen nor intellectually defensible, individuals’ faith in money depends on their feeling that others believe in it as well. In those periods of open sociopolitical confl ict and cultural possibility that we call “revolutions,” individuals rightly doubt that others share their beliefs. Since some degree of tacit agreement is nonetheless necessary for functioning within society, they call on various powers—nature, government, a deity—to force agreement. While appealing to some natural basis of monetary value is less obviously coercive than arresting and executing political enemies, its effects in 1795–1796 (poverty, despair, and a great increase in the number of suicides) were equally disastrous. And while Dan Edelstein has recently argued that natural-rights theory specifically underpinned “the Terror,” consideration of monetary policy suggests a different relation between the French Revolution and ideologies based on nature. For it was only from April 1793 to autumn 1794 that positive laws mandating the circulation of paper and coin based on their face values alone replaced laissez-faire policies grounded in the idea of gold or silver’s intrinsic, “natural” worth. In other words, only during “the Terror” did the revolutionary state treat money as something it had the right to patrol and police, only during “the Terror” was money dimly recognized for the political and social convention it is. This recognition, history suggests, was terrible in itself, something from which most revolutionary elites fled as soon as it became politically feasible to reembrace mea sures that had devastating consequences for urban workers, the state’s creditors, and the legitimacy of the Republic itself.

“Regardless of any future laws . . .” The fifth of Thermidor, Year Four, was as revolutionary a date as the ninth of Thermidor Year Two. The law of Thermidor 5, Year IV, granted individuals the right to contract in whatever units they liked. The rich immediately demanded payment “in gold and silver” while the poor con-

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tinued to hand over stacks of assignats. It was a world turned upside down, in which only the rich had coins and only the poor had paper. Contracts written in the following weeks and months show that individuals (or their notaries) understood this law as a way of protecting themselves from the effects of monetary variety and instability. No longer fungible, the varied money objects in circulation—silver and gold coins minted in 1790 or earlier, small change issued over the past five years, assignats, mandats, and the odd billet de confiance—were instead clearly differentiated between, with some acceptable and many others rejected. Selling three-quarters of a house he had inherited from his mother to his sister (who owned the other quarter of it), the Montmartre vigneron Simon Blanchetot specified he would accept as payment “only gold, or silver representing the intrinsic monetary value of gold, and nothing else.” Leasing a shop on the rue Saint Honoré to a grain merchant, a military supplier stipulated that if his tenant were ever to pay the rent “in other than metallic money,” the contract would immediately be cancelled. Borrowing 3,000 livres in gold coins to tide her over until her husband’s estate had been settled, a wealthy Parisian widow promised to repay the sum in “gold coins of precisely the same weight and fineness.” She did not quite agree to return the exact coins her creditor had lent—but she came close.73 Such restrictions were not completely novel in autumn 1796. Leasing an apartment in September 1790 (during the month-long debate on issuing further assignats), a property owner in Le Mans had already added the “essential clause” that “tenants must pay in gold or silver coins and not in bills, assignats, or any other paper moneys local or national” and noted that “without said clause, the present lease would not have been agreed at the above-named price but at one considerably greater”; similar, if less wordy, restrictions appeared in other contracts written that summer as well.74 Moreover, the currency with which perpetual rentes were to be paid— did it have to be the coins circulating at the time the contract had been written or should it be those used at the time of any given payment?—had been a recurring topic of legal dispute throughout the eighteenth century. But in the context of the 1790s, contracting parties used such language to new ends: they attempted to escape not just from financial instability but from all of human history, as well. Alongside the clauses specifying payment in gold coins or in “gold and silver money,” notaries inserted text establishing that the purchaser, borrower,

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or tenant agreed to those terms and would willingly abide by them regardless of anything that should happen later. “Renouncing the right to benefit from any subsequent laws,” buyers and debtors committed themselves to living in a perpetual monetary present. Those who adopted such language tried to avoid uncertainty by short-circuiting history. Laws might be passed, currencies might be introduced, regimes might come or go: people—in short—might do whatever mad thing they liked, but it would not affect the execution of contracts for which the future was irrelevant. Writing contracts specifying payment in “gold coins” or, for the rent of rural properties, in red and grey partridges, fattened geese, and bushels of grain, individuals attempted to protect themselves and their property from further revolution by positing that a gold coin would always be a gold coin, that a partridge was always a partridge. (Knowing the former was not exactly true, notaries added language specifying “of the same weight and fineness.”) The natural world with all its animal, plant, and mineral variety was conceived as a constant, far more stable than the domain of human history. As “land” had been for the assignats’ proponents (even though a sizable percentage of the Church’s property consisted of urban buildings), so gold, silver, and agricultural goods were for these contracts—a cultural fantasy of value made all the more powerful by not being imagined as human constructions. For contracts signed in the past, history was more difficult to avoid. Yet the disproportionate values of paper and metal in the 1790s affected arrangements made in previous decades, as well. In 1788, a contract promising an annual rente of a thousand livres would have been enough to ensure most French men or women a modest but comfortable existence (though it would have been mortifyingly little for a court noble or someone else with appearances to maintain). Paid in gold or silver in 1796 it was fabulous wealth, but paid in assignats, it barely bought a single second-balcony theater ticket. Creditors—be they crédirentiers, landlords, or lenders—hence protested bitterly that the introduction of the assignats had cheated them of income they were due and pleaded with the Directory to take action invalidating those contracts retroactively. Moreover, many argued that paper payments made in 1791–1796 should also all be voided. Their debtors, however—many of whom had taken advantage of rises in nominal incomes to pay off long-standing debts—insisted that having already paid in assignats or mandats, they

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should not be required to pay again. As Judith Miller has shown, this confl ict could not easily be resolved, since the interests of creditors and debtors were so clearly and starkly different.75 Raised four times within the Directory’s Councils, it repeatedly came to nothing because politically divided lawmakers failed to agree on mea sures that would inevitably deprive one or the other party of property. Only after the elections of spring 1797 brought a sizeable conservative majority to power (of 216 former members of the National Convention running for legislative office, not a tenth were elected) did the Councils agree on a course of action—one that would begin with the writing of local histories. Asserting that “in order to settle disputes arising from the depreciation of paper money, it is immediately essential to determine how much it was devalued,” they gave officials in each department a month to compile relevant statistics.76 The resulting “depreciation tables” (tableaux de dépréciation), showing the “actual” value of paper on a month-by-month or week-by week basis since 1790, were to be used by justices of the peace and commercial tribunals in adjudicating differences (and they continue to be consulted regularly by scholars today).77 Yet the decision to gather this quantitative information was itself politically charged, premised on the assumption that the assignats and mandats had decreased in exchange value and had done so at some discernible and mea surable rate—a claim that many disputed. In fact, as local notables constructed their numerical tables, some more or less admitted they had no idea what had happened and were chiefly intent on writing a history that might help to end political strife by virtue of not obviously looking political. Dignitaries in the Aube (in the Champagne region of northeastern France), for example, left a particularly full record of their lengthy deliberations, in which several of them initially asserted it was “frankly impossible to say” at what rate the assignats had depreciated. Merchants, after all, had been free to take or refuse the bills on their own terms, so should one calculate on the basis of the Jacobin baker, who accepted assignats at face value through 1792, or with reference to his colleagues who discounted them 15 percent in January and 25 percent by December? Prices for consumer necessities, luxury goods, livestock, and real estate all ought to figure into their calculations, but since those prices had not followed a single pattern, any table accurately presenting one of them would necessarily misrepresent the others. Having begun their discussions in agreement that paper money’s “maximum,

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minimum, and average value cannot be fi xed geometrically, nor can its progressive depreciation be mea sured as with a compass,” the commissioners in the Aube nonetheless eventually concluded that by averaging all available figures for a certain date, they could arrive at a number that “is not accurate, but is fair.”78 As they struggled to make sense of competing and fundamentally irreconcilable assertions, individuals and communities across France produced their own economic histories of the Revolution and debated how and on what basis they should be written. It would “violate all the laws of evidence and of justice,” asserted one writer, to say the assignats had depreciated at a steady rate. “Far from being a gradual slope,” he continued, “it was a series of sudden and violent shocks.” (The assignat’s history, in other words, had been revolutionary rather than evolutionary.) One petitioner protested the final numbers produced for the department of the Seine by writing, “Anyone who lived in Paris in 1793 remembers not that assignats sold for 67 percent less than their face value— which is what the table produced by the department claims—but that people chased the money changers from the Palais Royal and beat them publicly.” Creditors in Dijon asserted the high value listed for assignats by their department’s table indicated the strength of their own past, “blind” patriotism and hence was to their credit metaphorically even as it more literally shortchanged them.79 Unlike so many of the best-known histories written in and of the 1790s, the depreciation tables were resolutely local, not national. At a time when lawmakers were orga nizing civic festivals and outlining education policies with the intention of creating a durable, nationwide, republican culture, the ninety-eight different “pictures” (tableaux in French means both “tables” and pictures”) of paper money reminded citizens that, as recently as 1796, no two departments had the same history. 80 Any careful reader of the published General Collection of depreciation figures would have noted, for instance, that in the southern department of the Hérault, a hundred livres in assignats had been discounted 7 percent in January 1791 (that is, one hundred livres in assignats was worth ninety-three livres in coins), whereas in the neighboring department of the Gard, the rate had been only 5 percent. Noticing that officials in the nearby Aude had decided on an assignat-to-metal exchange rate calculated down to the denier—they recorded that in January 1791, one hundred livres in assignats had been worth ninety-three livres, ten sous, and

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nine deniers—the reader in Montpellier (capital of the Hérault) might have become suspicious of the round numbers used in his own department; observing that the depreciation table for the Gard gave a precise figure for every ten-day interval, the same reader might have wondered at the monthly numbers applied to contracts signed in his own city. In keeping with the instructions they received from Paris, authorities in the Hérault did record a new figure for every décade (the ten-day “week” used in the republican calendar) starting with spring 1795, but the tables constructed by their colleagues in the Aude switched at that point to giving daily numbers. The General Collection’s alphabetical orga ni zation may have obscured these differences between neighboring departments, but it made others apparent: in the Gers at the beginning of 1791, for instance, assignats had supposedly been accepted at face value, while in the Gironde they were discounted 10.5 percent (a rate reached in the Gers only a year later).81 Meant to be used in resolving old differences, the tables did as much to create new ones, as creditors realized how much more money they would have coming to them if only they had signed their contracts in another department (and as debtors made similar calculations in reverse). Petitioning the Council of Five Hundred, a lawyer in Vendeuil (Aisne) observed that in February 1792, he had perfectly balanced lending 10,000 francs [sic] in the Aisne by borrowing the same amount in the nearby Aube, but that the differences in these departments’ depreciation tables now rendered him 1,725 francs short. All around France, critics protested the law of Messidor 5, Year V, which decreed there would be a separate scale for each department. Themselves the recipients of many angry complaints, administrators in the Haute Saône pleaded to be allowed to revise their numbers upwards, since their table showed the assignats losing value far more quickly than in any of the neighboring departments.82 Across the country in Rouen, more than a dozen merchants argued the opposite point, claiming their department’s figures—which showed the borrower of 10,000 livres in assignats in December 1795 owing slightly over 400 livres in cash, whereas the table for the Eure had the same borrower owing only 47—were far too high, and since “the discrepancy never really existed” it simply revealed some underlying miscalculation. Like many others, the Rouennais used a form of the word “motley” (bigarrure or bigaré) to describe the situation they faced: “The administration will no doubt find the cause of this mess [bigarrure],” their petition

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Figure 23. Though not the best executed of the many trompe l’oeil representations of assignats, this is one of the more interesting. In among the assignats (clearly marked as “hypothecated on national domains” and displaying signatures and serial numbers), the National Guard membership and the ration cards, a single religious card comments, perhaps, on the assignats’ former status as the savior of France.

concluded, “and will hasten to rectify it.” Defined by Diderot in the Encyclopédie as “differing from ‘variety’ only as ‘bad’ does from ‘good,’ ” “motley” was hardly a term of praise or a mere statement of fact. Rather, it suggested that with the tableaux, France had become an ugly and incoherent patchwork suited only for fools. The “cursed scales of ninety-eight colors,” wrote another angry citizen, “guarantee the Revolution will have ruined only its most ardent friends [that is, those who held onto assignats the longest].”83

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With their department-by-department loss of value the only coherently documented aspect of their history, the idea that the assignats or the mandats might ever have been a truly meaningful money was slowly reduced to a barely memorable fiction. For a time, some individuals remembered the assignats’ history differently and challenged socioeconomic fragmentation with the language of political universalism. “It is contrary to the unity and indivisibility of the Republic,” protested one petitioner from Amiens, to suggest that “under a single government and a single law, there were as many modes of payment as there were departments.”84 His claim met with no response, however. For while the tableaux, contrary to their authors’ hopes, were neither “accurate” nor “fair,” they did capture a fundamental truth about money in the revolutionary era (and beyond): that its qualities mattered as much as its quantity. Assignats borrowed in one département compared to those repaid in another; coins earned one June and assignats spent the next September; assignats with “royal faces” and those with republican emblems—in none of these cases did the currency’s numerical value alone suffice to indicate its worth. The depreciation tables may have, as the petitioner suggested, revealed the Republic’s “unity and indivisibility” to be chiefly rhetorical, but they were only the latest in a long series of economic policies and monetary decisions to do so. Nor were the compiled tableaux the sole depictions of money’s variable qualities to be produced in the socially violent and culturally rich years of the Directory. Graphic artists, for instance, took to representing assignats and many other papers by means of the well-established tradition of trompe-l’oeil painting (thereby commenting sardonically on revolutionaries’ insistence that the assignats’ value was “in front of your eyes”). Remarking on all the paper that looked like money but no longer served as currency, this imagery—found in single-sheet prints, on fans, and as the final item in the famous print series Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française—also adamantly insisted on the very real difference between a “tableau” and that which it represented. If, as Richard Taws has argued, these images spoke obliquely to the trauma of hyperinflation, many of them also referred much more directly to the effects of the depreciation tables themselves.85 Philippe-Joseph Maillart, for instance, directly referenced them by subtitling his print Tableau des variations du cours des assignats pour servir de baze aux transactions entre particuliers (“Table

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Figure 24. Maillart (Brussels), “Moneys and Other Papers of the French Republic: A Picture-Table Showing Variations in the Value of the Assignats”— this highly detailed trompe l’oeil comments both on the papers it literally depicts and on the depreciation tables produced by every department.

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Figure 25. “Comparative scale of the paper money’s reduction and actual size.” By including a scale bar, Maillart called attention to his trompe l’oeil as a work of reproduction and asserted that his own “reduction” of the assignats was more accurate than that produced by departmental commissioners. Maillart “Moneys and Other Papers of the French Republic” detail.

of the varying value of the assignats to serve as a basis for transactions between individuals”) and attaching to it a detailed, chronologically ordered, series of values. Printed in Brussels in late 1796, Maillart’s work represented dozens of different papers, while the text below stated that a twenty-four-livre gold coin had sold for twenty-six livres, four sous in paper in January 1791, for thirty-eight livres a year later, and for 1,200 livres in October 1795. Plausible as those figures might initially seem, Maillart’s inclusion of an exchange rate for August 1789—three months before the nationalization of the Church’s lands, four months before the first vote on the assignats, eight months before the vote on monetizing the assignats, and a full year before any actual assignats entered circulation—must have been meant either to imply that the paper lost value even before it existed or to prompt the viewer into questioning all

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the other numbers provided. Including a scale bar at the bottom of his print (but above the engraved columns of numbers), Maillart subtly asserted that his own visual “depreciating” of the assignats, mandats, and other papers was more precise than that produced by the departmental commissioners. While the official tables attempted to construct algorithms for translating qualities into quantity, Maillart’s tableau (and other, similar images) implicitly contended no such calculation could be accurate, that monetary incommensurability had to figure in any true “picture” of the Revolution. Layering assignats and mandats between bills issued by many other bodies (the Paris sections, the Caisse Patriotique, the ill-fated Maison de Secours) and a host of related paper objects (ration cards, a banker’s license, a printed Maximum), Maillart reminded viewers of how divided monetary authority had become and how difficult its reconstruction would be. Like the clauses specifying a particular medium of payment “regardless of any future laws,” the official depreciation tables were an attempt to bring the Revolution’s effects to a close. But the history written in those tableaux could not really be used to escape from history, since it produced its own historical effects. History did not end and the revolution—the palpable uncertainty of the future, the possibilities in the present—went on and on and on. In autumn 1804, a dutiful prefect in Brittany alerted other state functionaries to what he presumed to be a new counterfeit coin in circulation. It could be recognized, he said, by the way it replaced a simple laurel wreath with a “great confusion” of leaves and by the tooshort haircut it gave to the figure represented on the “heads” side of the coin. The supposed counterfeiters’ most obvious error was even more striking, however: instead of a legend saying “Bonaparte, First Consul,” their coin made reference to “Napoleon, Emperor.”86

7 Taking the Old Regime out of Circulation Old friends and old écus: this is a proverb meaning old friends are the best. Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1835)

O

day in 1845, an otherwise unremarkable man— conventionally dressed, aged about thirty— distinguished himself by how quickly he hurried down Paris’s rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. Muttering to himself about “scoundrels” and “God’s justice,” he walked determinedly, attracting a small crowd of onlookers as he crossed the Place Maubert. Some people tried to approach him, but he repulsed them with his walking stick and his strange claim, “Napoleon is my lawyer.” Becoming even more visibly agitated, he reached the Ile Saint Louis. “You demonetized Napoleon, but you won’t demonetize me!” he finally screamed as he jumped from the Pont Marie into the Seine below.1 Meanwhile, over two hundred soldiers took up posts at the Paris Mint, where they traded their weapons for cashiers’ aprons and spent their days counting coins and controlling crowds.2 In Etampes (southwest of Paris), the police repeatedly intervened in ordinary commercial transactions, forcing bakers and café keepers to accept money [sic] for purchases.3 In Rouen, Lille, and Douai, local officials noted the planned demonetization of Old Regime and Revolutionary coinage had provoked numerous incidents of marketplace violence; they warned large-scale rioting was likely.4 Le Populaire, a newspaper affiliated with Etienne Cabet’s Icarian movement, reported unrest in Toulon as well. 5 Most histories of the French Revolution end with Napoleon Bonaparte. The previous paragraph suggests, however, that such a terminus would N A SUNN Y SEP TEMBER

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not be particularly germane for this book. The meaning and use of money remained highly fraught for decades, as social and cultural reconfigurations begun in the 1790s worked themselves out in daily life. Litigation over the legal status of certain Old Regime privileges—were they contractual property or feudal abuses?—continued long after the military coup, the imperial coronation, and the final battle of Waterloo. The French state sold the last of the biens nationaux in 1867. Closed in 1794, the provincial mints reopened in 1804 and thirteen of them remained in operation (as private enterprises responsible for making France’s money) through the 1830s; only in 1879 did the Paris Mint become the sole producer of coins and a fully state-operated institution.6 Largely removed from circulation by 1800, assignats and billets de confiance entered it anew during the July Monarchy (1830–1848) as numismatists across France attempted to amass “complete” collections of these now fascinating and increasingly rare papers.7 Nonetheless, existing monetary and financial histories, from Marcel Marion’s six-volume Histoire financière de la France to more recent works such as René Sédillot’s Histoire du franc (1979) and François Crouzet’s La Grande inflation (1993), tend to follow the chronology established by political historians. Treating Bonaparte’s coming to power as the definitive end of a tragic story and the beginning of another, far happier, one, they too have limited the time of the French Revolution to roughly a decade. In their accounts, the chaos of the 1790s yielded quickly to order in the first years of the new century. Under the Consulate, they say, the state began to collect taxes efficiently and Napoleon’s personal aversion to paper meant the country immediately found itself on a stable, “hard money” diet. Though the “trauma” of the assignats may have left France hostile to banks and allergic to paper currency for most of the nineteenth century, the monetary system created in 1803 (with the franc germinal as its centerpiece) was, these historians agree, one of the Emperor’s most lasting legacies and a legitimate basis of national pride until the 1920s. Completely overlooking the sustained debates and popu lar unrest provoked by the demonetization of various coins, Marion simply remarked with approval that “the fiscal history of thirty years, from the Restoration through the July Monarchy, can be written in a handful of pages!”8 Given the dominant framework for writing about money and history, this consensus among historians is not particularly surprising. Operat-

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ing within the faux-materialist perspective that narrates the history of money as a difficult, perhaps misguided, transition from substance to abstraction (from metal to paper), the assignats’ introduction and eventual withdrawal provide logical-seeming chronological boundaries. In contrast, however, this book insists that paper, per se, was never the defining issue. Most transactions before the Revolution had, after all, been made on or in paper. Many chambers of commerce both opposed the issue of more assignats in September 1790 and actively supported local issuers of billets de confiance. When Parisians from the faubourgs marched into the Convention on Prairial 1, Year III, they called not for a return to some mythical gold or silver standard but for laws enforcing the circulation of paper at face value. Paper was not the problem. Politics—the struggle for cultural legitimacy and economic power among individuals defined in regional, social, and ideological terms—politics was the problem. It was not a problem that vanished with Napoleon Bonaparte.

Stubborn Calculation French currency in the nineteenth century presented a striking contrast between theory and practice, legislation and daily life.9 At the beginning of the period, the laws of Germinal 7–17, Year XI (March 28–April 7, 1803) endowed the country with a coherent and comprehensive monetary system of marvelous simplicity. Money, various authors noted at the time, was a form of mea surement and ought therefore to be compatible with the other mea sures (of length, area, volume, and weight) introduced by the Republic.10 In keeping with such arguments, the basic unit of money would henceforth be the franc, a coin consisting of a fi xed quantity of precious metal of a certain fineness (five grams of silver, .900 pure). Doing away with the deniers, sous, and livres that had been the accounting units of the Old Regime, the introduction of the franc supposedly also replaced the écus, demi-écus, and liards that had been the coins most widely in circulation. The legislation, that is, envisioned the franc both as a new unit of mea surement and as a new coin (thereby abolishing the centuries-old distinction between money of account and money of reckoning); it was meant both to create new categories of physical objects—coins marked franc, half-franc, and quarter-franc—and to align the monetary system with the other new units of mea sure introduced as part of the metric system (first adopted in 1795). Like the other

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new mea sures, the franc was decimal (base 10) in conception and hence marked a clear break with the prerevolutionary money of account, in which twelve deniers equaled one sou and twenty sous made a livre. Since all metric units of mea surement were convertible into each other, the new decimal money could—at a pinch—even be used to mea sure something other than value: for instance, since each five-franc silver coin weighed twenty-five grams, forty of them were a kilogram. (A midcentury almanac suggested an even more cumbersome conversion, observing that a line of twenty two-franc and twenty one-franc coins would be a meter long).11 The hypothetical ease of moving within the various measures of the metric system was only achieved at the cost of creating other, far more difficult and much more common, conversions. In making the five-franc coin weigh twenty-five grams of a certain quality of silver, a unit was created—the franc—containing just slightly more silver than the livre had at the end of the Old Regime. It did not contain much more silver, only 10,125/10,000 (81/80) of the amount found in the older coins. But since a coin’s commercial value was understood to derive from its metal content, the franc was also worth just barely more than the livre in daily transactions. This difference was so slight it could have gone largely unnoticed had all Old Regime accounts and coins become obsolete overnight. Yet the complicated process of literally manufacturing money (made all the more difficult by wartime metal shortages), coupled with policy hesitations and popular resistance, meant the franc only very slowly became the universal equivalent envisioned in 1803.12 Though currency was one of the first items to be truly mass produced, even the 336,200 one-franc coins issued by the Paris Mint in Year XII (1803–1804) were only sufficient to put a single such coin into the hands of one French person out of a hundred.13 As late as 1827, calculations done by regime officials indicated more than two-thirds of the gold, silver, and silver-alloy coins issued between 1726 and 1794 remained in circulation.14 No comparably credible estimates existed for small change made of copper or copper alloys but it was widely accepted most in use had been made before 1800. In 1836, a handbook for priests therefore reminded them centimes did actually exist (though you almost never saw one), and many standing donations to the Church had been expressed in monetary units (such as pistoles) that would have to be translated into new terminology.15

Figure 26. “Use of the New Mea sures.” Created as part of the metric system, the franc was supposed to be interchangeable with the other new mea sures such as the liter, gram, and meter shown here. Only in the 1840s did any of these begin to be widely used.

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For years and years, taxes and state fees were legally calculated in decimal francs but paid in duodecimal coins issued under earlier regimes. The slight discrepancy in value meant transactions involving prices in francs but payment in livres required division carried to the fourth decimal point.16 While much business was no doubt conducted without attention to this level of accuracy, the possibility of contention—of disputes over the rightful exchange rate—nevertheless hovered over every exchange. In some contexts, the 81 to 80 ratio made for protracted and vexed interactions. Consider, for example, the consequences of collecting taxes in francs rather than livres.17 Requiring taxes to be assessed and payments reckoned “in francs” was an important step toward generalizing use of the new decimal accounting system, but material limitations meant the use of new coins could not simultaneously be mandated. Taxpayers would have been told they owed such-and-such an amount in francs, but they would nearly all have then asked, “How much is that in livres?” At the same time, the state’s understandable commitment to the collection of overdue back taxes, figured in livres (as they had originally been assessed), created contexts in which it was the state (or at least, its agents) that asked the question, How much is that in livres? and had then to be reminded that, in such cases, “six livres is six livres, and a five-franc coin is five livres, one sou, three deniers.”18 In other words, it was not always a case of converting from old to new: in the case of arrears, as with any debt contracted in livres, the new had to be converted into the old—the present (or perhaps it was the future) explained in the past’s terms. A seemingly straightforward decree, such as that of Thermidor, Year XI, which stipulated that French coins minted in or after 1726 would be accepted for all public payments only as long as they retained “some trace of their imprint,” did not clarify matters in practice but only further confused them. Anxious to avoid civil unrest and perhaps imbued with the notion that the “money of the poor” was necessarily different from that used by others, the Prefect of the Ille-et-Vilaine (Nicolas Yves Borie, born 1757) simply postponed the new law’s execution. Arguing that small change “without any imprint” should still be legal tender, he wrote that the decree risked “spreading alarm among the department’s poorest inhabitants.” Meanwhile from Saint Malo, a subprefect reported that people distinguished between coins intentionally altered by clipping or shaving and those worn “merely by age.” While they understood

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the rationale for refusing the former, they saw no grounds for rejecting the latter since “if they no longer carry any trace, it must be because the imprint was not strong enough in the first place.”19 The questions and challenges posed by these citizens resonated in the corridors of government, as well. In the aftermath of the decree, prefects, subprefects, tax receivers, local payeurs, and officials in the Ministries of Taxation and Finance bickered incessantly over what constituted “enough” of an imprint. As they did so, detailed descriptions and recriminatory notes went back and forth between provincial France and the capital, as did bags of coins. Frustrated that central authorities regularly rejected thousands of livres laboriously collected and sent in payment, local officials opened the sacks, scrutinized the coins, declared them sufficiently marked, and simply sent them back again.20 Seen from this perspective, “New Regime” France was hardly more centralized or uniform than the “old” had been. A smoothly functioning machine it was not. Consider the case of the secretary-general of the department of the Sarthe, who in spring 1805 paid his taxes with part of his salary. When the departmental tax receiver arrived at his office to tell him the coins with which he had paid were not valid, the prefect overheard this conversation and wrote in angry tones to the departmental payeur, chastising him for putting public officials in such an awkward position. The payeur protested to the secretary that he should not have complained to the prefect about the coins; the secretary responded he had not intended to bear tales but the tax collector’s outbursts could not be controlled. Reminding the payeur that “the Government’s decrees” mandated that only coins with “left-facing heads and laurel branches around a shield” could be accepted, the Secretary deflected responsibility from any known individual to some shadowy force in Paris (one apparently intent on sowing discord in local administrations). 21 In another case, when two mayors complained about their own towns’ tax collectors, the collectors shifted blame to their departmental superior. He, in turn, responded that based on the samples sent to him by the mayors, the coins in question did have “enough of an imprint” and should in fact be accepted. Describing his own position on these disputes as “perhaps too easy,” the departmental collector then outlined the difficulties he faced in transmitting the coins: “If I give them to the payeur, the public complains I gave him insufficiently marked ones . . . if I send them to Paris, they deduct countless numbers of them and there is almost never

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a shipment on which I do not suffer personal losses.”22 While offices were supposed to be established where old coins could be exchanged (on the basis of weight) for new, finding individuals to operate these offices was no easy task. In the department of the Vosges, for instance, a lace dealer who was also a judge in the commercial courts initially bid for the post but then quickly rejected it when he realized the cost of shipping used coins to Paris would fall to him personally. Another merchant took the job and promptly sent his first shipment to the Strasbourg Mint, only to be told he ought to have given the coins to the departmental tax receiver. The receiver, however, said he was “expressly forbidden by the Ministry of Finance” to accept them; it then fell to the minister of finances to explain the coins in question should have been sent, not to the director of the Strasbourg Mint, but to that establishment’s cashier. 23 Time alone did little to resolve matters. Instead, as the decades passed, issues of new coins and the partial or attempted demonetization of old ones allowed rumor to undermine any money-object’s currency. Suspicious that an 1810 law meant to withdraw Old Regime silver from circulation might also be applied to small change, bakers and other retailers in Lorraine simply refused to accept the latter, thereby helping to create the very situation—one in which copper and billon coins were worthless— they had most feared.24 Little could be done to prevent such crises, and rare was the legislator who could foresee legislation’s unintended effects. The laws of 1810 on the écus, for instance, had decreed an écu should circulate for five francs and eighty centimes. The metal in a full-weight coin was, however, worth slightly more than 5F80 at the current market rate, and individuals would be paid this larger sum if they took their écus to a mint and exchanged them for francs. The law had been passed as a measure of ideological and iconographic purification, with the difference between exchange and “intrinsic” value meant to entice people into trading Old Regime coins for Napoleonic ones. Instead, it encouraged people to leave significantly underweight écus—the oldest and most worn coins, those for which the mint would pay no premium—in circulation. The state could mandate that coins customarily counted as “six livres” be accepted for only 5F80, but it could not force daily practices to follow the letter of the law. Since Old Regime coins bore no inscribed indication of numerical worth, they had always been understood to circulate not according to some “face” value but on the basis of their “nominal” value (as set by royal decree). For the past century an écu had, as it

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were, been named “six livres.” Rechristening each écu “five francs and eighty centimes” was an extremely slow and uneven process. Describing the situation in 1817, the prefect of the Sarthe admitted that “in transactions between individuals, six-livre coins are accepted for their nominal value.”25 When the prefect pushed those under him to enforce the laws more rigorously, they pushed back, citing the same ideal of individual economic freedom that had played such a significant part in the monetary confl icts of the 1790s. Telling the prefect to mind his own business, the mayor of Le Mans and the city’s Chamber of Commerce agreed: “If the current laws on demonetization do not constrain individuals when they draw up contracts between themselves, what makes you think that any other regulations could have this effect? Commerce is the enemy of barriers and requiring it to renounce an arrangement established for the ease and speed of transactions can only produce a negative effect. Moreover, no real inconvenience or disadvantage results from the habit of counting écus as écus, which is common in a great many départements.”26 Meant to wear away the old money’s credibility, state policies instead encouraged people in some regions to keep the coins in circulation. In areas where private individuals and state functionaries alike “named” the coins 5F80, écus were used to pay taxes and the collectors often then exchanged them at the nearest mint. This last transaction benefited both parties: it provided the mint with the raw materials (silver, in the form of écus) needed to make francs and gave the tax collector coins that entered easily and legally into any calculation. In Paris, the newly created Banque de France (whose bills, like those of the old Caisse d’Escompte, circulated only within the capital) also played a major role in funneling silver écus into the mint and putting the resulting silver francs into circulation. So effective were these circuits in certain parts of France that the deputy Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Andigné de Resteau could say in 1823 that he had never seen an écu in Paris. 27 In other parts of the country (such as Andigné de Resteau’s home department of the Sarthe), however, very different dynamics were at work. Where farmers, merchants, and retailers counted an écu as six francs even though state officials took it for twenty centimes less, the older coinage not only remained in circulation but became concentrated there—anyone traveling regularly between Paris and Le Mans, for instance, would have saved écus to spend in the latter city. An 1818 decree, intended to ensure the franc’s quality

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and uniformity, limited the melting down of old coins for new to the Paris and Rouen mints and thereby contributed even more to exacerbating regional differences. Since tax collectors and other administrators had to pay transport and insurance costs from their own pockets, few in the more remote regions of the country had any inclination or incentive to ship écus to the mints in Normandy and the capital. Rather, like anyone else in Brittany, a tax collector in Nantes or Rennes realized that if he put an écu back into circulation locally, it was six francs, whereas if he sent it to Rouen or Paris, it was 5F80 (less shipping and handling). Meanwhile the mints, though under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance, remained (as they had always been) private, for-profit enterprises and their directors balked at being told they had to pay upfront for the Old Regime coins that were the basic raw materials for making new ones. In 1834, when a concerted effort was made to remove écus from circulation, the director of the Rouen Mint insisted on valuing them by weight though the departmental collectors from whom he received them were forbidden by law from doing so.28 When the liberal economist Hippolyte Passy explained the pooling of Old Regime coinage in certain areas to his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies in 1835, he cited none of these statewide factors. Instead, referring to “the habits of this population, their dislike of innovation, and—it must be said—their fear of a new effigy [on the coins],” he implied local tradition and unfounded emotion were solely responsible for the continued use of Old Regime money. 29 Decades of currency flows from places where an écu was not counted as six francs to those where it was had created distinct monetary geographies, but describing that pattern in terms of regional backwardness did more to mystify difference than to explain it. When policymakers like Passy cited culture and superstition to account for the continued use of écus in western France, they marked the product of largely rational calculations as irrational monetary anachronism. This perspective was challenged by the radical Alexandre Glais-Bizoin and even by Augustin Giraud (a deputy from western France who was otherwise an unexceptional member of the ministerial center), but their calls for the regime to attend to its own role were largely ignored. Confronted on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies with the suggestion that the situation could easily be remedied if the state accepted écus for a time at their customary value (that is, for six francs

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rather than 5F80), Minister of Finance Jean- Georges Humann simply yelled, “No!” and repeated that the government would not compromise with “local habits.”30 In the 1834–1835 debate over ongoing attempts to remove all écus from circulation, the dominant ministerial and legislative voices made it sound as if obdurate Bretons alone were at fault. Yet as various deputies from the West observed, the problem was as much a shortage of francs as it was a surfeit of tradition. In the interest of political and economic stability, the old currency could not be fully banned until sufficient new coins were in circulation. But since the franc was defined by law as a certain quantity of silver—even though France had no natural deposits of silver and the Spanish Empire’s collapse had completely disrupted imports from Central and South America—it was physically impossible to issue more francs without first melting down the existing coinage. The écus, sous, and louis of the Old Regime were the raw materials from which New Regime francs had to be made. Summing up this situation, one member of the Chamber of Deputies commented, “It is no more possible to make coins without money/silver [des pièces de monnaie sans argent] than it is to make rabbit pâté without a rabbit.”31 His listeners laughed at his analogy but they agreed with the underlying sentiment. Concluding that the government could not be faulted for its failure to provide the coins people were supposed to use, the Chamber voted extra time (and a bit of extra funding) for the demonetization. Nobody responded that one might, in such a context, either pay extra for “rabbits” or opt to make a different “pâté.” Ordinary people’s monetary habits could certainly be tenacious: faced with the local custom of valuing two-sous coins for only one (that is, counting them as five centimes rather than ten), they mayor of Pontorson (Manche) was brought close to despair. A chevalier of the Legion of Honor and a man who prided himself on fulfilling his official duties promptly and efficiently, he remarked in irritation on villagers’ “dogged attachment” to their mistaken ideas and described those of Pleine-Fougères (Ille-et-Vilaine) as “the most stubborn of all and the least disposed to conform to the publicity I have issued.” At a loss for how to proceed, the mayor wrote to his colleague in the neighboring department, suggesting he, too, might post notices reminding farmers they were “obligated” to accept sous for their “nominal” value by the “laws and regulations” governing these matters.32

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Yet if peasants could be obstinate, they had no monopoly on this trait. Was their behavior really any more entrenched than lawmakers’ attachment to the idea of “intrinsic” value or the government’s desire to make money without paying for it (in other words, to get rabbits for free)? Pushed on why tax receivers in Brittany were themselves continuing to put écus back into circulation as six francs (rather than withdrawing them at the official 5F80 rate at which they accepted them), the minister asserted that to do otherwise would be to demonetize the state’s money before individuals’. Such a discrepancy would be an intolerable injustice, violating the basic premises of monetary equality. So while Louis Philippe’s government might not be willing to “compromise” with stubborn peasants, its behavior in many ways mirrored theirs. Conceiving the state’s fi nances as if they were those of a bourgeois household, Humann’s chief goal as minister of fi nances was to run a budget surplus. A Strasbourgeois wholesaler who had dealt chiefly in sugar, coffee, and tobacco before investing in steamships and oil refi ning, Humann had literally made millions by transporting goods from where they had little value to where they had more. 33 Yet when faced with other people doing this same thing on a small-scale basis, he responded not with a gleeful cry of self-recognition but with scorn and contempt. In the 1820s and 1830s, individuals’ needs, state regulations, and material conditions interacted to produce a historically specific pattern of currency distribution many contemporaries did not see as such. Instead, they perceived it in largely static, cultural terms. Yet by understanding monetary difference as the product of custom, they transformed political economy into ethnography and turned social difference into personal idiosyncrasy. The July Monarchy press treated Humann as a grocer from Alsace and holders of écus as typical Bretons sitting, fairylike, on their pots of silver and gold. 34 And anyone who suggested that pâté could indeed be made without rabbits was a swindler and a fraud. (Goupil de Préfelne’s choice of that particular foodstuff to make his point had hardly been innocuous. Nor was it necessary; he could just as well have said that one cannot make poulet Marengo without chicken or tarte au citron without lemons. In an era when urban legend dwelt insistently on the possibility that Paris restaurateurs made most “rabbit” dishes from cats and when political satire extended this accusation to charge the regime with being similarly stingy and fraudulent, the pâté analogy asserted the contrary: that the government could and should be

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trusted to use the “correct” ingredients when making money.35) Clinging to notions of silver’s intrinsic value, like understanding the monetary landscape as the product of innate character, made it possible to imagine history’s effects as manifestations of timeless, unchanging nature. At a time when “the people” regularly and violently challenged the authority of their purported representatives, when Louis Philippe’s claim to the throne rested chiefly on his not being the “legitimate” monarch, and when revolutions threatened to be yearly events, ideas like intrinsic value and innate character were both immensely comforting and under constant pressure. 36

Two Kinds of Money Entitled “The Two Bouquets,” Antoine Fontenay’s short story in the Revue des deux mondes (1833) might just as well be called “Two Kinds of Money.”37 At a performance of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, the story’s narrator, John (the text was signed with the pseudonym, “Lord Feeling”), sees the beautiful Madame de Nanteuil in the audience and rushes to join her. When her companions leave them alone in her box at the Opéra, it seems his joy is about to be complete, but instead a flower seller interrupts his happiness. Describing himself as “the most suspicious and inexplicable of men,” John takes objection to the “physiognomy” of this woman who is “still young, but already tarnished” and declines her bouquets. Madame de Nanteuil, however, chooses one of camellias and tea roses and leaves him to pay the bill. Discussion follows: the flower seller, hoping to benefit from a lover’s largesse, initially says, “Pay me however much you like,” but John refuses to participate “in this odious negotiation.” He replies, “I think you are selling, I am not,” and insists she name her price. The flower seller settles on “forty sous” (a vernacular denomination with no legal significance) and John responds by giving her a fivefranc coin. When she says she has no change, he tells her to get some. After this exchange, she leaves the box and returns quickly with a “devilish smile” on her face and her apron pockets full of “an enormous quantity of two-sou and six-liard coins” that she slowly counts out on the theater stall’s green-velvet-covered ledge. “Maybe in embarrassing me so, the sly marchande de fleurs thought she could push me over the edge and imagined I would throw this mess of old grapeshot [toute cette mitraille] back in her face,” the narrator comments. “I confess I was tempted,”

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he continues, “but I resisted . . . and without the least concern for my white gloves, I picked up this execrable money piece by piece and stoically put it in my back pocket.” Dwelling on how the flower seller has humiliated him, John “fidget[s] with those odious sous that weighed so heavily in my jacket pocket” and “was at times tempted to throw handfuls of them at the poor bald heads below, which my bad eyes and worse temper transformed into faces of mockery and insult.” Instead, standing in the rain after the per for mance ends, he rewards the virtuous poor by tossing the small change into a sickly young flower girl’s basket and greatly overpaying her for several bunches of violets. Taking these last to Madame de Nanteuil, he finds her en deshabillé in her boudoir, slowly throwing her roses into the fire. The silver coin with which the narrator buys the first bouquet and the sous and liards he spends on the second differed in nearly every respect. Made of copper or billon or from melted-down church bells, the latter tarnished while the former did not. Matte, they did not shine. Having been produced quickly and cheaply, the small change was not uniform in size, in weight, or really even in shape. Like the first flower seller, sous and liards showed signs of age in a way that silver coins did not. In constant circulation and passing literally through many hands, their surfaces quickly became worn and their imprints effaced. Even when it did not circulate, base-metal coinage deteriorated more rapidly than silver coins—such, at least, was the conclusion reached by a correspondent of the Académie des sciences who reported on dissecting the stomach of a dog who twelve years earlier had accidentally swallowed both a five-franc coin and a “gros sou.” While the former was barely altered, the latter was reduced to one quarter of its original weight and “it is likely that if the dog had lived longer, the coin would have disappeared completely without causing any damage to the stomach.”38 Small change, we might conclude, was like the magical peau de chagrin (wild ass’s skin) in Balzac’s novel—granting wishes in the short term but also shrinking with every use, it ensured that those who held it would eventually have nothing whatsoever. As this story dramatized, it was as true in 1830s France as it had been a hundred years earlier that different people had different money. This situation had been more or less tolerable in the eighteenth century, when the idea of national uniformity was largely nonex istent and official attitudes toward the poor mixed paternalism with neglect—if copper pen-

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nies had a disagreeable odor or if money sacks were part filled with nail heads and buttons, these were small prices to pay for maintaining a clearly hierarchical social order. In contrast, and in the context of a liberal regime that at least paid lip ser vice to the idea of formal equality, many members of the July Monarchy elite found the same truths politically, intellectually, and emotionally almost unbearable. Writing in the Journal des économistes in 1843, for instance, Horace Say (son of one famous economist and father of another) described French copper and billon coins as “imperfect . . . troublesome . . . gross . . . inferior . . . undeserved”— and those were just the adjectives he used in his article’s first paragraph.39 An anonymous pamphleteer asserted that “in a country like France,” the existing small change (all of which was “hideous”) was an “insult to reason and taste,” while the Orleanist deputy and Director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Claude Pouillet, spoke of replacing it as an “urgent necessity” and nothing less than lawmakers’ “duty to humanity.”40 Such attitudes prevailed among provincial elites, as well. Replying to a questionnaire sent by the Ministry of Finance in 1838, officials around the country readily found fault with France’s existing small change. Commenting specifically about the ten-centime coins made in 1807 of billon (low-grade silver alloyed with copper) and marked with an N for Napoleon, the subprefects in Nuits-Saint- Georges (Côte-d’Or), Redon (Ille-et-Vilaine), and Le Mans (Sarthe) all complained—albeit in hardly specific terms—that “a lot” of those coins were obvious fakes. Their colleagues in Auxonne (Côte- d’Or) and Poligny (Jura) proposed that all such “little napoleons” should “disappear” or “be suppressed”; the prefect of the Dordogne reported that it had been many years since anyone in his department had been willing to take one; and in Marseilles, where counterfeiters had been arrested a year earlier, they had become regular grounds for confl ict.41 If some officials responded to the survey in different tones— complaining of small- change shortages or succinctly summarizing local conditions with a phrase such as “no problems here”—many certainly evinced long-standing frustration with the existing coinage and enthusiasm for a major new issue. Not mincing his words, the subprefect in Remiremont (Vosges) asserted that “creditors always accept [any] copper or billon coins only with repugnance.”42 Yet for many people, this “disgraceful and ugly” small change was all they had.43 On a daily basis, it effectively was all they needed. Since even in official terms, the franc and the livre were nearly identical, individuals

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who trusted each other might well treat the units as interchangeable (especially for small sums). And the basic price stability of the Restoration and July Monarchy—at least, the absence of hyperinflation comparable to 1795–1796—meant that even the smallest old-denomination coins continued to have practical use. If there was not much one could buy for a single two-sou coin (one-tenth of a livre, or very slightly less than ten centimes), it nonetheless more than fi lled one’s pipe with tobacco. In market terms, that is, the “old” small change continued to be quite useful, especially for people who purchased small quantities of staple items such as bread, tobacco, or salt. Since no copper coins had been issued after 1799, making exact change actually required using “old money.” Even Claude Pouillet, speaking for the extraparliamentary commission charged with reporting on the planned recoinage, granted that “all these liards, royal sous, bell-metal sous, and Liberty-head sous circulate pell-mell in every department and are accepted with as much trust as if they had just come out of the coin press [italics in original].”44 Basic functionality did not relieve policymakers’ concerns. It exacerbated them. Every time a deputy got copper coins back in change; whenever a municipal official drafted a placard and wrote “sous” when he should have said “centimes”; every time a church-going prefect searched his pocket for liards to put in the collection plate—on all these occasions and at many other times as well, he was reminded that the “worthless” coins of the poor belonged to the same monetary system as his own “intrinsically valuable” silver.45 Contiguity did not inspire comfort. Instead, the so-called “money of the poor” was pathologized to the point of being imagined as a literal contaminant: according to the subprefect in Saint Calais (Sarthe), the local grocers were all dying of verdigris poisoning because they handled copper coins on a daily basis.46 As members of the political elite eagerly endorsed the withdrawal of existing small change and the minting of shiny brass centimes, they therefore betrayed their anxious realization that this effaced, “execrable,” and despised coinage actually circulated just like the wealth that facilitated the railroad schemes, the building booms, and the imperial expansion of the 1830s and 1840s. Money, after all, was movable wealth, it was meant to flow— what was to ensure that this “mess of grapeshot” would stay in the pockets of the poor and not be flung violently in the faces of the rich? It might have little exchange value, but France’s misshapen small change nonetheless had some value as a weapon. In his scandalous bestseller De la

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prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836), Parent-Duchâtelet described an enraged prostitute using a six-liard coin to slice “five or six deep cuts” in another woman’s face.47 Employers who paid workers their weekly wages in rolls or envelopes of small change hence did so both for clearly stated, rational reasons (such as saving time) and perhaps from the less fully conscious, but equally real, desire to shield themselves from the packets’ contents. Sealed in a package, copper sous and discredited billon posed few literal or conceptual dangers—even so, in some regions a closed envelope of small change was referred to as a cartouche, a word defined by the Académie Française in 1835 as meaning “ammunition cartridge” or “cannon charge composed of nails, musket balls, iron fi lings, etc. sealed in cardboard or canvas.”48 In the increasingly industrialized parts of northern and eastern France, mill workers, miners, and linen weavers were all habitually paid with such “cartridges” and though their employers found the contents repulsive, the workers usually accepted their share of “grapeshot” without difficulty. Describing how small change was used in his department, one prefect noted, “It is generally accepted on trust in rolls of five or six francs.” Since it circulated regularly in this form, the prefect asserted that any cautious individual who actually opened a roll to verify its contents thereby put himself at a disadvantage. “He cannot know by whom he has been cheated,” the prefect continued (revealing his assumption that all rolls contained too few coins or several counterfeit ones), “and so most people prefer to accept the risk rather than waste their time counting individual coins.” Their faith in this particular currency was, in other words, largely ironic: they used it knowing very well that it might not “deserve” their trust and yet they behaved as if it did.49 Fully effective as long as others did the same, this strategy was not available to working people whose entire weekly income might total nine or ten francs. Obliged to remove individual coins from the envelope or to break a roll in order to pay the baker or the grocer, a worker could quickly discover that a roll valued as five francs contained coins officially worth only three or four. 50 Workers nonetheless rarely went on strike (illegal at the time) or otherwise protested how they were paid. One justice of the peace in the Loire region thought it was because “workers would never have the idea of rejecting what their bosses gave them in payment”; 120 years later, the eminent historian Maurice Agulhon reached the same conclusion about salaries in Toulon’s naval shipyards. 51 Invariably, a worker’s wages

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consisted of money that middle-class Frenchmen touched only with repugnance, but envelopes and other literal and metaphorical prophylactics kept it from sullying those hands on too regular a basis. Meanwhile, for the café keeper, the baker, or the grocer with a predominantly working-class clientele, it did not pay to scrutinize the money offered too closely. While departmental authorities, wholesalers, and numismatists might confidently challenge coins as effaced or counterfeit, such retailers were left in a more awkward position: they could either reject 20–40 percent of their customers’ money (thereby undercutting their sales considerably) or they could accept what they were offered and expect to pass it eventually to someone else. Their faith in the currency was less ironic than it was locally realist; since theirs was a milieu in which these coins circulated, they rightly concluded that “debased,” “execrable,” and “hideous” money was just as good as any other. 52 More or less untroubled by the fantasy of intrinsic value that so permeated classical liberalism, they implicitly recognized money for the social convention it is. Often referred to in ministerial euphemism as “the money of the most interesting class of people,” base-metal small change may have chiefly been “the money of the poor,” but it could not be confined to the lower classes and the underworld. Instead, it leaked and sloshed around. Even the law mandating that individuals had to accept copper only for exact change paradoxically had the result of creating new commercial opportunities. In major cities, as in less densely settled areas with large, wage- earning work forces (recall that much early industrialization in France was rural, not urban), money changers made a business of trading copper for silver. Discounting copper and billon coins while demanding a premium for silver francs, a money changer in Marseille or Rouen could make a small but significant profit by charging 510 or 520 centimes for a single five-franc coin. A trade widely represented as advantageous to cooks and other domestic employees of prosperous households— given a few francs to do the marketing, a servant could break them for copper and pocket the difference—it clearly penalized those paid in copper and, even more so, small-scale retailers or farmers who sold eggs, milk, or produce in local markets.53 If nineteenth-century France had truly had perfectly parallel monetary systems—one for the affluent, one for the poor; one of silver, one of copper and billon; one that glittered and one that did not—then neither Fontenay’s story nor the repeated parliamentary discussions of remint-

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ing and demonetization would have had much emotional or political purchase. But money is a means of exchange and even the most clearly class-based society depends upon relations between classes for its existence. On occasions, therefore, the hideous and misshapen money of the Old Regime poured from market women’s aprons into the white-gloved hands of “Lord Feeling” and his kind. The fantasy that it would not, that there might be individuals with one kind of money who knew nothing of the other arose from time to time as well. A story like Georges Sand’s La Petite Fadette—in which the heroine naively confesses, “I cannot tell you if I am rich or poor” as she pulls sacks of silver from her basket— depended for its piquancy on readers’ assumptions about the metal’s self-evident worth, but it also played on their desire to believe that ugly peasant women’s lives were completely unrelated to their own. But like the “semi-imbecile” described by the Annales médico-psychologiques who told the court she could not count, sew, or cook (though she “[knew] the value of base-metal coins perfectly well”), Fadette did not exist in a truly separate world. Her tale ends with the homely Fadette (who always had an innately good heart) externally transformed by inherited wealth and a happy marriage. As for the “village idiot,” twice raped in the fields as she worked, she met no such storybook fate.54

At regular intervals, Louis Philippe’s government proposed a comprehensive overhaul of France’s small change. First publicly discussed in 1838, the necessary legislation was brought initially to the Chamber of Deputies in 1842 and debated extensively the following year. 55 It proved surprisingly contentious. Though few in the Chamber spoke in favor of the existing copper and billon coinage, many nonetheless were harshly critical of the planned means for “perfecting” it. Treating Britain as a model to be emulated, an extraparliamentary commission of deputies, peers, and engineers had recommended that coin manufacture be taken out of the hands of private entrepreneurs and made fully into a branch of state administration (as, for instance, was the production of munitions and tobacco). Their report further proposed shutting down the six remaining provincial mints and furnishing the Paris Mint with the latest, steam-powered machines—this technology, they argued, was the only way to ensure that new, lightweight bronze coins would be safe from counterfeiting (a claim unintentionally echoing those made fifty

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years earlier about assignat production). 56 This proposed centralization provoked an outcry from deputies across the political spectrum. The Orleanist numismatist (and future marquis of the Second Empire) Lelièvre de Lagrange described it as “the war of Paris, which wants to absorb everything, against the departments wishing to preserve the little they have left,” while the prominent republican Ledru-Rollin warned that such mea sures would put the money supply in the hands of “a single man . . . perhaps a foreigner, a powerful banker . . . who will direct the flow of precious metals all across Europe and might one day enrich a country arming itself against France.”57 Such arguments clearly resonated: while the Chamber verbally approved each element of the proposed legislation, it also rejected the entire bill when it came to a secret ballot. The government did not give up. Instead, it broke the 1842–1843 project into parts and in 1845 proposed simply to remove all the billon from circulation: this included coins for ten centimes marked N (produced in 1807 and colloquially known as “two sous”); coins for fifteen and thirty sous (created by decree of the National Assembly in 1791 and used as seventy-five centimes and 1F50); and coins for six liards (1-1/2 sous or 7-1/2 centimes), issued any time between 1705 and the late eighteenth century. According to the commission charged with reporting on the draft legislation, nothing could be less controversial or more ardently desired. Laying out the familiar criticisms of the existing coins (as ugly, nondecimal, easily counterfeited, and so forth), the commission emphasized that lawmakers since Mirabeau had described billon as the “most impolitic coinage” because it was partially silver and nonetheless circulated for more than its metallic value. 58 Billon thereby undermined the distinction, so central to liberal monetary theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, between intrinsically valuable “true money” made of gold or silver and the merely conventional small change produced from base metals. Billon was neither. (Or was it both?) Moreover, since only four denominations would be affected and since the mints could use the silver extracted from the melted-down coins to make new francs, this demonetization would be comparatively fast and cheap. Happy to imagine ridding the country of the offensive billon while leaving copper coins and monetary administration to be debated at a later date, both chambers of the legislature passed the bill on a near unanimous vote (237 to 2 in the Deputies, 92 to 6 in the Peers). 59

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Within days of the bill becoming law (Law of July 10, 1845), state officials were ordered to no longer put billon into circulation and citizens were told that the coins would only be accepted for state payments (including taxes, licenses, and lottery tickets, but also tobacco and postage) until the end of the calendar year.60 Mindful of the difficulties it had faced in removing écus from circulation, the government thought to avoid a repetition of them by establishing offices at the Paris, Rouen, and (eventually) Lille mints where individuals could exchange their billon for an equal value in silver. Chaos nevertheless erupted almost immediately. In the rush to trade the soon-to-be-demonetized coins, those who used them on a daily basis collided headlong with those who avoided them at almost any cost. Local authorities (and the soldiers of the Fourteenth Light Brigade, who staffed the office at the Paris Mint) were instructed to accept the discredited coins, but they were also enjoined to reject any that were “bad” (counterfeit, of foreign manufacture, so worn as to be indecipherable, or meant for use only in the colonies)—a charge that greatly complicated the business of exchange. Albert de Lezay-Marnesia, a commander of the Legion of Honor, July Monarchy peer, and member of several learned societies, was probably not the only prefect to issue guidelines for distinguishing “good” coins from “bad” in 1845, but his age (seventy-three; he had been a teenage émigré during the Revolution), personal connections, and aristocratic heritage all contributed to making those he produced for the Loir- et- Cher especially detailed. Beginning with the simple but vague reminder that ten-centime coins ought to be “uniformly grayish,” he offered further pointers about the use of touchstones and the degree of ornamentation to be expected around the letter N. Liards made for the colonies should not be accepted under any circumstances (he cited edicts of January 1763, March 1781, and November 1788 in support) and even ten-centime coins of Italian manufacture (which dated from when Italy was part of Napoleon’s empire) would have to be rejected. Taxpayers, Lezay-Marnesia noted in conclusion, had the right to present any coins they liked—it was up to administrators to decide which they ought to take.61 With one eye on some such set of guidelines and another on the pile of money in front of them, those charged with administering the exchange and demonetization therefore scrutinized each and every coin presented. Their attention to detail made for

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long lines, short tempers, and nearly constant disputes. (On a single day in August, the Lille Mint refused more than 10 percent of the 11,037 tencentime pieces brought by 138 individuals.62) There was little the bearer of a suspected coin could do—heating it in a bath of equal parts water and hydrochloric acid would reveal actual metal content, but the procedure was not quick and even once it had been done, how was one to know whose coins had gone into the melting pot? So if a few individuals did demand such tests, many more simply stood by in anger while their money was declared fraudulent and summarily cut in two with metal shears. As the satirical newspaper Le Charivari remarked, three hours was a long time to spend in line for literally half a sou.63 Confl ict and contestation rippled far from where the coins were being exchanged. Fearful they would be left with money the state would never accept, some retailers abruptly stopped taking any billon whatsoever, occasioning riots and acts of sporadic violence against tavern keepers and bakeries.64 Where large numbers of workers had habitually been paid with rolls of small change, either political sympathies or the desire for a level of social peace led some local authorities to misrepresent the law. In the calico-weaving center of Armentières (Nord), for instance, a police officer charged with announcing the law in the marketplace insisted that tax receivers had to accept any and all billon. Told that he was mistaken, he responded in “threatening” tones, saying to one collector, “You have to take them all—good or bad, red or white.” A justice of the peace in Saint Calais (Sarthe) similarly insisted that the state could not really have intended to have so many coins rejected; he drew on the evidence of his own research in medieval numismatics to argue that a coin could be “good” even if it were neither round nor clearly marked.65 A year later, figures were reported to the Chamber of Deputies. Of the roughly 7,000,000 francs’ worth of six-liard coins guessed to have been in circulation in July 1845, slightly more than half (coins worth 3,715,656 francs) had been withdrawn; similar proportions held for the tencentime N coins (1,667,278.60 francs out of an estimated 3,278,000); and an extension had been granted for the fifteen-sou and thirty-sou coins on the grounds that some quantity of them were thought to be in Algeria.66 Counting just the first two denominations, something like fiftyone million coins had been carried to state authorities’ offices or the mints, scrutinized, and found to be “good” (which, in this case, meant legitimately ugly). It initially seems a very large number. Fifty-one mil-

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lion, however, works out to somewhat less than two coins for each French man, woman, and child. One begins to wonder what the fuss was about.

That different people have different money had made a sort of logical sense within the Old Regime’s culture of orders where society was premised on the notion that nobles and commoners differed in their very substance. In contrast, within a postrevolutionary political order founded on the fiction of legal equality and the reality of socioeconomic difference, qualitative variation between moneys became far less palatable. It underscored that no matter how hard the day laborer worked, his or her stash of tarnished coins was never likely to turn into a crisp, clean banknote (especially at a time when the Banque de France’s smallest bill was for 500 francs). July Monarchy elites could not find the clear difference between the sous of the poor and the francs of the rich reassuring because money, like law, had come to be imagined as the same for all. That it so palpably was not threatened to undermine the fantasies—of progress, of liberty, of national unity, of equality before the law—that made it possible to say the time for revolutions had passed. In its repeated efforts to take the Old Regime out of circulation, the government of Louis Philippe attempted to render the uncomfortable truth of social difference less visible and less threatening. Foreign Minister François Guizot (who served the regime at other times as prime minister and as education minister) spoke surely the most quoted phrase of 1843’s parliamentary session when he replied to the idea of expanded voting rights with the words “enrichissez-vouz” (often translated as “get rich”). His statement in context does not sound quite so crass—“Solidify your institutions, enlighten yourselves, enrich yourselves,” said Guizot, calling on his listeners to “improve the moral and material condition of France—these are the real innovations . . . that will satisfy the need for progress that characterizes our nation”—but it nonetheless assumed a close positive correlation between wealth, morality, and enlightenment.67 In a country where barely 3 percent of adult males met the high property qualification required for suffrage, telling people to “use the rights they have” was tantamount to telling the poor, the artisanal, and most of the middle class that they would simply never have the vote. So, too, with money. If, in purely mathematical terms, it ought to have been possible to add up 2,000,000 sous to make 100,000 francs, in truth

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those came very close to being completely separate scales. “Worthless” small change plus “worthless” small change did not add up to much, no matter how many times the sum was repeated. The government’s various mea sures and proposals to withdraw “effaced,” “hideous,” and “undeserved” coins was part of an attempted political purification of France that worked in two symbolic registers. In social terms, the abolition of billon ensured that the intermediary, hybrid form between the silver of the rich and the copper of the poor no longer existed. In temporal terms, removing the Revolution from circulation was equally important. Guizot, in the sentence preceding the famous “enrichissez-vous,” warned the Chamber of Deputies against “the greatest danger for governments, the danger of anachronism.” He reminded his listeners that, while there had once been “a time when the conquest of political and social rights was the great affair of this nation,” that time was over. To conserve the order he had worked so hard to create since the revolution of 1830, Guizot had to establish that the revolutionary past was fully passed and the progress of the present would take a different form. In chronology as in currency, overlap was strictly to be avoided. That minting new silver francs in the 1830s had required literally melting down old écus was an inconvenient fact quickly being obscured. For at its end, the fundamentally dialectical process of making the new from the old would instead appear as a temporal rupture. The new could now be found everywhere and the old could be consigned to the history books. In 1848, the February Revolution swept Louis Philippe from power. Guizot fled to England.

Conclusion Money and History You know my theory on this point. In our day, the only force that endures is the one we draw from our characters. And there is only one way to be sure to keep one’s character intact: never want for money. Alexis de Tocqueville to Arthur Gobineau, August 1851

An ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practice or practices. This existence is material . . . what is represented in ideology is not the system of real relations . . . but the imaginary relation of individuals to the real relations. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

F

OR OV ER T WO CENT UR IES , the French Revolution has been a prime battleground for confrontations between materialist and idealist conceptions of history. Barely a decade after it began, a French diplomat (Alexandre Maurice d’Hauterive) insisted that material changes— Britain’s accumulation of a vast overseas empire, Russia’s emergence as a European great power, and Prussia’s fiscal military successes—had made the Revolution inevitable. In response, Friedrich von Gentz (who translated Edmund Burke into German and later advised Metternich) attributed the “dreadful storms that closed the eighteenth century” not to environmental factors but to mental ones: “the progress of knowledge and . . . a propensity to idle and extravagant speculation.” With the restoration of the French monarchy in 1814, counterrevolutionaries remained adamant that “philosophy” had been responsible for all the troubles of the preceding quarter century; merging their fear of ideas with a certain

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kind of materialism, they called not just for banning books but for burning them to prevent anyone reading those fatal and impious words again.1 Throughout the twentieth century, historians circled almost obsessively around and between these two approaches. To this day, nearly every discussion of revolutionary historiography begins with a ritual invocation of the great, epoch-making clash between supposedly Marxist materialists and their critics, the Tocqueville-citing scholars of political ideas.2 This book uses the example of making and using money to suggest that the distinction of material from mental causes, of socioeconomic from political or cultural history, of solid reality from intangible faith may occlude more than it reveals. And it uses historical examples to demonstrate that money has never been simply concrete or purely symbolic. When money “works,” when individuals and institutions accept monetized transactions—be they conducted with metal, paper, shells, or circuitry—then tacit social trust is made manifest. Trust is habit congealed through repetition into faith. Asked what they are doing, individuals might speak of a particular currency’s value, but what they are really doing is relying on their own, barely conscious, expectations of how other human beings will react when presented with bills, coins, or credit cards. Functional money is a social and historical relation routinely perceived as an autonomous thing. In the political and social upheaval of France in 1789–1790 and in the civil wars that followed, many men and women quickly discovered they could no longer rely on their expectations about others’ reactions. Money for them stopped working. That the breakdown of market relations happened when and how it did made political ideals such as liberty and equality both all the more urgently appealing and all the more difficult to achieve. Because so much of its analysis turns on issues of value and of social difference, some might want to treat the story told in this book as part of the “transition to capitalism,” but I have deliberately avoided that vocabulary. For more than a century, Marxist (or Marxisant) historians and their challengers have understood the relation of the French Revolution to capitalism in terms of the role played by particular social classes in the unfolding of events. The most devastating attacks on social analysis of the Revolution have hence been those showing that political beliefs and class position (with class defi ned as “relation to the means of production”) rarely aligned. In this historical precedent to the “What’s

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wrong with Kansas” analysis now common among political commentators who puzzle when people vote against their own immediate interests, Elizabeth Eisenstein critiqued the so-called Marxist orthodoxy of the Revolution’s origins by observing how many aristocrats took a leading role in the events of 1788–1789 while Richard Mowery Andrews poked great holes in Albert Soboul’s analysis by demonstrating many active “sans- culottes” were members of the bourgeoisie. 3 Both these historians (and many others) clearly showed that people’s perceptions of their interests, their own defi nition of their political goals, correlated very poorly with any “objective” statement of their class positions. When combined with the revived interest in the history of political thought inspired by Cambridge School historians such as Quentin Skinner, these critiques succeeded in largely invalidating social and economic difference as a way of understanding the French Revolution for more than a generation. This book reframes the question. It takes the key social nexus to be not the relation of individuals to the means of production but their relation to the means of exchange. This latter was a relation well-understood by Marx on both intellectual and emotional levels. He did, after all, define the distinctive feature of the proletariat as having to work for a wage, since the members of that class had nothing to sell but their labor power. Moreover, his own household suffered constant money problems, such that Marx, writing to Engels in 1854 that “I have to pay 25 percent [of my income] to the pawn shop alone and in general I can never get things in order because I am always in arrears,” sounds strangely like the marquis de Montesquiou describing the French state’s fi nances in November 1789.4 Nonetheless, Marx (like anyone else) could not write social analysis just as he pleased and in his insistence that money is fundamentally an abstraction, that it has quantity but not qualities, he shared the prejudices and assumptions of his time and place. Yet the qualitative differences between moneys were actually as central to the truth of social difference in Marx’s day as they had been in the Old Regime. (Or as they are today. Try buying a plane ticket with cash or being a homeless person who only accepts credit cards.) To treat money as an abstraction is itself an ideological position, a way of imagining relations that are uneven and emotion laden as instead untainted by power dynamics or feelings. Considering the many different forms that money actually took in the revolutionary era, this book expands the study of economic thought

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to develop a more capacious history of social monetary practices. Those practices were hardly unthinking but the ideas relevant for understanding them are as likely to have been those of local administrators, notaries, and market women as those of philosophes, political leaders, or twentieth-century economists. While the latter have certainly played a larger role than the former in determining official state policy, practices and policy have not always coincided (as the case of decimalization in the nineteenth century so clearly demonstrates). The opinions and ideas of experts, in other words, are not always the best place to look if we want to know how people live or how “the economy” functions. At stake, in fact, is the whole idea—new in the late nineteenth century—of there being a thing called “the economy.” True (in this one respect) to the categories used by its eighteenth-century subjects, this book instead works with ideas of political economy. From the enthusiasm many first felt for them to their eventual utter collapse, the assignats can only be properly explained by attending to the political, social, and material conditions of their creation and use. Their history, however, has usually been written more with an eye to shaping the present than to understanding the past. When the neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth century (William Stanley Jevons and Irving Fisher chief among them) broke with the idea of “political economy” to create the modern academic discipline of economics, they left history behind. Working with abstract entities and general definitions, they assumed that all agents (be they individuals, households, or institutions) act to optimize their gains, and they argued that free, open markets consistently produced efficient and desirable outcomes. The economy, as they conceptualized it, did not consist of countless relations in which uneven power dynamics were at play, but rather of a coherent, uniform system that could and should be modeled (in equations or even with hydraulic-mechanical devices). The results of these models would apply to all times and places. “Inflation,” as Milton Friedman wrote very much in this mode, “is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”5

This book is called Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. It insists that money in the Revolution cannot be understood outside the specific time of the Revolution and that money itself was part of revolu-

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tionary temporality. The assignats were introduced with the hope of settling Old Regime debts quickly and definitively, thereby marking them as “paid” and transferring them from active accounts to historical archives. Like the Revolution itself, the assignats were expected to be of finite duration. The assignats were. The Revolution was not. That the Revolution’s relation to past, present, and future was not the clear rupture evoked and eventually wished for by some radical Jacobins will strike few specialist historians as a particularly revolutionary claim. Many will instead hear echoes of the opening paragraphs of Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution. “No nation had ever before embarked,” wrote Tocqueville, “on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past . . . to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had been and all they now aspired to be. . . . I have always felt that they were far less successful in this curious attempt than is generally supposed.” Those sentences resonate with my own analysis, but this book draws different conclusions about the relation between intentions and resulting realities. For while Tocqueville’s exposition may have been serpentine, his underlying narrative was fundamentally linear: he told the unidirectional story of how the strong, centralized state rose and took on its modern form. In contrast, this book has emphasized a much more dialectical logic, in which the so-called “modern” emerges only haltingly and only through sustained confl ict with the old. Tocqueville relativized the magnitude of the Revolution in theory; this book stresses the difficulty of enacting a revolutionary break in practice.6 It was after spending months in the departmental archives of the Indre-et-Loire that Tocqueville concluded the so-called “old regime” of the eighteenth century had in fact already been new. On the basis of paperwork and questionnaires, he argued that the Old Regime’s concentration of authority in the central state both marked a significant break with the local, aristocratic institutions of medieval France (whose passing he bemoaned) and was of a piece with the strong centralization of power under Napoleon III. From the perspective of ministerial intentions and prefectoral responsibilities—forms to be fi lled, correspondence to be answered, information to be collected—Tocqueville may well have been right. But when we think about monetary practices in eighteenthand nineteenth-century France, it seems just as obvious that he was quite remarkably wrong. Most transactions in the eighteenth century were

276

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

made not in state-approved currency (produced from privately supplied metals) but on credit and in paper issued by individuals. The radical free-market policies of the Revolution’s first years brought with them considerable decentralization (as demonstrated by the billets de confiance). When the National Convention attempted to assert some sort of central control, the state was largely too weak to do so—the resulting confl ict was just one of the many civil wars besetting France in the 1790s. The renewed commitment to monetary freedom under the Thermidorean Convention and the Directory may have distinguished those regimes from the one they called “the Reign of Terror,” but it just as conclusively reduced state authority in many areas to nothing. (Remember the officials who asked how they were to administer anything, if they could afford neither paper nor pens.) Throughout Tocqueville’s lifetime, the supposedly strong central state struggled, and largely failed, to remove Old Regime coins from circulation. In short, Tocqueville may have recognized his own age in the archives not because the past was already “new” but because his own era was still in so many ways “old.” This book attends as much to what resists and complicates change as it does to what Marx and Engels called (in one familiar translation of The Communist Manifesto) the bourgeoisie’s “sweeping away” of “fi xed, fast-frozen relations” and the tendency of “all that is solid [to] melt into air.” If this book does describe years that almost certainly were experienced by many as “an uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,” it is nonetheless worth pausing to consider that phrase. Disturbance “uninterrupted” is surely no disturbance at all; it is disturbance become the norm. This, I think, is what Marx and Engels were saying: that in capitalism, commodities must be constantly reproduced, replaced, and renewed (that fashion, for instance, is always new and always the same). For the purposes of this book, however, the phrase has a different significance. Unlike commodity manufacturers in Marx’s day (or our own), those who produced the “uninterrupted disturbance” of the 1790s fully meant for it to come to an end. Their actions rarely led to anticipated effects, however. Instead, each effort to end the process of revolution contributed to further, unexpected disruption. The time of the French Revolution was neither its purported origin in the 1760s–1770s nor some supposedly new era inaugurated by the fall of the French monarchy and the declaration of a republic. It was instead the spectral time of the 1790s—“spectral time” in the sense that much of

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277

what was materially and mentally present did not fit with how various actors thought things ought to be.7 Memory’s conscious and unconscious workings mean that time for individuals is always spectral, always shot through with unexpected traces, remnants, and residues of earlier moments and previous decades. In the 1790s, however, the spectral became political, as enthusiastic but increasingly weary revolutionaries grappled with what it meant to abolish privilege or to regenerate an entire people. Assignats had to be printed and signed; buyers had to be found for priests’ cassocks, church outbuildings, and choirboys’ robes; taxes had to be assessed, levied, and paid. Even under the best of circumstances, all of this took time and all of it took money. As war, civil war, and acrimonious dissent took their toll on money’s credibility, the time of the Revolution—a time full of hope and creativity, but fi lled also with the metaphorical debris and the literal rubble of the Old Regime—dragged on and on.

It is common to draw monetary lessons for the present from the history of the past. To do so, contemporary economists often treat the past as if it were the present in fancy dress, as if the only questions worth asking about it concerned the reliability of available numerical data. But the past is not the present. Spectral, it is (to paraphrase William Faulkner) not even one past, but many pasts. This does not mean, however, that lessons cannot be learned from the history recounted in this book. The rise and fall of the assignats should remind us that economic policy decisions are also, inevitably, political choices—choices that have uneven effects and, very often, unintended outcomes. It should also remind us that appeals to “intrinsic” value (be the valued substance land, silver, or gold) are always culturally specific, that what appears obvious or natural is very often only that which has been stripped of its historical determinants. Land in a form that can circulate, money in a form that can (and should) disappear, real estate in a form that can easily be sold: the French Revolution introduced all of these. That we now fi nd the first two completely peculiar and the last utterly banal should tell us that value and property have never been naturally given categories but have always been historically produced.

Abbreviations

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

A.N. A.N. Min. Cen. A.D. Côte- d’Or A.D. Drôme A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine A.D. Jura A.D. Loire-Atlantique A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle A.D. Nièvre A.D. Nord A.D. Paris A.D. Rhône A.D. Sarthe A.D. Seine-Maritime A.D. Vosges A. E. G. A.M. Lille A.M. Nancy A.M. Nantes A.M. Nevers A. H. M. A. M. A.M.P.

A.P.P.

Archives Nationales (Paris) Minutier Central, Archives Nationales (Paris) Archives Départementales de la Côte- d’Or (Dijon) Archives Départementales de la Drôme (Valence) Archives Départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine (Rennes) Archives Départementales du Jura (Lons-le-Saunier) Archives Départementales de Loire-Atlantique (Nantes) Archives Départementales de Meurthe- et-Moselle (Nancy) Archives Départementales de la Nièvre (Nevers) Archives Départementales du Nord (Lille) Archives Départementales de Paris (Paris) Archives Départementales du Rhône (Lyon) Archives Départementales de la Sarthe (Le Mans) Archives Départementales de Seine-Maritime (Rouen) Archives Départementales des Vosges (Epinal) Archives d’Etat de Genève (Geneva) Archives Municipales, Lille (Nord) Archives Municipales, Nancy (Meurthe- et-Moselle) Archives Municipales, Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) Archives Municipales, Nevers (Nièvre) Archives Historique, Musée des Arts et Métiers (Paris) Archives, Monnaie de Paris; now located at the Centre des Archives Economiques et Financières, Savigny-le-Temple (Seine- et-Marne) Archives de la Préfecture de Police (Paris)

280

Abbreviations

LIBRARIES

B. H. V. P. B. L. B. N. mss B.N.F.

Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (Paris) British Library (London) Manuscripts, Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris)

PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES

AAAD Actes de la Commune

AP

Aulard, Paris sous le Directoire

Buchez and Roux

Encyclopédie

Marion, Histoire financière Moniteur

Affiches, annonces, et avis divers ou journal général de France (Paris) Sigismond Lacroix et al., eds., Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la révolution (Paris: Cerf, 1894– 1955), 19 volumes. M. J. Madival and M. E. Laurent, et al., eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787–1860, première série (Paris: Librairie Administrative, 1867–1913; publication continued by Editions CNRS, 1960–present), 102 volumes to date. [François-]Alphonse Aulard, ed., Paris pendant la reaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire (Paris: Cerf, 1898–1900), 6 volumes. P.-J.-B. Buchez and P.- C. Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la révolution française ou journal des assemblées nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815 (Paris: Paulin, 1834–1838), 40 volumes. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. Marcel Marion, Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715 (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1927–1931), 6 volumes. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur . . . depuis la réunion des Etats- généraux jusqu’au Consulat (Paris: Plon frères, 1847), 32 volumes.

ACADEMIC JOURNALS

AHR AHRF EHR JEH JMH P&P

American Historical Review Annales historiques de la révolution française Economic History Review Journal of Economic History Journal of Modern History Past and Present

Notes

Introduction 1. Michel Hennin, Histoire numismatique de la Révolution française (Paris: J. S. Merlin, 1826), 2–3. 2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15. 3. Hennin, Histoire numismatique, xiv; all translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 4. Encyclopédie, art. “Médailles.” On Hardouin, see Anthony Grafton, “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1999), 241–267, and Mark Jones, “ ‘Proof Stones of History’: The Status of Medals as Historical Evidence in Seventeenth- Century France,” in M. H. Crawford, C. R. Ligota, and J. B. Trapp, eds., Medals and Coins from Budé to Mommsen (London: the Warburg Institute, 1990), 53–72. 5. Rascas de Bagarris, first keeper of the royal Cabinet des Médailles, argued that other historical sources, such as books, suffered from “their lack of certain faith and assured truth”— qualities given to money by its unique combination of the monarch’s face and the state’s authority; Rascas de Bagarris, La Necessité de l’usage des medailles dans les monnoyes (Paris, 1611) quoted in Jotham Parsons, “Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 74. 6. Dom de Vaines, Dictionnaire raisonné de diplomatique (Paris: Lacombe, 1774), vol. 2, 107. See also abbé de Vallemont, Les Elémens de l’histoire, ou ce qu’il faut savoir (Paris: Nyon, Savoye, Desprez, 1758), vol. 1, 31–32. 7. Hennin, Histoire numismatique, iii. 8. Relevant works include Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

282

Notes to Pages 4–7

9. Or, as one theorist puts it, “belief [in money] is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people,” Slavoj Zižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 34. 10. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 11–12, 127–131. “It is a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out . . . ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’ ” Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 116. 11. On the place of duration in Locke’s conceptualization of money, see James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 147–148. The reference to the ease with which money could be melted down is from the Courier de Provence 100 (Jan. 29–30, 1790), 92. 12. This, I think, is what Zižek means when he writes money shows us to be fetishists in practice, not in theory: “When individuals use money, they know very well that there is nothing magical about it—that money, in its materiality, is simply an expression of social relations . . . on an everyday level, the individuals know very well that there are relations between people behind the relations between things. The problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such. They are fetishists in practice, not in theory,” Zižek, Sublime Object, 31. Generally read to be operating within a psychoanalytic framework, Zižek nonetheless shows himself here to be remarkably blind to the childhood processes through which we learn there is nothing magical about money: such a statement would hardly be self- evident to most threeyear- olds, after all. Insofar as money’s social use is something we once learned, but is now part of our semiautomatic practices, it resembles another theorist’s defi nition of “incorporated memory.” See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 13. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993). 14. Michel Aglietta and André Orléan, eds., La Monnaie souveraine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 24–27. Their third category, our “ethical trust” that market society and abstract universal individualism are permanent institutions, emerged in—but was also often contested—in the period covered by this book. 15. For one eighteenth- century controversy over spelling reform, see Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment Details: Theology, Natural History, and the Letter h,” Representations 61 (1998), 29–56. 16. On the journées of Prairial, Year III, see Haim Burstin, “Echos faubouriens des journées de prairial,” AHRF 304 (1996), 373–385, and Kåre Tønnesson, La Dé-

Notes to Pages 7–10

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

283

faite des sans- culottes (Paris: Clavreuil, 1959); for two classic statements on the interconnections between popu lar politics and economics, see E.  P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” P&P 50 (1971), 76–136, and Louise Tilly, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Confl ict in France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971), 23–57. For Delamarche, see Chapter 6. On paperwork in the Revolution, see Ralph Kingston, Bureaucrats and Bourgeois Society: Office Politics and Individual Credit, France 1789–1848 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012) and Ben Kafka, “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror,” Representations 98 (2007), 1–24. AP 21:408 (Dec. 12, 1790); several years later, Clavière also referred to the “disagreeable odor” of copper coinage, AP 53:67 (Oct. 30, 1792). Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Hans Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). Pierre Bourdieu emphasized that modern states monopolize “physical and symbolic violence” and described the state as “the central bank of symbolic credit.” See his “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociolog ical Theory 12 (1994), 1–19, and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Loïc Wacquant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 376. The so- called “state theory” of money, or chartalism, is usually traced by historians of economic thought to Georg Friedrich Knapp’s The State Theory of Money (1905 in German; trans. Mrs. H. M. Lucas and James Bonar; London: Macmillan,1924). For a useful introduction, see Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 47–58, 66– 67; for one very clear statement from an economist, see Abba Lerner, “Money as a Creature of the State,” American Economic Review 37 (1947), 312–317. So called because they were “assigned” to a par ticu lar source of funds for their value. Many Anglophone historians italicize the word “assignat,” but since it occurs very frequently in this text and as an entry in the American Heritage Dictionary and in the Oxford English Dictionary, I have not done so. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank Turner (1791; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 33, 73, 103–104. See too Thomas Carlyle’s discussion of the 1780s as “The Paper Age.” “Bank paper, wherewith you can still buy when there is no gold left; Book-paper, splendent with Theories, Philosophies, Sensibilities,” in his The French Revolution (1837), Part One, Book Two. Pierre Claude Reynard, “Manufacturing Quality in the Pre-Industrial Age: Finding Value in Diversity,” EHR new series 53 (August 2000), 493–516; quotation at 499. See also Leonard Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth- Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 184–198. A.N. F12 1535. For classic formulations, see: Encyclopédie, art. “Vente,” and William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (London: H.S. King, 1875).

284

Notes to Pages 10–12

26. Pierre Gervais, “A Merchant or a French Atlantic? Eighteenth- century Account Books as Narratives of a Transnational Political Economy,” French History 25 (2011), especially 37– 40. 27. In this respect, Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money (New York: Penguin, 2008) and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) are remarkably similar. See my review essay, “Money, Money, Money,” History Workshop Journal 69 (2010), 225–233. 28. In other words, I find the distinction made between abstract and concrete money to be as artificial as that sometimes drawn between ideas and actions. Of the latter, Keith Baker writes: “The action of a rioter in picking up a stone can no more be understood apart from the symbolic field that gives it meaning than the action of a priest in picking up a sacramental vessel. The philosopher picking up a pen is not performing a less social action than the ploughman picking up a plough, nor does the latter act lack intellectual dimensions.” See his Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13. 29. Thomas M. Luckett, “Imaginary Money and Real Guillotines: The Intellectual Origins of the Financial Terror in France,” Historical Reflections 31 (spring 2005), 117–140, is useful on this subject, but little concerned with actual economic practices. 30. François Crouzet, La Grande inflation: la monnaie en France de Louis XVI à Napoléon (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 22. 31. For the latter, see the receipts issued by one tax collector in A.D. Nord L 2023. 32. [Voltaire], Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, par des amateurs in Collection complète des oeuvres de M. de *** (Geneva: Cramer, 1768–1777), vol. 21, 312. 33. Gilles Postel-Vinay, La Terre et l’argent: l’agriculture et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998); Philip Hoffman, Gilles PostelVinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1780 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth- Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 34. “People valued bills of exchange and promissory notes and were willing to accept them in lieu of specie because they respected the endorser or, rather, because they had no grounds for suspicion,” James Riley and John McCusker, “Money Supply, Economic Growth, and the Quantity Theory of Money: France 1650–1788,” Explorations in Economic History 20 (1983), 274–293, quote at 278; see also J.  F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 14–15, 263, 268–269. For a different view, see Amalia Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth- Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 35. On state building and money in an earlier period, see Jotham Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth- Century France: Currency, Culture, and the Modern State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Notes to Pages 13–16

285

36. The remainder consisted of state-issued (30 percent) and private papers (50 percent); Françoise Bayard and Philippe Guignet, L’Economie française aux XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles (Gap, France: Ophrys, 1991), 217–219. 37. Laurence Fontaine, L’Economie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 2008); compare, however, Thomas Brennan, “Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth- Century Champagne,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2006), 175–200. 38. The critique of credit in these decades has been a topic of continued interest for historians. For four very different approaches to the question, see James Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Sonenscher, Before the Deluge; John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and most recently, Clare Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 39. Thomas E. Kaiser, “Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early EighteenthCentury France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit,” JMH 63 (1991), 1– 28; Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth- Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. 40. Théodore Vernier, Elémens de finances (Paris, 1789), 1; Henri Bouchon Dubournial, Considérations sur les finances et idée générale d’un moyen simple, doux et facile pour rembourser la plus grande partie de la dette foncière de l’Etat (London, 1787), 3; “The characteristic feature of the Revolution was a situation in which power was perceived by everyone as vacant,” François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 47. 41. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–1792; New York: Penguin, 1984), 43– 44. Thomas Jefferson did however make just this point; see Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 42. AP 18:353 (Aug. 27, 1790). 43. AP 8:366 (Aug. 8, 1789). 44. For some discussion of this “miserabilist” strain in the historiography, see Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, “Sans- culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of Necessity and Luxury in Eighteenth- Century France,” in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); see also Colin Jones, “Olwen Hufton’s ‘Poor,’ Richard Cobb’s ‘People,’ and the Notions of the longue durée in French Revolutionary Historiography,” P&P 2006, Supplement 1, 178–203. 45. Kwass’s work suggests how much both these caricatures owe to eighteenthcentury polemics; see his Privilege and the Politics of Taxation. 46. Arthur Young, Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (Bury St. Edmunds: J. Rackham, 1792), 134 (July 12, 1789); Thomas Kavanagh, “The Libertine Moment,” Yale French Studies 94 (1998), 79–100.

286

Notes to Pages 16–20

47. Serge Bianchi, La Révolution culturelle de l’an II (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 198–203; Matthew Shaw, Time and the French Revolution: The Republican Calendar, 1789-Year XIV (Woodbridge, England: Royal Historical Society, 2011). 48. David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); E. P. Thompson, “Time, WorkDiscipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” P&P 38 (1967), 56–97; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 22–36; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 49. Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933). 50. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 35, 51. The Tocqueville revival drew much of its energy from the work of François Furet; in addition to his Interpreting the French Revolution, 132–163, see his article “Tocqueville,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1021–1033. See also my “Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution?” AHR 108 (2003), 119–147. 51. The section heading, “What Do You Do After You Have Totally Abolished Feudalism?” makes this point in one sentence; the following 200 pages prove it. See John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 450. 52. This, I think, is also Markoff ’s basic point when he writes, “After that summer [1789] there was a national legislature whose members ached to reconstruct France but found they had to deal with forty thousand villages,” Abolition of Feudalism, 425. 53. For these and other examples, see A.N. C 2465. 54. A.N. C 2455 (Arthur and Robert invoice for fourth quarter 1791); A.N. C 2463 (Boquet invoice, Oct.–Dec. 1792). Other bills also mentioned the difficulty of getting the paint to have the “same degree of worn-ness [vétusté]” as the background; see A.N. C 2463 (Reignier invoice, Messidor 15, Year III) and also A.D. Nièvre 1L 253 (Floréal 4, Year III). 55. F. Braesch, Le Commune du dix août, cited in John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, 116.

1. The Time of the Debt 1. As on October 15, 1784; copy of certificate deposited with Paris notary, A.N. Min. Cen. L-694 (Oct. 28 and 30, 1784). 2. One-third of the loan of November 1779 was subscribed on “thirty heads from Geneva”; in that created by edict of December 1783, 40 percent was subscribed

Notes to Pages 20–24

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

287

on “30 demoiselles” from Geneva and another 4.3 million livres on other configurations of thirty or sixty heads; see Hubert Lüthy, La Banque protestante en France (Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1959; reprinted 1998), vol. 2, 508–509, 533. The standard work remains Lüthy, Banque protestante. There is no extended discussion in English, though see George V. Taylor, “The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution,” AHR 67 (1962), 960–962, and François R. Velde and David R.Weir, “The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746– 1793,” JEH 52 (1992), 31–34. For brief mentions, see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 157, and Gail Bossenga, “Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in Thomas Kaiser and Dale Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 54–55. See especially Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998) and Laurence Fontaine, L’Economie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). One midcentury commercial dictionary explained the difference by stressing that with an “annuity,” the original capital was gradually reimbursed and that payments were made “to the bearer” on the basis of coupons. A rente, in contrast, was payable only to named individuals (or their heirs) and left the principle intact. See Honoré Lacombe de Prézel, Dictionnaire du citoyen, ou Abrégé historique, théorique et pratique du commerce (Paris: chez Grangé, 1761), vol.1, 55–56. John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,” International History Review 25 (2003), 505–562. Aquinas, Commentum in quatuor libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi, III:37:1:6, cited in John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 52. Encyclopédie de jurisprudence: ou dictionnaire complet, universel, raisonné, historique, et politique de jurisprudence . . . de toutes les nations de l’Europe (Brussels: J.L. de Boubers, 1778), vol. 4, 469; see also Robert Joseph Pothier, Traité du contrat de constitution de rente (Paris: Debure, 1763), 222–223. Unless otherwise noted, genealogical information in this section is based on the database compiled by the Société Genevoise de Généalogie (http://www .gen-gen.ch/); the names of the Diodati sisters figure on lists of “Genevan heads” deposited with Paris notaries, such as A.N. Min. Cen. L-693 (Sept. 30, 1784). Bernard Gagenebin, ed., Voltaire; Lettres inédites à son imprimeur Gabriel Cramer (Geneva: Droz, 1952), 280. For a copy of the list, see A.N. Min. Cen. L-694 (Oct. 19, 1784). Louise, Suzanne, and Jacqueline Rilliet were her cousins once removed; their names appear on lists deposited with Paris notaries, see Ibid. and Charles Gautier, “Un investissement genevois,” Bulletin de la société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Genève 10 (1951), 53– 68.

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Notes to Pages 24–27

13. On Bertrand’s grandfather-in-law, Gédéon Mallet, see Lüthy, Banque protestante. His sister, Henriette, married Isaac de Thellusson and died shortly after the birth of her only child, Madeleine (herself one of the “thirty heads”). 14. Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), quotation at 17; see also David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 69–111. 15. Jacob Vernet, Instructions chrétiennes, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Henri-Albert Gosse, 1756), vol. 4, 1–5; vol. 1, 140. 16. The Société Genevoise de Généalogie’s database suggests that Jacob Vernet had no children but since it also asserts he had no parents, this is clearly incorrect. For his early family history, see Michel Jean Louis Saladin, Mémoire historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de Mr. J. Vernet, professeur (1790). Vernet’s daughter, Catherine, married Pierre Fabri; the names of their daughters (Renée, Marie, Charlotte) appear on lists of “thirty heads” deposited with Paris notaries in the 1780s; see A.N. Min. Cen. L-718 (Jan. 20, 1787). 17. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 114–115. See also Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), chapter 2, and Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), especially 280–282. 18. Etienne Clavière to Théophile Cazenove (Jan. 13, 1786), cited in Lüthy, Banque protestante, vol. 2, 468. 19. Etrennes aux amateurs de la loterie royale de France ou la vraie explication des songes avec leur rapport aux 90 numéros de la loterie royale de France (Lugano: 1777), 17, 70; see also Michel Porret, “Rêver de s’enrichir ou s’enrichir en rêvant. Les ‘pensées nocturnes’ du Genevois Pierre Frémont, dit Butini, libraire et ‘explicateur des songes’ (1774),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 38 (1991), 22–50. 20. Tableau instructif, à l’usage des actionnaires de la loterie royale de France (Paris: chez Marcel, 1778) and Combinaisons sympathiques, très intéressantes, avec les tables de tirages depuis l’etablissement de la loterie de l’ecole militaire et nationale de France (Paris: chez David, Year VI. 21. Here my interpretation diverges from Daston’s, since she sees lotteries and guides to winning them as a “consistent rejection of calculation and calculability,” Classical Probability, 163. For her, mathematical probability is inherently more powerful than narrative likelihood. 22. Pocock’s classification of “time consciousness” as based either in continuity or in contingency may work for English political thought, but it does little to help us understand how ordinary people live their lives; see J. G. A. Pocock, “Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth- Century England,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 5 (1976), reprinted in his Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91–102.

Notes to Pages 27–30

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23. Taylor, “The Paris Bourse”; Shovlin, Political Economy, 157–159; Bossenga, “Financial Origins,” 57–58; and Nina Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth- Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), especially chapter 2. For a different assessment, much closer to my own, see Lüthy, Banque protestante, vol. 2, 469. 24. H.E.B., “The Flight of Capital from Revolutionary France,” AHR 41 (1936), 710–727; for investments on the “thirty heads” made by members of the Le Couteulx banking dynasty (who were also heavily involved in the Paris Caisse d’Escompte, in the Constituent Assembly’s fi nancial debates, and in the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire), see Michel Zylberberg, Capitalisme et catholicisme dans la France moderne: la dynastie Le Couteulx (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2001), 170–189, and A.N. Min. Cen. XCVIII- 643 (Jan. 22 and Mar. 28– 30, 1782). 25. A.N. Min Cen. L-694 (Oct. 30, 1784); Bossenga, “Financial Origins,” 51. 26. One young Genevan matron admitted that she understood nothing of it, but felt reassured by her father’s conversations on the subject: “he never sees a dark cloud and says that we are settled forever,” A.E.G. papiers de famille, premier série; LeFort, nouveau fonds 31 (letter from Sara Lullin to Jean Louis de Tournes, July 5, 1771). 27. A .N. Min. Cen. L-694 (Oct. 6, 1784), dépôt of documents by Jacques Martin Payen. 28. On the slave trade, see Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); Olivier Pétré- Grenouilleau, Nantes au temps de la traite des Noirs (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 79– 80; Robert Forster, Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Depont Family in Eighteenth- Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 4–14. One economic historian has recently argued that varieties of longdistance trade, including the slave trade, were actually less risky than holding government debt, but this is hardly how things appeared at the time. See Guillaume Daudin, “Profitability of Slave and Long-Distance Trade in Context: The Case of Eighteenth- Century France,” JEH 64 (2004), 144–171. 29. [Dr. J. Moore], A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany . . . By a Gentleman, who resided several years in those countries (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1779), vol. 1, 156; William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland in a Series of Letters to William Melmoth, Esq. (Dublin: White, Byrne, and Gruber, 1789), vol. 2, 98; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1755), dedication; John George Keysler, Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain (no translator named),2nd ed. (London: A. Linde, 1756), vol. 1, 179. 30. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva. 31. Jeffrey A. Smith, Frankin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapters 3– 4. 32. As a form of property, rentes were, in the words of one legal historian, “very, very stable.” Ralph Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in

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33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

Notes to Pages 30–32 Prerevolutionary France,” AHR 82 (1977), 271–289; quotation at 278. For eighteenth- century expressions of similar sentiments, see Christine Adams, A Taste for Comfort and Status (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 68, and Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century, A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 102–119. Jean Rousseau (in London) to the Genevan bookdealer Jean Louis de Tournes, May 16, 1786; in Electronic Enlightenment (www.e-enlightenment.com), based on R. A. Leigh, ed. Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau: 1781–1788, (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965–1998), vol. 45, 313–316. It remains uncertain whether the Caisse’s founders (and major political backers, such as Mirabeau) set out to defraud from the beginning—this is the implication of Guy Thuillier’s useful collection of documents, Une ténébreuse affaire: la Caisse Lafarge (1787–1892) (Paris: Comité d’histoire de la société sociale, 1999), but his analysis is not conclusive. Aside from this collection of documents, there is no existing historiography on the Caisse Lafarge or on the other popular life-investment schemes of this era (for example, the “Tontine des sans- culottes”). B. L. 5403 a 6(51). Mémoire à consulter, et consultation pour les administrateurs de la caisse Lafarge (Paris: Antoine Bailleul, 1808), 36. A.N. F22* 1028–10342. AP 9:162 (Sept. 24, 1789). Anonymous, “Lettre à Monsieur Necker,” in Collection complette de tous les ouvrages pour et contre M. Necker. Avec des notes critiques, politiques et secrettes (Utrecht, 1782), vol. 1, 157–158. Pierre- Gilbert Leroy, baron d’Allarde, AP 9:282 (Oct. 2, 1789). The distinction between meubles and immeubles approximates but is hardly identical to that in English and U.S. law between personal and real property. For overviews, see Martha Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300– 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 1 and Ralph Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance.” As one nineteenth-century historian explained things, inherited immeubles constituted only “life-time property.” Edouard Lambert, De l’exhédération et les legs faits au profit des héritiers présomptifs (1895), cited in Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance,” 273. Given the patchwork structure of law in the Old Regime, it is impossible to make any truly defi nitive statements about France overall. My claims here are generalizations, and specialists in the inheritance law of one region or another may well identify exceptions. See, for example, Claude-Joseph de Ferriere, La Science parfaite des notaires ou le parfait notaire, new edition with additions and corrections by François Benoit de Visme (Nancy: Jean Trebua, 1786), vol. 1, passim. See Voltaire to Marguerite Jeanne de Staal (Dec. 31, 1732), in Electronic Enlightenment, based on Theodore Besterman, ed., Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: Institut et Musée Voltaire and Voltaire Foundation, 1968–1977), vol. 86, 271–272.

Notes to Pages 33–36

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43. Jean Domat, Les Loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689), nouv. ed., supplemented by de Hericourt (Paris: Nyon, 1777), vol. 1, 23. 44. William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157. See also: David Bien, “Property in Office under the ancien régime: The Case of the Stockbrokers,” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995), 481– 494; Jean Nagle, Un orgeuil français: La vénalité des offices sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008); and Robert Descimon, “La Vénalité des offices comme dette publique sous l’ancien régime français,” in Jean Andreau, Gérard Béaur, and Jean-Yves Grenier, La Dette publique dans l’histoire (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2006), 177–242. 45. Robert Joseph Pothier, Oeuvres posthumes de M. Pothier, dédiées à Monseigneur le Garde des Sceaux de France (Paris: Pierre-Théophile Barrois, 1777), vol. 2, 639– 642; Joseph Nicolas Guyot, ed., Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence civile, criminelle, canonique, et bénéficiale, nouv. ed. (Paris: Visse, 1784–1785), vol. 2, 339–344. 46. Pothier, vol. 2, 638. 47. Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance,” and Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, 74. For an overview of the many ways that immeubles might be transferred without being “sold” as private property, see Gérard Béaur, “Le Marché foncier éclaté: Les modes des transmission du patrimoine sous l’Ancien Régime,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 46 (1991), 189–203. 48. Martha Howell, “Movable/Immovable, What’s in a Name? The Case of Late Medieval Ghent,” in Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, and Martin M. Elbl, eds., Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of John H. A. Munro (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 541. 49. Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and Itnarratives (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2007). See, too, Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 50. Encyclopédie, art. “Gage (mort).” 51. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Mémoire sur les municipalités (1774) cited in William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 130; translation slightly modified. 52. Key works on the growth of consumer culture in eighteenth- century Europe include John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993) and Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 53. Claude de Ferriere, Corps et compilation de tous les commentateurs anciens et modernes sur la coutume de Paris, 2nd ed. (Paris: Claude Robustel, 1714), col. 1320; later editions added “livestock” to this short defi nition while leaving “cash” as the

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54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

Notes to Pages 36–42 first example. See Claude-Joseph de Ferriere, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Brunet, 1749), vol. 2, 306. See also Encyclopédie, art. “Meubles.” “Meuble,” Dictionnaire universel, contentant generalement tous les mots françois, nouv. ed. (The Hague, 1725), vol. 3, no page. Delphin Lamothe to his brother, Victor (March 10, 1764), cited in Adams, A Taste for Comfort and Status, 71. Gilles Postel-Vinay, La Terre et l’argent: L’agriculture et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début de XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 61. A.N. Y 11276 (June 4, 1783). A.N. Y 15000 (July 17, 1779) and A.N. Y 15000 (July 17 and 30, 1779). A.N. Y 15000 (Nov. 5, 1779). The fashion press, as well, referred to coins as mea sures of size, approving when men replaced buttons as big as a six-livre écu with smaller ones comparable to three-livre écus; Le Cabinet des modes, April 1, 1786 (10th cahier), 74. I thank Clare Crowston for this reference. Such revaluations had been extremely common during the fi nal decades of Louis XIV’s reign. For an overview, see Adrien Blanchet, Manuel de numismatique française (Paris: A. Picard, 1912–1936), vol. 2, 187. Guy Thuillier, ed., La Réforme monétaire de 1785: Calonne et la refonte des louis (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1785). “You cannot have money without buying it.” Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de La Rivière, L’ordre naturel et essential des sociétés politiques (London, 1767), 253, 258, 334–344; Encyclopédie, art. “Fermiers.” Le Mercier de La Rivière, L’ordre naturel 219–224, 253–262, 338, 383–391. Baudeau, Avis au peuple sur son premier besoin, ou petits traités économiques (Paris: Hochereau, 1768), 73–74. William Doyle, The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 58. On the Physiocrats and their critics, see especially Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, 102–117; Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Turgot, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses and Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances, cited in Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 287 and 307; Véron de Forbonnais, Principes et observation oeconomiques, cited in Vardi, The Physiocrats, 146. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Le Commerce et le gouvernement in Oeuvres de Condillac (Paris: Houel, Year VI[1798]), 133–134. Of Condillac, Keith Baker has written, “Nowhere more clearly than in his systematic pages is the structure of Enlightenment thought in France revealed”; see Baker, Condorcet, 116. For Roze de Chantoiseau, see my Invention of the Restaurant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), chapter 1. Philip Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 5.

Notes to Pages 43–46

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68. Joseph Addison, Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (1726), cited in David Alvarez, “ ‘Poetical Cash’: Joseph Addison, Antiquarianism, and Aesthetic Value,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 38 (spring 2005), 509–531, quotation at 511. Though first published in 1721, the Dialogues were written in the 1690s (that is, during the recoinage crisis and when Locke was emphasizing the durability of gold and silver). John Evelyn’s Numismata (1697) described ancient coins as having “broken and worn out the very Teeth of Time, that devours and tears to pieces all things else”; cited in Alvarez, 527. 69. David Parker, “Absolutism, Feudalism, and Property Rights,” P&P 179 (2003), 69–96; Gilles Postel-Vinay has calculated that between 1772 and 1790, 20 percent of the property sales in Bar-sur-Seine were opposed by two or more creditors: La Terre et l’argent, 121. 70. David Bien, “Les Offices, les corps, et le crédit d’état: L’utilisation des privilèges sous l’ancien régime,” Annales E. S. C. 43 (1988), 379– 404. 71. Daniel Roche, Le Peuple de Paris (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981). 72. Forster, Nobility of Toulouse, 131–141. 73. Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Pierre Michel Hennin (June 9, 1786) in Electronic Enlightenment. Available at www.e-enlightenment.com and based on Malcolm Cook, ed., The Digital Correspondence of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. 74. For a similar conclusion about early-modern England, see Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, especially 98–103. 75. Laurence Fontaine, “Antonio and Shylock: Credit and Trust in France, c. 1680– c. 1780,” trans. Vicki Whittaker, EHR 54 (2001), 39–57. 76. AAAD (March 7, 1782), 534, and (July 25, 1786), 2002. On the affiches, see Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” AHR 101 (1996), 13– 40. See also Alain Belmont, “L’Artisan en sa boutique: du troc à l’écu,” in Philippe Minard and Denis Woronoff, eds., L’Argent des campagnes: Echanges, monnaie, crédit dans la France rurale de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique de la France, 2003), 113–128. 77. Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Pierre Michel Hennin (June 9, 1786) in Electronic Enlightenment. 78. Steven L. Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 140–141, 570–572; Brigitte Maillard, “Les Usages du crédit chez les boulangers à Tours au XVIIIe siècle,” in Natacha Coquery, ed., La Boutique et la ville (Tours: Centre d’histoire de la ville moderne et contemporaine, 2000), 357–368. 79. A.N. Min. Cen. X-672 (Oct. 14, 1778), XCVI-528 (Oct. 18, 1783), and VII- 491 (May 25, 1789). 80. Dozens of texts explained the full intricacies of this trade; see for instance Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel de commerce (Paris: Jacques Etienne, 1723) vol. 2, cols. 503–507, and Robert Joseph Pothier, Traité du contrat de change (Paris: Debure père, 1773). Within the secondary literature,

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81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Notes to Pages 46–49 particularly lucid accounts are provided by Amalia Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth- Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 190–193, and Veronica Aoki Santarosa, “Financing Long-Distance Trade without Banks: The Joint Liability Rule and Bills of Exchange in Eighteenth- Century France” (2010), working paper accessed at http://www.eh.net/eha/system/fi les /Santarosa .pdf. Much as we might think of a rente viagère as an inverted life-insurance policy, so the discounting of bills of exchange can be understood as the mirror image of twenty-first- century credit cards. With the latter, the card holder pays an extra amount to the card issuer in exchange for extra time to pay for purchases. When a bill of exchange was discounted, on the other hand, its holder agreed to accept less than the bill’s face value, in exchange for receiving goods or money before the bill was due. AAAD (Jan. 23, 1755), 54; Encyclopédie, art. “Finances (caractère de).” Turgot, Memoire sur les prets d’argent, cited in Emma Rothschild, “An Alarming Commercial Crisis in Eighteenth- Century Angoulême: Sentiments in Economic History,” EHR 51 (1998), 268–293; quotations at 270–271. Kaplan, Bakers of Paris, 378; elsewhere in the book, he asserts, “The city lived as much on credit as on calories” (151). Michael Sonenscher has similarly written, “Credit bound masters and journeymen together because it transformed a bargain into a promise and made a simple transaction a more complex dialogue over rights and obligations,” Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth- Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192. See also Fontaine, L’Economie morale, and Clare Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Philippe Guignet, Mines, Manufactures, et ouvriers de Valenciennois au XVIIIe siècle (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 580–592; Elise Dermineur, “Female Peasants, Patriarchy, and the Credit-Market in Eighteenth- Century France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 37 (2009), 61– 84. Fontaine, L’Economie morale, 118; Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands-Merciers of Eighteenth- Century Paris (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), 26; A.N. Y 7554 (April 19, 1769); A.N. Min. Cen. II749 (Aug. 3, 1790); A.N. F30 132, letter from Rimbault (Aug. 21, 1790); Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex; Dermineur, “Female Peasants,” 69. Joseph Grisel, l’Année religieuse, ou occupation intérieure pendant les divins offices, t. 5 (Paris: D’Houry, 1767), 131. Marcel Marion, Les Impôts directs sous l’ancien régime, principalement au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Edouard Cornély et cie, 1910), 15–16. A.D. Rhône 1C 57 (circular of Jan. 12, 1763, responses from Feb. 1763); A.D. Seine Maritime C 1047 (report from Rouen, Jan. 26, 1763). AP 10:137–138 (Nov. 20, 1789). A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine C 1866 (July 20, 1783).

Notes to Pages 49–52

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92. See the documents collected in A.N. Z1B 546, especially the decisions of the Conseil du Roi. 93. “J’ai remis entre les mains des curés des billets signés de mon nom qui portent tant de pain et de légumes.” A. Cans, ed., “Lettres de M. de Boisgelin, archevêque d’Aix, à la comtesse de Grammont,” Revue historique 80 (1902), 304. 94. Thomas M. Luckett, “The Sales and Business Strategies of a Pa risian Artisan, 1754–1764,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 36 (2008), 93–108; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks: The Experience of Nuits St. Georges, 1756–1776,” JEH 54 (1994), 288–306; Liana Vardi, The Land and the Loom (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), chapter 10; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les Financiers du Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1980); Joël Cornette, Un révolutionnaire ordinaire. Benoît Lacombe, négociant 1759–1819 (Seyssel [France]: Champ Vallon, 1986), 156. 95. Libération de la dette nationale, ouvrage dans lequel on présente le vrai moyen d’acquitter toutes les dettes de l’État (Geneva: n.p.,1787), part 1, 5 and part 3, 3; Henri Bouchon-Dubournial, Considérations sur les finances (Paris: Belin, 1787), 3. On the popu lar success of Necker’s Sur le compte rendu au Roi en 1781, nouveaux éclaircissemens (1788), see Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 285–287. 96. LeFort was sixty years old at the time; he served as a member of Geneva’s Grand Council and was connected by birth or marriage to numerous bankers and magistrates. A. E. G. papiers de famille, premier série; LeFort, nouveau fonds, carton 2 (Abraham Lefort to Jean Martin Fritsch, Jan. 1772). 97. Eugene Nelson White, “Was There a Solution to the Ancien Régime’s Financial Dilemma?” JEH 49 (1989), 545–568. As David Weir has observed, even Marcel Marion (the historian who was among the harshest critics of Old Regime borrowing) recognized Britain’s debt was larger; see David R. Weir, “Tontine, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789,” JEH 49 (1989), 96 note 8, and Marcel Marion, Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715 (Paris: 1914–1931), vol. 1, 460– 461. Other economic historians have calculated that the debt, if mea sured in livres of constant silver value, actually shrank by 10 percent between 1715 and 1789; see Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 98–105. 98. On the centrality of debt, taxation, and luxury as themes in the political culture of the 1770s and 1780s, see: Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth- Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. For a useful and concise synthesis, see Bossenga, “Financial Origins,” in From Deficit to Deluge; in their introduction to this collection, Kaiser and Van Kley argue that without an “unprecedented widening of the political process” a “normal fiscal crisis” would not have turned into the Revolution. 99. Robert Lacour- Gayet, Calonne: financier, réformateur, contre- révolutionnaire, 1734–1802 (Paris: Hachette, 1963), 173–174; David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation

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100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

Notes to Pages 53–58 in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–153; Michael Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes: An EighteenthCentury Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 284–285. In addition to the works cited above, see Bell, Cult of the Nation; Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce. Keith Michael Baker’s work on the decades preceding the Revolution was an important impetus for much of this scholarship; see especially his Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). A perhaps unlikely pair of readings has helped sharpen my sense that “causes” follow “events”; see Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Anthony Briggs (1869; London: Penguin, 2005) and Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolf Man)” (1918), in James Strachey, ed., [The Wolf Man] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press,1955). It is instructive in this context to compare William Doyle, The Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), with Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991). “Even if it [the Revolution] had not taken place, the old social structure would nonetheless have been shattered . . . it would have crumbled bit by bit.” Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 62 and 20. Colin Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” P&P 60 (1973), 84–126; for an overview of the situation in Brittany, see Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 84– 85, 91.

2. The Money of Liberty 1. AP 8:129 (June 17, 1789). 2. Letter of August 24, 1790 (quotation slightly modified), in M.  E. QuereauLamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit, député à l’Assemblée nationale constituante (1789–1791),” Bulletin de la commission historique et archéologique de la Mayenne second series, 21 (1905), 341–342; for debate on the Bastille demolition bill, see Camille Bloch, ed., Procès- verbaux du comité des finances de l’Assemblée Constituante (Rennes: Oberthur, 1922), 373, and AP 19:433 (Oct. 4, 1790). 3. Théodore Vernier, Eléments des finances, nécessaires à tous ceux qui voudront juger avec connaissance des abus à réformer (Paris: Clavelin, 1789), 1. 4. “It is impossible to judge these plans and figures on a single hearing; I demand the proposal be printed,” AP 10:369 (Dec. 4, 1789); see also AP 9:237–238 (Oct. 2, 1789) and Bloch, ed., Procès- verbaux du comité des finances, 140. In the August– September 1790 debate on liquidating the debt, Doctor Campmas wrote he

Notes to Pages 58–59

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

297

was “counting on my fi ngers like a fi shwife,” letter of Sept. 12, 1790, to his brother, cited in Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 261. It is possible Campmas saw this as a point of pride; that was certainly how a commoner deputy from Dauphiné meant it when he introduced his own comments by saying, “There are two ways to address a question: the expert’s way and the apprentice’s. A mathematician scribbles figures while a woman counts on her fi ngers. Mine is the second method,” AP 18:396 (Aug. 28, 1790). With hindsight, one deputy wrote the Assembly’s members knew less about fi nances than about anything else and concluded “the less you know about something, the more likely you are to think of a difficult and complicated way of dealing with it”; see Alexandre Lameth, Histoire de l’assemblée constituante (Paris: Moutardier, 1829), vol. 2, 56. Adrien Duquesnoy, Journal d’Adrien Duquesnoy sur l’Assemblée constituante, ed. Robert de Crèvecoeur (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fi ls, 1894), vol. 1, 384 (letter of Oct. 2, 1789). AP 12:606– 607 (April 9, 1790) and 25:595 (May 5, 1791); A.N. D VIII 2 (Dec. 16, 1791, letter from citizens of Besançon). For the assignats as a “disastrous experiment,” see: Henry Higgs, “Revolutionary Finance,” in Lord Acton et al., eds., The Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), vol. 8, 704, and Gwynne Lewis, “The French Revolution,” in David Parker, ed., Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West, 1560–1991 (London: Routledge, 2000), 93. In the words of one nineteenth- century writer, the assignats proved “paper-money is itself an evil,” E. Levasseur, “The Assignats: a Study in the Finances of the French Revolution,” Journal of Political Economy 2 (1894), 179–202. See also Andrew Dickson White, Paper Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1876); C. J. Gignoux, La Planche aux assignats (Paris: des Portiques, 1933); Florin Aftalion, The French Revolution, An Economic Interpretation, trans. Martin Thom (1987; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990). Though see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Michael Sonenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789,” History of Political Thought 18 (1997), 64–103 and 267–325. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), vii. Tackett, Becoming, 7. With sixty-four members, the Finance Committee was the Assembly’s largest; illness and resignation meant a total of seventy-seven men eventually served on it. In addition to three dukes, six counts, three barons, five marquises, and two vicomtes, the Committee included ten parish clergymen, six other clerics,

298

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes to Pages 59–60 the director of the Limoges Mint, and a number of commoners with extensive experience in private and public fi nance (d’Ailly, Anson, Laborde de Méréville, Le Couteulx de Canteleu). For the full list of members and short biographies, see Bloch, Procès- verbaux du comité des finances, xxxix–xlix. See also Edna Hindie Lemay and Alison Patrick, Revolutionaries at Work: The Constituent Assembly, 1789–1791 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996) and Edna Hindie Lemay, ed., Dictionnaire des constituants, 1789–1791 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991). François Crouzet, La Grande inflation (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 567; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York, 1962), 121. AP 13:51 (April 15, 1790). Tackett argues that some deputies’ conscious and coordinated opposition to reform pushed others to become more radical; my analysis does not challenge his argument so much as extends it. This is more or less the approach taken in Michael Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes: An Eighteenth- Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue. Though working in a very different idiom, S.  E. Harris’s classic study, The Assignats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930) also gives Clavière a prominent place. Like the present chapter, Eugene White has examined the process of creating the assignats, but he does so almost exclusively with quantitative sources. See especially his “The French Revolution and the Politics of Government Finance, 1770–1815,” JEH 55:2 (1995), 227–255. His daughter, Jeanne, married Pierre Vieusseux; the names of several of Vieusseux’s nieces and cousins figure on lists of “heads” deposited with Paris notaries, A.N. Min. Cen. L-694 (Oct. 1784). For more on Clavière (in addition to the works in the previous note), see George V. Taylor, “The Paris Bourse on the Eve of Revolution, 1781–1789,” AHR 67 (July 1962), 951–977; Jean Bouchary, Les Manieurs d’argent à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1939), vol. 1, 11–101; and J. Bénétruy, L’Atelier de Mirabeau: quatre proscrits genevois dans la tourmente révolutionnaire (Geneva: Société d’histoire et archéologie, 1962). One of Clavière’s later collaborators, Brissot, called him “the creator of the assignats,” Le Patriote français 411 (Sept. 23, 1790), 4. Lemay and Patrick, Revolutionaries at Work; this was also how voting was done in committees; see Bloch, Procès- verbaux du comité des finances, 220. See, for example, the letters of the marquis de Villemort (nobility, Poitiers), who found the September 1790 debate on debt liquidation “interminable” and “tedious” and the main discussions of tax policy “feeble . . . dry . . . arid.” Henri Calvet, “Lettres de Marquis de Villemort au Comte François d’Escars (1790– 1791),” Archives historiques du Poitou 52 (1942), 5–158; quotations at 48, 62, 63. Another deputy, the abbé Rousselot, wrote in detailed terms to his nephew about business and property dealings in their own section of Franche Comté (Haute Saône) but of the Assembly’s discussions said only, “Now we are plunged into the chaos of finances. We have to make sense of all the state’s debts, set future expenditures in all areas, and determine the depth of the abyss left by

Notes to Pages 60–63

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

299

pensions, bonuses, and royal gifts [approfondir le gouffre des pensions, des traitements, des dons du roi].” Anne-Marie Malingrey, ed., Correspondance de l’abbé Rousselot, constituant (Paris: les Belles Lettres, 1992), 48 (letter of Jan. 1, 1790). For enthusiasm about the donation of veterans’ pensions and other “patriotic gifts,” see the letters of Jean Pierre Boullé to the municipality of Pontivy, reproduced in “Ouverture des Etats généraux de 1789,” Revue de la révolution: documents inédits 16 (1889), 50. Lindet, letter of Dec. 21, 1789 in Correspondance de Thomas Lindet pendant la constituante et la législative, ed. Armand Montier (Paris: Société de l’histoire de la révolution française, 1899), 32; Antoine René Hyacinthe Thibeaudeau, letter of Dec. 22, 1789, in Correspondance inédite, eds. H. Carré and P. Boissonnade (Paris: H. Champion, 1898), 57. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21, 213 (July 20, 1790); D. Tempier, ed., “Correspondance des députés des Côtes- du-Nord à l’Assemblée Constituante,” Bulletin et mémoires de la société d’émulation des Côtes- du-Nord 27 (1889), 25 (letter from Baudouin, Oct. 1, 1790). Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21, 341–342 (Aug. 25, 1790). AP 10:56–57 (Nov. 14, 1789); for a very similar presentation of the difficulties facing France, see Necker’s earlier report AP 9:140–146 (Sept. 24, 1789). This paragraph owes much to T. J. A. LeGoff, “How to Finance an EighteenthCentury War,” in W. M. Ormrod, Margaret Bonney, and Richard Bonney, eds., Crises, Revolutions, and Self- Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1999), 377– 413. AP 10:90 (Nov. 18, 1789); “the deficit is a national trea sure and the public debt was the seed of our liberty,” AP 8:499 (August 27, 1789); “Look behind you for an instant: it was the disorder in our fi nances that brought us to the happy days of liberty,” from the Assembly’s “Address to the French People about the Assignats,” 15:344 (April 30, 1790). In June 1789, Camille Desmoulins wrote, “As the death of Vergenia reestablished liberty in Rome . . . in France, the deficit will do so. O blessed deficit, o my dear Calonne!” La France Libre, in Jules Claretie, ed., Oeuvres de Camille Desmoulins (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), 79. See, for instance, the comments by Populus, AP 8:221 ( July 11, 1789) and by Duport and Brostaret, AP 9:232 (Oct. 1, 1789). See, too, Dumont, Recollections of Mirabeau . . . , 116. AP 8:128–129 (June 17, 1789). AP 8:230 (July 13, 1789); italics in the original. French has two words for “bankruptcy”: while faillite refers to an honest business failure, the “infamous word” used here, banqueroute, means a strategic default, perhaps a fraudulent one, engineered to cheat creditors. Thomas E. Kaiser, “Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early EighteenthCentury France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit,” JMH 63 (1991), 1– 28; David R. Weir, “Tontines, Public Finance, and Revolution in France and England, 1688–1789,” JEH 49 (1989), 95–124.

300

Notes to Pages 64–67

30. Arthur et Robert, wallpaper manufacturers, furnished the new Legislative Assembly with at least 375 yards of fleur- de-lys wallpaper in the fi nal quarter of 1791 alone; see A.N. C 2455. Little over a year later, the National Convention’s committees met in those same rooms and requested the wallpaper be replaced with something more republican, see A.N. C 354. 31. AP 9:6 (Sept. 16, 1789). 32. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 19 (1903), 226–227 (Aug. 10, 1789). 33. AP 10:281 (Nov. 27, 1789); see also Regnaud de Saint Jean Angély’s statement, “we have to do something about our fi nances . . . if we don’t, the edifice we are constructing will collapse before it is finished,” 10:391 (Dec. 5, 1789). 34. AP 9:183 (Sept. 25, 1789). 35. Edouard de Barthélemy, ed., Journal du Baron de Gauville (Paris, 1864), 36 (Dec. 14, 1789). 36. AP 11: 239 (Jan. 18, 1790). 37. AP 8:363 (Aug. 7, 1789) and 10:91 (Nov. 18, 1789). 38. AP 10:56– 65 (Nov. 14, 1789). According to Lemay, Dictionnaire des constituants (952), the Assembly then had four secretaries: the Protestant clergyman and early Jacobin Rabaut Saint-Etienne; the conservative (and often drunk) vicomte de Mirabeau, younger brother of the famous orator; the moderate and highly respected lawyer Salomon, who sat on four committees and was one of the Assembly’s administrative inspectors; and a conservative commoner from Cahors, Lachèze. It seems certain each would have read the report differently. 39. AP 10:112 (Nov. 18, 1790). 40. Necker’s critics delighted in highlighting these paradoxes; see for instance, Les Comments (1781). Similar arguments run through Maury’s attacks on the Finance Committee’s proposals in August–September 1790. Noting the committee’s calculations included a certain amount for “costs of the Revolution,” Maury quipped: “Are they going to bill us for a new revolution every year?” AP 18:425 (Aug. 30, 1790). 41. Emmanuel Barbotin, Lettres de l’abbé Barbotin, ed. A. Aulard (Paris: Société de l’histoire de la Révolution française, 1910), 21–22. Many referred to Necker as a “father” and understood their emotions at this moment as those of bereavement. See Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Mémoires d’un témoin de la révolution, ou journal des faits qui se sont passés sous ses yeux, et qui ont préparé et fi xé la constitution française (Paris: Levrault, Schoell et cie, 1804), vol. 2, 86, and H. Diné, “Le Journal des Etats généraux de Camusat de Belombre,” AHRF 37 (1965), 265. 42. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 18 (1902), 472– 473 (July 16, 1789); Thibeaudeau, Correspondance 6 (July 17, 1789); Duquesnoy, Journal, vol. 2, 133 (Dec. 4, 1789). 43. François Ménard de la Groye, Correspondance (1789–1791), ed. Florence Mirouse (Le Mans: Archives départementales de la Sarthe, 1989), 142 (Nov. 17, 1789); Tableau des opérations de l’Assemblée Nationale d’après le Journal de Paris, t. 2 (Lausanne: Hignou, 1789), 60.

Notes to Pages 67–69

301

44. A ten-man commission was elected to report on the proposals. On a day when approximately 800 deputies were present, 522 votes were cast for Le Couteulx de Canteleu, the internationally connected merchant banker from Rouen. Others elected to the commission included Anson (475), Dupont de Nemours (435), and d’Ailly (354), all of whom had served in financial administration since the 1770s; Laborde de Méréville (360), the court banker; and the Marquis de Montesquiou-Fézénsac (252), who routinely chaired the Finance Committee. Also elected were Talleyrand (243) and the baron d’Allarde (222), as well as the two most outspoken partisans of conservative reaction, the abbé Maury (261) and Cazalès (309). Vote numbers in parentheses as reported by Duquesnoy, Journal, vol. 2, 140. 45. “We have to go very slowly on taxes . . . Each sees things in terms of his own locality and thinks only in terms of what he knows,” Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 22 (1906), 73 (Oct. 17, 1790); AP 10:325–326 (Nov. 28, 1789). 46. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 20 (1904), 109 (Dec. 5, 1789). For the text of Talleyrand’s criticisms, see AP 10:380–386 (Dec. 4, 1789); for Laborde’s proposal, AP 10:397–406 (Dec. 5, 1789). 47. AP 10:657– 663 (Dec. 18, 1789). 48. AP 10:685, 690– 691 (Dec. 19 and 21, 1789). 49. Claude Gantheret, a deputy and a wine and grain merchant from Burgundy, told his brother-in-law the biens were worth at least four billion; letter excerpted in E. Leflaive, “Le premier représentant de Beaune au parlement: Claude Gantheret,” Société d’archéologique de Beaune. Histoire, lettres, sciences et arts 42 (1925–1929), 99. Another called the mea sures “provisional” and “essential” in a letter to his uncle; see Marie- O. Monod, “Lettres de Guillaume-Benoit Couderc, bourgeois de Lyon, deputé à l’Assemblée Constituant à son oncle, M. Vernet-Dupan, à Genève, 1781–1792,” Revue d’histoire de Lyon 5 (1906), 420; very similar language can be found in Le Couteulx de Canteleu’s report on the various proposals AP 10:632 (Dec. 17, 1789). The day before the vote, Adrien Duquesnoy, a lawyer from Nancy, wrote, “tomorrow we should leave this surprising crisis behind us. It has absorbed all our thoughts and we have been so busy trying to provide for the present that we cannot give enough thought to the future,” Duquesnoy, Journal, vol. 2, 185. 50. The clerical deputy and Finance- Committee member, Colaud de la Salcette, wrote to one of his fellow cathedral canons in the Dauphiné, “everyone is appalled at the luxury” of the bishops in the Assembly. “I could name five or six prelates who between them have an income of 3,000,000 livres,” he continued. “In this enlightened century, it has been calculated the twelve apostles and seventy disciples did not have 1/240 of this enormous sum.” “Lettres de J.-Bern. Colaud de la Salcette, chanoine de Die, député aux Etats Généraux en 1789,” Bulletin d’archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme 69 (1944), 155. 51. Amable Boursier wrote to the chevalier de Buffon, son of the famous naturalist: “The Assembly’s decree of last Saturday casts a glimmer of hope on the

302

52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

Notes to Pages 69–72 financial situation. May it please God we are not disappointed! I think M.  Necker . . . will have more funds available, not in cash—which nobody has— but in bills from the Caisse d’Escompte. There is no longer any discussion of creating paper money; this project has been rejected.” Henri Nadault de Buffon, ed., Correspondance inédite de Buffon (Paris: Hachette, 1860), vol. 2, 532. Thierry Claeys, Dictionnaire biographique des financiers en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: éditions SPM, 2008), vol. 1, 796–799, and vol. 2, 141–153; Lemay, Dictionnaire des constituants, 566–567; Michel Zylberberg, Capitalisme et catholicisme dans la France moderne: la dynastie Le Couteulx (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2001). In English, it would be more idiomatic to say revenue from those taxes was allocated to the paying of those annuities. The French (for example, A.N. Min. Cen. L-694 Oct. 14, 1784) reads “assignés sur les aides et gabelles, tailles, postes, cuirs, [etc.],” so while a literal translation would be that annuity payments were “assigned to” those revenues, it makes more sense in English to say income from those taxes was “assigned to” (or “earmarked for”) making those payments. Another way to express this relation was not to say categories of expenses and revenues were assigned to each other, but that the tax “represented” the budget item; see Rilliet de Saussure, Lettres sur l’emprunt et l’impôt, addressées à M. *** (Geneva: 1779), 2. AP 9:187–196 (Sept. 26, 1789). “La dette du Roi, qui deviendra alors celle de la nation, ait désormais pour gage l’honneur et la fidélité de cette nation même, et la surveillance de ses représentants, organes et dépositaires du trésor sacré de la foi publique.” AP 8:112 (June 15, 1789). Montesqueiu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) is one classic statement of the relation between honor and aristocracy. For attempts to redefi ne honor as a generally “French” trait, see Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth- Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially chapter 4. Armand-Louis de Gontaut, duc de Biron, Lettres sur les états généraux de 1789 (Paris: Bachelin-Deflorenne, 1865), 41 (Oct. 7, 1789). Gauville in general found gifts to the Assembly insulting and was dismayed by what he saw as the king’s loss of pomp and dignity; Journal de baron de Gauville, 13, 20, 34, 37. Jean Laporte, Organisation et administration des finances pour un peuple libre (Paris: Gastelier, 1790), 80. For these figures and others, see the Finance Committee’s report, AP 10:90–114 (Nov. 18, 1789). Ibid. See, for instance, Henri Dubournial, Considérations sur les finances et idée générale d’un moyen simple, doux et facile pour rembourser la plus grande partie de la dette foncière de l’Etat (London and Paris: 1787).

Notes to Pages 73–79

303

63. AP 10:679 (Dec. 19, 1789); “shocked and scandalized” is from Garat’s account in the Journal de Paris and was reprinted for wider circulation; see Tableau des opérations de l’Assemblée Nationale d’après le Journal de Paris (Lausanne: Hignou, 1789), t. 2, 144. 64. Marquis de Ferrières, Correspondance inédite, ed. Henri Carré (Paris: Armand Colin, 1932), 64, 83, 100, 110, 122–124, 134–137, 151 (letters of June 12, July 10, July 28, Aug. 7, Aug. 10, Aug. 20, Sept. 20). From archaeological evidence, we know that some who hid money never returned to claim it. For cases of coins from this era found buried in a large earthenware pot, built into a wall, or stashed in a sock behind a false desk drawer, see Frédéric Droulers, Les Trésors de monnaies royales de Louis XIII à Louis XVI découverts en France et dans le monde depuis le XIXe siècle (Paris: Feydeau Numismatique, 1980), 39, 47, 56. He notes the discovery of fifty trea sures buried in 1789–1794 yielding approximately 19,000 gold and silver coins (6–7). 65. Ferrières, Correspondance inédite, 120, 151, 155, 182. 66. For the widespread belief that any shortage must be the result of a plot, see Steven Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth- Century France (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982) and William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Sans- Culotte Rhetoric of Subsistence,” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Terror, vol. 4 of Baker, et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1987–1994), 249–270. 67. [Paul-Augustin Pous], “Correspondance inédite d’un membre de l’Assemblée constituante,” Revue de l’Anjou 23 (1879), 94 (March 28, 1790). 68. Lemay, ed., Dictionnaire des constituants, vol. 1, 171. 69. Duquesnoy, Journal, vol. 2, 461 (March 12, 1790); Lindet, Correspondance, vol. 2, 89 (Feb. 22, 1790); see also Tackett, Becoming, 265. 70. Daniel Ligou, La Première Année de la révolution vue par un témoin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961), 275 (April 12, 1790). 71. Lindet, Correspondance, vol. 2, 135 (April 14, 1790). 72. As of February, members of the Finance Committee expressed concern that “the State’s fi nances are, or are thought to be, in such an alarming state that the Committee is being blamed,” Procès- verbaux du comité des finances (Feb. 17, 1790), 140. By the time of the April debate, it had been decided that the nationalized properties would be sold wholesale to the municipalities, which would then be responsible for reselling them; this decision was later rescinded. On this issue see Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes, 328–331. 73. AP 12:602– 611 (April 9, 1790). 74. On March 27, the Finance Committee had elected the three men to examine Necker’s latest report and draft a response; this was the last documented task it assigned to Anson before the report on April 9; see Procès- verbaux du comité des finances, 182. 75. AP 12:602– 611 (April 9, 1790). 76. The analogy of the constitution with an edifice recurred across a surprisingly wide range of discussions; see AP 8:284 (July 27, 1789) and 317 (Aug. 1, 1789),

304

77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Notes to Pages 79–82 9:689 (Nov. 5, 1789). The Jacobin Club of Cette (Hérault) developed this analogy extensively: playing on the double meaning of bâtiment (both “building” and “vessel”), they wrote of how the 1791 constitution had “weathered the storms” and was now a “majestic edifice” in need of finishing details. See their petition to the Comité des Monnaies, A.N. D VIII 2 (Oct. 6, 1791). For uses of this metaphor in the new United States, see Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 63– 85. Kaiser, “Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion.” AP 13:54–57 (April 15, 1790). Each issue of the Journal de Paris briefly reported the previous day’s weather. The month started with several “superb” days but April 8–17 are all characterized by “clouds” or “rain.” In the Journal de Paris, Garat acknowledged Dupont’s vast relevant expertise and described his presentation as “sorrowful and worrying,” April 16, 1790, 417. AP 12:609 (April 9, 1790). AP 13:54–55 (April 15, 1790). Venua, the restaurateur at the Grand Hotel des Etats- Généraux, advertised dinners for 24 and 36 sous; AAAD, Jan. 1, 1790, 15. Even opponents of the money-assignat thought to explain their objections by reference to this physiological model. “The circulation of money in the body politic has been compared to blood in the human body, and never has a comparison been more accurate. The comparison has been made so often it now may seem insignificant, but it can help us understand better the danger of issuing assignats in small denominations.” Le Roy, Des inconvénients des assignatsmonnaie, et des moyens de liquider la dette de l’Etat, in AP 18: 582–588; quotation at 584. Harris, The Assignats, chapter 3. AP 10:285 (Nov. 27, 1789). Anson, AP 12:608 (April 9, 1790); extract from the minutes of the meeting of the section Thermes du Julien, A.N. D VI 8 (Sept. 8, 1790). Ménard de la Groye, Correspondance, 278 (Sept. 28, 1790). Nicolas Ruault, Gazette d’un parisien sous la Révolution, ed. Anne Vassal and Christiane Rimbaud (Paris: Perrin, 1976), 193–194, 201. “The dangers of paper-money have been debated, but this is not about papermoney, it’s only about assignats,” AP 13:84 (April 17, 1790). Maupetit, for instance, reassured his correspondent that the issue of assignats was not like Law’s scheme because it depended on an “immense gage,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21 (1905), 376 (letter of April 17, 1790). The journalist Prudhomme argued all money had to be backed by something and while coins carried their gage (the metal) with them, theirs was neither as indestructible nor as inherently valuable as the land backing the assignats; see Révolutions de Paris 41 (April 17–24, 1790), 157–162.

Notes to Pages 82–88

305

93. A.N. D VI 8, extract from Registre of the Section Théâtre Français (Sept. 10, 1790). 94. Ibid., section Tuileries (Sept. 1790). 95. Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au xviiie siècle (Marseille: Institut historique de Provence, 1973), 842. 96. AP 21:655 (De. 24, 1790); summaries of his report appeared in the provincial press, for instance, Journal universel du département de la Haute Garonne et Affiches de Toulouse (Jan. 1, 1791), 7. 97. Observations des représentans du Commerce, des Manufactures, et des Arts et métiers de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Clousier, 1790), 8. 98. William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–3 and 275–311. 99. Doyle has calculated that nearly half the commoners and over 60 percent of the noblemen in the Assembly owned, or had owned, venal office; many others had fathers or brothers who stood to be reimbursed; Venality, 275–276. 100. Procès- verbaux du comité des finances (Aug. 13 and 18), 328–329 and 336; AP 18:357 (Aug. 27, 1790). 101. AP 18:354–356 (Aug. 27, 1790). 102. AP 18:360 (Aug 27, 1790). 103. There is no evidence Robespierre spoke on this issue at all, either in the Assembly or in the Jacobin Club. Marat supported paying the debt in assignats; see his L’Ami du peuple 223 (Sept. 17, 1790). 104. Oscar Browning, ed., The Despatches of Earl Gower, English Ambassador at Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885), 34; A.D. Jura, 5E 561/P15 (Sept. 5, 1790). 105. “Correspondance inédite d’un membre de l’Assemblée constituante,” Revue de l’Anjou 23 (1879), 198 (Sept. 18, 1790); Georges Michon, Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926), 90 (Sept. 9, 1790). 106. Ferrières, Correspondance, 263–264 (August 12, 1790); Journal de Paris, Sept. 18, 1790, 1065. Introducing his own “long speech” on the topic, Maury asserted Mirabeau had accepted the challenge but then failed to appear: “I look around this arena, searching for Monsieur Mirabeau . . . and I sadly fi nd myself reduced, among so many adversaries, to the solitude of a monologue,” AP 19:290 (Sept. 28, 1790). 107. His fellow deputies commented on Maury’s pistols; see Lindet, Correspondance, vol. 2, 137 (April 14, 1790); Camille Looten, Lettres de François-Joseph Bouchette (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909), 331 (Jan. 25, 1790). The abbé Vallet who, like Maury, attended meetings of the far-right Capuchin Club, claimed Maury’s example inspired him to get his own handguns; “Souvenirs de l’abbé Vallet, député de Gien à l’Assemblée constituante,” Nouvelle revue rétrospective 16 (1902), 391. 108. AP 16:456 (June 25, 1790); see also the description in Etienne Charavay, ed., Mémoires du Comte de Paroy, souvenirs d’un défenseur de la famille royale (Paris: Plon, 1895), 193–194.

306

Notes to Pages 88–92

109. AP 19:194–195 (Sept. 24, 1790). 110. “Correspondance inédite d’un membre de l’Assemblée constituante,” Revue de l’Anjou 23 (1879), 199 (Sept. 18, 1790). 111. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21 (1905), 468 (Sept. 17, 1790). 112. AP 18:359–360, 522, 683 (Aug. 27, Sept. 3, and Sept. 10, 1790). 113. AP 19:304–307 (Sept. 28, 1790). 114. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21 (1905), 335 (Aug. 16, 1790) and 473 (Sept. 22, 1790); Ménard de la Groye, Correspondance, 273 (Sept. 14, 1790). 115. E. Leflaive, “Le Premier représentant de Beaune au parlement: Claude Gantheret,” Société d’archéologie de Beaune. Histoire, lettres, sciences et arts. Mémoires 42 (1925–1929), 102; Lemay, ed., Dictionnaire vol. 1, 386. 116. AP 19:311 (Sept. 29, 1790). 117. AP 19:311–315 (Sept. 29, 1790); Journal de Paris, Sept. 30, 1790, 1112. More than three weeks earlier, Lepoutre had already described the Assembly as “on the eve of decreeing two billion livres of assignats,” Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Edna Hindie Lemay et al., eds., Député-paysan et fermière de Flandre en 1789, la correspondance des Lepoutre (Lille: Centre d’Histoire de l’Eu rope du Nord- Ouest, 1998), 308 (Sept. 4, 1790). 118. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit,” Bulletin de . . . la Mayenne 21 (1905), 468 (Sept. 17, 1790). 119. Démeunier spoke in favor of paying the debt with quittances and ended with the words, “And I request the vote be taken by roll call,” AP 19:61 (Sept. 18, 1790). Shortly before 5:00 P.M. on the day before the vote, Cazalès claimed it was “physically impossible to render a decree at this hour, especially by roll call,” as if it had already been agreed the vote would take that form, AP 19:308 (Sept. 28, 1790). Lepoutre (who voted “yes”) wrote to his wife eleven days earlier, “I am almost certain it will be decided by a roll call,” Jessenne and Lemay, eds., Député-paysan et fermière, 312 (Sept. 18, 1790). 120. AP 19:316 (Sept. 29, 1790); Etienne Le Hodey, Journal des Etats Généraux . . . aujourd’hui l’Assemblée Nationale permanente 16:144 (Sept. 29, 1790). 121. A very fast roll call in such a large room might possibly be managed in ten seconds per name, meaning six deputies each minute. At 360 deputies per hour, it would still take over three hours to call out 1,200 names and record their responses. It probably took significantly longer: the somewhat numerically smaller National Convention (749 members) took twenty-four hours for the roll- call vote on the fate of Louis XVI (an admittedly exceptional instance) and nine hours for the impeachment of Marat in April 1793; see Anne Simonin with Corinne Lecheavanton- Gomez, “L’Appel nominal, une technique pour la démocratie extrême (1789–1795)?” AHRF 357 (2009), 67–101. 122. Many sources reported the meeting adjourned after 8:00 P.M. See Le Point du jour 446 (Sept. 30, 1790) 410 and Le Hodey, Journal des Etats Généraux; for when the meeting started, Révolutions de Paris 64 (Sept. 25– Oct. 2, 1790), 627.

Notes to Pages 92–98

307

123. Liste des membres de l’Assemblée nationale qui ont donné leurs voix pour et contre les assignats (n. p., 1790); Liste par ordre alphabétique de Messieurs les Députés à l’Assemblée nationale qui se sont trouvés présens à l’appel nominal, le 29 septembre 1790, jour où la question des assignats- monnoie sans intérêts a été décidée (n. p., 1790). The following analysis is based on these two lists and on biographical information drawn from Lemay, ed., Dictionnaire des constituants. 124. Lists drawn up in 1791 of “Right” and “Left” deputies show a similar, though less extreme, pattern: while 56 deputies of the Left voted against the assignats, only 14 on the Right voted yes. 125. Tackett, Becoming, 313. 126. AP 34:125–126, 384–385 (Oct. 8 and 24, 1791).

3. Making Money 1. On the orga ni zation of European mints in the late medieval and early earlymodern periods, see Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 187–208, and his “Mint Organisation in the Burgundian Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century” in C. N. L. Brooke et al., eds., Studies in Numismatic Method Presented to Philip Grierson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 239–262. No authoritative study of the French mints exists. For parts of the story, see Robert Sabatino Lopez, “An Aristocracy of Money in the Early Middle Ages,” Speculum 28 (1953), 1– 43; Octave Noël, Etude historique sur l’organisation financière de la France (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881), 357– 406; Bruno Collin, L’Atelier monétaire royal de Montpellier et la circulation monétaire en Languedoc de Louis XIII à la révolution (Paris: n. p., 1986); Noel Angot des Rotours, Almanach des monnoies, année 1786 (Paris: Méquignon, 1786). 2. A.D. Seine Maritime C 1050 (letter dated March 5, 1755). 3. Lopez, “Aristocracty of Money,” 39. 4. In 1760, the mint workers were clearly distinguished from venal officeholders— such as the directors of the mints— on the grounds “they were born exempt from paying the taille and did not purchase this privilege”; see A.N. T 149126 (unsigned and undated mémoire, citing the arrêt of Feb. 4, 1760). Louis Audiat, “La Monnaie de La Rochelle, 1728–1755,” Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis 8 (1880), 338–348, and Almanach astronomique et historique de la ville de Lyon (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, 1787), 147–148. 5. There were, for instance, five women’s guilds in seventeenth- century Rouen but only two in Paris. On the municipal orga ni za tion of women’s work in early-modern France, see Clare H. Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old-Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), especially chapter 4. 6. Mémoire pour les prévosts, lieutenans, ouvriers, et monnoyeurs du Serment de France, travaillans en la Monnoye de Paris (Paris: Laurent Mazuel, n. d.) in A.N. T 149126; see also A.D. Seine Maritime C 1050 (Oct. 16, 1759).

308

Notes to Pages 98–105

7. Stephen Sombart, “L’atelier monétaire d’Amiens 1578 à 1772,” Revue numismatique 36 (1994), 220–260; Bruno Collin, L’Atelier monétaire. 8. Encyclopédie, art. “Discours préliminaire” and art. “Bouard.” 9. On the Cour des Monnaies, see Jotham Parsons, Making Money in SixteenthCentury France: Currency, Culture, and the Modern State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 10. A.N. Z1B 532 (Feb. 11, 1764); Z1B 533 (June 4, 1767); Z1B 478 (March 10, 1784); Z1B 476 (Jan. 18, 1777); Z1B 478 (Jan. 8, 1785). 11. A.N. Z1B 532 (Nov. 29, 1759). 12. François-André Abot de Bazinghen, Traité des monnoies, et de la jurisdiction de la Cour des monnoies, en forme de dictionnaire (Paris: Guillyn, 1764), vol. 1, 53. 13. A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine C 1866 (letters and decrees dated July 29 and Dec. 17, 1783; April 15, 1784). 14. Henri Rolland, “La Monnaie de Marseille pendant la Révolution,” Revue numismatique series 5, 9 (1946), 166–191. 15. In April 1790, the deputy Lepoutre wrote to his wife, “France’s salvation is still in danger: the illness is serious and above all a strong remedy is necessary”; Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Edna Hindie Lemay et al., eds., Député-paysan et fermière de Flandre en 1789, la correspondance des Lepoutre (Lille: Centre d’Histoire de l’Europe du Nord- Ouest, 1998), 208 (letter of April 13, 1790). Conservative critics often used very similar medical metaphors albeit to different ends; see L’Ami du Roi, des français, de l’ordre et surtout de la vérité 355 (May 8, 1791), 3, where the assignats are described as a charlatan’s potion that causes the ailment it is meant to cure. 16. AP 18:359 (Aug. 27, 1790). 17. Ibid., 19:506 (Oct. 8, 1790); 19:647 (Oct. 15, 1790). 18. Ibid., 34:384 (Oct. 24, 1791). 19. Ibid., 52:78 (Sept .21, 1792). 20. In this context it is worth noting William Reddy’s otherwise excellent Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) contains not a single illustration. 21. M.  E. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit, député à l’Assemblée nationale constituante (1789–1791),” Bulletin de la commission historique et archéologique de la Mayenne 22 (1906), 476 (letter of Sept. 27, 1790). Authorities in Bordeaux were apparently reassured to realize “a new issue of assignats can only happen over a long time and after a long series of labors, such that the first ones will have had time to be extinguished,” cited in AP 19:195 (appendix, Sept. 24, 1790). 22. Observations des représentans du Commerce, des Manufactures, et des Arts et Métiers de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Clousier, 1790), 8, 13. 23. See A.N. F30 114 (procès-verbaux, April 30, May 19, and June 16, 1790). 24. In addition to those in the Louvre itself, Anisson- Duperron had eightyfour additional presses in nearby buildings; see Auguste Bernard, Histoire de

Notes to Pages 105–113

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

309

l’imprimerie royale du Louvre (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1867), 103–104. Fernand Gerbaux, La Papeterie de Buges en 1794 (Besançon: Jacquin, 1903), 6–9. Edouard Van Hende, “Pierre Lorthior, graveur des médailles du roi, né à Lille en 1733,” Revue belge de numismatique 53 (1897), 310–317. A.N. F30 114 (St. Aubin, “Procès verbal des Planches gravées en taille douce qui ont servie pour les 1200 mille premiers Assignats”); AP 17:186 (July 18, 1790). For the debate on this within the Assembly, see AP 15:341 (April 30, 1790) and 16:28–29 (June 1, 1790). AP 15:344 (April 30, 1790). A.D. Loire Atlantique 101 J 34; see also A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 1F 1923 (account book of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, Saint Malo) and A.D. Ille- etVilaine L 692 (July 26, 1792). For lost assignat advertisements, see Journal de Paris (July 1, 1790), 738, and (Dec. 7, 1790), 1386. On the relationship between bills of exchange and the individualization of character in eighteenth- century culture, see Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–98, and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 63– 64. See, too, John Padgett and Paul McLean, “Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence,” JMH 83 (2011), 1– 47. AP 19:504–508 (Oct. 8, 1790) and 20:513 (Nov. 18, 1790). A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle L 2388 (June 9, 1791), and see A.D. Nord L 2023 (Feb. 24, 1791). AP 20:264–265 (Nov. 4, 1790); Leonard Rosenband, “Jean-Baptiste Reveillon: A Man on the Make in Old Regime France,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997), 481–510. A.N. F30 130. A.N. F30 117. A.N. F30 130. The Journal de Paris printed daily indications of the interest accrued; see, for example, Oct. 8, 1790, 1146. The Comité des monnoies was founded at the urging of André and Cussy; see AP 18:693 (Sept. 11, 1790). There is no standard literature in English on the billets de confiance. On poor relief, see Isser Woloch, “From Charity to Welfare in Revolutionary Paris,” JMH 58 (1986), 783. A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle L 2394–2396 (Caisse Patriotique de Toul) offers an especially complete set of records for one Caisse. For the early ones in Bordeaux and Lyon, see Adresse des citoyens de Bordeaux, actionnaires de la caisse patriotique à l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1790) and Caisse patriotique de Lyon, pour faciliter, par la division des Assignats en Mandats de six livres, le paiement des mains- d’oeuvre et l’achat des comestibles (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, 1790).

310

Notes to Pages 113–121

41. Charles Montjean, “Les Billets de Confiance en Seine- et- Oise pendant la Révolution (Les Emissions de St- Germain- en-Laye),” Revue de l’Histoire de Versailles et de Seine- et- Oise 34 (1932), 121–126. 42. Pol Gosset, Les Billets de la caisse patriotique de Reims, 1791–1793 (Reims: Imprimerie cooperative de Reims. n. d.); AP 41:335–337 (April 7, 1792). 43. Ibid. and Gustave Laurent, Reims et la Fédération du 14 juillet 1790, suivie de notices biographiques sur les membres du premier conseil municipal de la ville de Reims (Reims: Matot-Braine, 1900), 45–50. 44. Caisse patriotique de Lyon pour faciliter, par la division des assignats en mandats de six livres, le paiement des mains- d’oeuvres et l’achat des comestibles (1790); Caisse Patriotique de la chapellerie de la ville de Lyon, 5 mai 1791 (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, 1791); A.D. Rhône 1L 632 (undated petition, from the administration of the “Caisse Patriotique des mandats” to the National Assembly). 45. A.D. Drôme L 988 and Rose-Marie and Jean Buis, Châteauneuf- d’Isère pendant la révolution (Châteauneuf- d’Isère, France: Châteauneuf Edition, 1990). 46. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les Deux rêves de commerce (Paris: EHESS, 1991), 211; A.D. Loire Atlantique L 493 (May 8, 1792). 47. A.P.P. AA 87 (Dec. 4, 1791). 48. A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine L 695 (Argentain); see also A.D. Nièvre 1L 321. 49. A.N. F12 798b, dossier Le Havre (letter, Dec. 10, 1792). 50. AP 22:100–101 (Jan. 9, 1791) and 26:222 (May 19, 1791). 51. For the crisis in the Nevers pottery industry and on the potters’ issue of billets, see A.D. Nièvre 1L 243 (extract from deliberations of the municipality, Jan. 6–10, 1791; poster, Feb. 9, 1792); A.D. Nièvre 1L 108* folios 122–123 (Dec. 21, 1791); A.N. F30 204 (Oct.–Nov. 1791). 52. A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle L 2395 (bordereau, Messidor 28, Year III). 53. Small numbers of billets can be found in most departmental archives; I am also grateful for the access I had to the collection held by the Musée de Normandie (Caen). 54. At least thirty-six distinct issuing bodies used this slogan, including the commune of Caen (Calvados), the Paris section Observatoire, and the Caisse Patriotique of Chartres (Eure et Loir); Jacqueline Pilet-Lemière and Claude Jigan, Les Billets communaux de la France révolutionnaire, 1790–1793, vol. 1 of Collections monétaires du musée de Normandie (Caen: Musée de Normandie, 1989), 248. 55. Ibid., numbers 339 and 2054. 56. A.M. Nantes F6 carton 2, dossier 2 (Nov. 11, 1791). 57. This was mentioned in reporting on the success of one of the first Caisses, in Nîmes. See Bulletin, affiches, annonces, et avis divers de la ville et du département de Bordeaux (Oct. 23, 1790), 862; AP 26:143 (May 17, 1791). 58. A.D. Seine Maritime L 859, letter from the department to the district (March 23, 1792). 59. Contemporaries produced wildly varying estimates of how many bills the Maison de Secours had issued; this figure comes from the Convention’s decree of Nov. 24, 1792, as found in A.N. F4 1059. For other totals, see Achilles Colson,

Notes to Pages 122–129

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

311

“Tableaux des billets de confi ance, émis dans les 83 départements et qui ont eu cours de monnaie de 1790 à 1793,” Revue numismatique (1852) 257–287, 344– 468. A.N. F4 1060 (dossiers Seine- et- Oise, Seine- et-Marne). R.  R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 127. Based on testimony in the papers of the police commissioners for the Palais Royal section, A.P.P. AA 87 (Nov. 28–29, 1791); for the weather conditions, see Journal de Paris (Nov. 30, 1791), 1355. Odiot’s impressive shop sign was depicted on his trade cards; see his invoice to Thomas Jefferson (June 3, 1789) cited in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950- ongoing), vol. 15, xxvii. See the membership list in François-Alphonse Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, recueil de documents (Paris: Jouaust, 1889–1897), vol. 1, lxv. See, for example, the correspondence about counterfeit assignats in A.D. Nièvre 6L 23 (district-level officials in Cosne and the Caisse de l’Extraordinaire, spring 1792) and in A.D. Rhône 1L 631 (police reports, summer of Year III). AP 20:265–266 (Nov. 4, 1790); 26:684– 685 (June 1, 1791). A.P.P. AA 87 (Nov. 29, 1791). A.P.P. AA 57 (Aug. 1, 1791). A.P.P. AA 86 (Sept. 2, 1791). A.M. Nancy F6 (May 18, 1792); A.P.P. AA 209 (July 3, 1793). Seymour Harris, The Assignats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 176, gives a figure of 4.05 billion for the value of the assignats in circulation in July 1793. If we estimate, almost certainly far too conservatively, an average denomination of fifty livres, then there must have been at least 800,000,000 notes. Jessenne, Lemay et al., eds., Député-paysan et fermière, 209, 304, 354, 355 (letters of April 18, Aug. 27, Aug. 28, and Aug. 31, 1790). Ibid., 357 (Sept. 21, 1790). A.N. D VIII 3 (May 6, 1792); A.N. D VIII 2 (undated proposal from Jacobin Club of Valenciennes); B. N. n.a.f. 21657, folio 83 (report of May 31, 1793); AP 61:112 (April 3, 1793); A.H.M.A.M. série Assignats, dossier 65 (April 26, 1793, Dauberte). See also Alain Weil, “Les Assignats de soie de Jolivet,” Revue numismatique 161 (2005), 177–189. “The things themselves believe for them” (italics in original), Slavoj Zižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33–35. A.N. D VIII 3 (Boudard, homme de loi à Besançon, “Réflextions . . . ,” May 6, 1792). A.N. D VIII 1 (Nov. 10, 1790). Abot de Bazinghen, Traité des monnoies, vol. 1, 499–504; Jean Baptiste René Robinet, Dictionnaire universel des sciences morale, économique, politique et diplomatique, vol. 25 (Paris, 1782), 138–141; François Gayor de Pitaval, Causes célèbres et interessantes: avec les jugemens qui les ont decidées (Amsterdam: Chatelain et fi ls, 1764), nouv. ed., vol. 1, 285.

312

Notes to Pages 129–131

78. Nicolas Bergasse, Protestation de M. Bergasse, député de la sénéchaussée de Lyon, contre les assignats- monnoie (s. l. n. d.), 31; the editors of the Archives parlementaires wrongly included this pamphlet as if it had been part of the fi rst debate on the assignats; see AP 10:681– 689 (Dec. 19, 1789). 79. Jean-Michel Deveau, ed., Le Commerce rochelais face à la révolution, correspondance de Jean Baptiste Nairac (La Rochelle: Rumeur des âges, 1989), 223 (letter of April 25, 1790, from La Rochelle’s Chamber of Commerce to Nairac); Réponse à la lettre de M. Bergasse à ses commettants sur les assignats, par des membres d’un des clubs patriotiques du Havre, imprimée par délibération de cette société (1790); Pierre de Vaissière, Lettres d’ ”aristocrates” (Paris: Perrin, 1907), 230 (Madame Porter de Nermont, letter of May 8, 1790); Marquis de Bombelles, Journal, eds. Jean Grassion and Frans Durif (Geneva: Droz, 1993), vol. 3, 88; Louis Bergasse, Un défenseur des principes traditionnels sous la révolution: Nicolas Bergasse (Paris: Perrin, 1910), 139. 80. AP 15:288 (April 25, 1790); Baron de Jessé, Supplément to Journal de Paris 115 (April 25, 1790), i–ii; see also, Actes de la Commune, vol. 5, 372–373. 81. Révolutions de Paris 41 (April 17–24, 1790), 157–172; see also the Courier de Provence 133 (April 19–20, 1790), 457–458, and 135 (April 23–25, 1790), 512–513. 82. Joseph-Antoine-Joachim Cérutti, Idées simples et precises sur le papier monnoie, les assignats forcés, et les biens ecclésiastiques suivies d’une réponse à M. Bergasse et à M. de Montlosier, et terminées par une note importante sur M. Burke (Paris: Desenne, 1790); Nicolas Ruault to his brother, Brice Ruault, published as Gazette d’un parisien sous la Révolution, eds. Anne Vassal and Christiane Rimbaud (Paris: Perrin, 1976), 202 (letter of June 3, 1790); Françoise Thésée, Négociants bordelais et colons de SaintDomingue: la maison Henry Romberg, Bapst, et compagnie (Paris: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1972), 109; Melvin Edelstein, La Feuille villageoise, communication et modernisation dans les régions rurales pendant la révolution (Paris: Commission d’histoire économique et sociale de la révolution française, 1977), 185–189. 83. AP 18:518 (Sept. 3, 1790). 84. For more on refutations of Bergasse, see my “The Ghost of Law: Speculating on Money, Memory, and the Mississippi in the French Constituent Assembly,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 31 (2005), 3–25; in his fi nal speech against the issue of assignats in September 1790, the abbé Maury returned to the topic of counterfeiting, AP 19:296 (Sept. 28, 1790). 85. The publisher and editor Charles-Joseph Panckoucke supported the assignats but argued they should be represented by “metal signs” rather than paper ones, in order to lessen the threat of counterfeiting; Moniteur 4:106–107 (April 14, 1790). 86. L’Ami du peuple (March 29, 1791), 6–7; see also (Feb. 26, 1791), 4; (March 25, 1791), 8; (May 9, 1791), 8; (May 17, 1791), 3. 87. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 93–95, 164–165. L’Ami du peuple (Jan. 17, 1791), 1– 8 and (April 4, 1791), 8. 88. AP 20:266 (Nov. 4, 1790); see also AP 26: 618– 622, 684, 687 (May 30 and June 1, 1791). For the verification offices, AP 16:28–29 (June 1, 1790) and Camille Bloch, ed., Procès- verbaux du comité des finances de l’Assemblée Constituante (Rennes: Oberthur, 1912), 354 (Sept. 9, 1790).

Notes to Pages 131–135

313

89. A.N. D VI 6 (Pierre Bourdeaux, “Mémoire présentant un Obstacle puissant . . . ,” Feb. 24, 1790); A.N. F12 796 (Lanon, négociant à Rouen, letter dated Feb. 11, 1790). In a meeting of the Paris Jacobins, Maurice Gouget-Deslandres (Dijon) claimed to have invented the endorsing of assignats; see FrançoisAlphonse Aulard, ed., La Société des jacobins: recueil des documents (Paris: Jouast, 1889), vol. 1, 219 (Aug. 13, 1790). Similar schemes continued to be proposed: see A.N. D VIII 3 (petitions from Blondel, rue du Bourbon Saint Germain, Oct. 8, 1790; C. A. Balland, district Bruyères (Vosges), Jan. 15, 1792; J. B. Coquet, citoyen de l’Aube, writing from Liverpool to report on meeting with English merchants, March 28, 1792) and A. H. M. A. M. série Assignats, dossier 64 (proposal from J. B. Bunarelli, May 2, 1793). 90. A.N. D VI 46 (Camet de Selincourt, avocat au Parlement de Paris, undated petition); see also, C. Buirette-Verrieres, Des faux assignats, ou le salut du crédit national (Paris: Lerouge et Cerioux, 1792). 91. A.N. D VIII 3 (A. Chatillon, Grand rue du faubourg Saint Martin, Paris; petition dated May 12, 1792). 92. The mayor of Lavelanet (Ariège) proposed that every valid assignat should be signed by its bearer and by the department’s procureur-syndic; see G. Arnaud, “Documents inédits sur Jean-Baptiste Clauzel, député de l’Ariège à l’Assemblée législative,” Bulletin de la Société ariègeoise des sciences, lettres, et arts 6 (1897–98), 118 (letter to Clauzel, Jan. 24, 1792); AAAD (Frimaire 28, Year II), 5330. 93. Reports dated Dec. 13, 1790, and April 17, 1791, most easily located in AP 25:168–171, 171–174 (appendices to April 17, 1791); see also, Lettre de M. PerisseDuluc . . . à Brissot de Warville, sur les assignats (n. p., Nov. 1790). On Périsse Duluc, see: Jane McLeod, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) and Louis Trénard, Lyon de l’encyclopédie au préromantisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). 94. AP 25:168 (appendix to April 17, 1791). 95. Ibid.; AP 67:686– 688 (appendix to June 30, 1793); the misprinted ones read “mil sept quatre-vingt- dix” rather than “mil sept- cent quatre-vingt- dix,” AP 18:68 (Aug. 14, 1790); A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine L 691 (circular of Nov. 3, 1791, about unstamped assignats). Individuals also sometimes encountered assignats that seemed to be valid but that lacked the necessary signature on the front; they sensibly concluded that the “assignataire” had accidentally picked up two bills at once, A.N. D VIII 2 (letter from district administrator of Tarascon in the Ariège). 96. Antoine Lavoisier et al., “Précis analytique des divers rapports faits au comité des assignats” (May 31, 1793) B. N. mss. n. a. f. 21657 (fol. 83). 97. AP 25:173 (report of Dec. 13, 1790; annexed to April 17, 1791).

4. Liberty of Money 1. AAAD, Nov. 6, 1790, 3,474–3,475; the text was republished a month later in the Journal encyclopédique 8:3 (Dec. 15, 1790), 449– 450.

314

Notes to Pages 135–138

2. In the AAAD, the text appears in quotation marks but gives no indication of its original publication. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, De la constitution monétaire (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1790) was published in this same month; that text called explicitly for a “national money” and for issuing “historical coins.” The idea may have originated with the engraver Dupré: see B. L. FR 475(3) Anfrye, Réponse aux observations présentées au comité des Monnoies de l’Assemblée Nationale, par M. Dupré (s. l. n. d). 3. Of Saint Aubin’s work, Mirabeau had asked, “How am I supposed to be able to tell if one of 2,000 distinctive features is missing?” AP 19:506 (Oct. 8, 1790). 4. AP 21:411 (Dec. 12, 1790). 5. James Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France, 1789–1799 (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1991); Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 6. Mirabeau, De la constitution monétaire, 47. 7. AP 21:411 (Dec. 12, 1790). 8. Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) and Benjamin J. Cohen, The Geography of Money (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) provide useful overviews though only partly relevant to the French case. For a sharper claim that the “Westphalian” model of money (that is, One Money/One Nation) constitutes an exception rather than the norm in world history, see Benjamin J. Cohen, The Future of Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9. For a complete list of all coins a money changer would accept and the rates he would pay, see Noel Angot des Rotours, Almanach des monnoies, année 1786 (Paris: Méquignon, 1786). 10. When the director of the Bayonne Mint seized nearly 900 pounds of coined Spanish silver and melted it down to make French écus, the King’s Council stripped him of his functions and ordered him to repay the injured merchant immediately; see Arrêt du conseil d’état qui déclare nulle une saisie de piastres faite à Bayonne . . . sur le sieur La Borde négociant en cette Ville (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1746). On the basis of this and numerous other examples, one historian has concluded that piastres from the Spanish Empire were “the dollars” (that is, the universally accepted “hard money”) of the Lower Languedoc throughout the eighteenth century; see Bruno Collin, “Production et circulation monétaires en Bas-Languedoc, 1718–1791,” in Georges Depeyrot, Tony Hackens, and Ghislaine Moucharte, eds., Rythmes de la production monétaire de l’antiquité à nos jours (Louvain-la-Neuve: Séminaire de Numismatique Marcel Hoc, 1987), 664. 11. See, for example, the receipts issued by a tax collector in French Flanders, A.D. Nord L 2023 (“Extrait des quittances”). 12. Louis Dermigny, “La France à la fi n de l’ancien régime: une carte monétaire,” Annales: ESC 10 (1955), 480– 493. 13. AP 21:405– 414 (Dec. 12, 1790).

Notes to Pages 138–142

315

14. “Avis aux ouvriers,” in Moniteur 8:242 (April 29, 1791). For the unrest to which this responded, see: Philippe Minard, “Agitation in the Work Force,” in Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, eds., Revolution in Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 107–123; Allan Potofsky, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 82– 86; David Andress, Massacre at the Champ de Mars (Woodbridge, England: Royal Historical Society, 2000), 130–135. 15. On the politicization of one of the most thoroughly “populaire” sections of Paris, see Haim Burstin, Une révolution à l’oeuvre: le faubourg Saint-Marcel (1789– 1794) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005). 16. AP 24:679 (April 9, 1791). 17. Space does not allow an exhaustive list of relevant works. For the classic introduction, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 18. When the stable master Drouet told the National Assembly he had recognized the king on the basis of an assignat, his comments were met with laughter and applause, AP 27:508 (June 24, 1791). For more on this episode, see Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003) and my The Invention of the Restaurant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 123–133. 19. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 54. 20. See Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille (Paris: H. Fournier, 1837), vol. 2, 266–267. 21. Noncommissioned officers got a sword, a feather, and some silver lace for their cap, but no cockade; Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd series, cited in John W. Wright, “The Corps of Light Infantry in the Continental Army,” AHR 31 (1926), 459. Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996), 22, also makes it clear cockades were reserved for military commanders. 22. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris: Libraires associés, 1765), vol. 1, 223. 23. Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, Restauration de l’état (Paris: Moutard, 1789), 45. On the widespread belief that awarding prizes would stimulate agricultural improvement, see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 83–92. 24. Mémoire sur un moyen facile et infaillible de faire renaître le Patriotisme en France, dans toutes les classes des citoyens, comme dans les deux sexes (Amsterdam and Paris: Desenne, 1789), 17–18. 25. Louis Méry and F. Guindon, Histoire analytique et chronologique des actes et des délibérations du corps et du conseil de la municipalité de Marseille (Aix: Achille Makaire, 1873), vols. 7– 8, 108. 26. Auguste Jean F. Arnould, Jules Édouard Alboize du Pujol, and Auguste Maquet, Histoire de la Bastille, depuis sa fondation 1374 jusqu’à sa déstruction 1789 (Paris: Administration de Librairie, 1844), vol. 6, 234.

316

Notes to Pages 142–144

27. A.D. Paris, D4B6 carton 102, dossier 7178 (July 4, 1788). 28. AAAD, Oct. 19, 1789, 2,984; Nov. 9, 1789, 3,200; he later advertised waterproof ones for six sous each; those purchasing “in quantities” were promised a discount, AAAD, Sept. 22, 1790, 2,922. 29. Jennifer Heuer, “Hats on for the Nation! Women, Servants, Soldiers and the ‘Sign of the French,’ ” French History 16 (2002), 28–52. 30. In early August 1789, the deputy Gallot sent his wife a cockade he had been given in Paris on July 15, 1789, asking her to make him one. He did not repeat the request in later letters; see Louis Merle, La Vie et les oeuvres du docteur JeanGabriel Gallot (Poitiers: Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1962), 122. [Richard Twiss], A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 (London: William Lane, 1793), 3; John Gifford, ed., A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795: Described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady (London: Longman, 1797) vol. 1, 154. 31. Among those at work in the market on the rue Grenetat was an illiterate young woman with a basket of nearly 600 cockades, see A.P.P. AA 49 (Vendémiaire 30, Year II). Some retailers in northern France ordered them from makers in Paris, see A.N. F7 4735 (dossier Gueudet, Prairial-Floréal, Year II). In some districts, cockades were among the items included in the General Maximum; see A.N. F12 1517 (Laon, Aisne) and F12 154432 (Bapaume, Pas de Calais). 32. AAAD, Dec. 16, 1789, 3,560; the manufacturer of the leather ones, a hat maker named Beau, specified that they were pleated even more tightly than a fabric cockade and could be cleaned with a wire brush; for the striped ribbon, see Bulletin, Affiches, Annonces, et avis divers de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde (May 18, 1790), 216. 33. AP 46:392 (Aug. 2, 1792); A.M. Nantes, I2–2–9 (Brumaire 3, Year II). Counterrevolutionaries, as well, came to recognize the usefulness of mass-manufactured, standardized cocardes; among the items ordered for the attempted invasion of Brittany in 1795 were 6,000 hats with white cockades. See B. L. Add. Mss. 37860, Windham Papers. vol. XIX, fol. 120. 34. Encyclopédie, art. “Monnoie”; see also Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris: Pancoucke, 1788), vol. 5, 130. De Jaucourt explicitly made the comparison with wine but did not extend the analogy to a discussion of labels. For a compatible reading of this passage that situates it in relation to the work of Bossuet and Montesquieu, see Thomas Luckett, “Imaginary Currency and Real Guillotines,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 31 (2005), 117–139. 35. Jean Boizard, Traité des monoyes, de leurs circonstances et dépendances (Paris: Coignard, 1692), 2. 36. The passage in the explanatory “Address to the French People about the Assignats” beginning, “The Assembly considered that minted gold and silver themselves have two different values” is otherwise inexplicable; see AP 15:345 (April 30, 1790). For the abbé Brousse, “paper money’s obvious dangers” were irrelevant to “our territorial money [numéraire], which is both money [monnaie] and

Notes to Pages 145–148

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

317

merchandise,” AP 18:392 (Aug. 28, 1790). Brousse, however, voted against the issue of non-interest-bearing assignats. Mirabeau, De la constiution monétaire, 2–3. AP 20:210 (appendix; Nov. 2, 1790). Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). AP 21:402 (Dec. 12, 1790); the phrase was also used in the Comité des monnoies’s report, AP 22:58 (Jan. 7, 1791). See also the abbé Saurine’s comments, AP 22:143 (Jan. 11, 1791). In the 1760s, the Intendant of Normandy estimated 8–10 percent of the twosou coins in circulation were actually nail heads; A.D. Seine-Maritime C 1047 (Jan. 26, 1763). Pierre Gervais, “A Merchant or a French Atlantic? Eighteenth- century Account Books as Narratives of a Transnational Political Economy,” French History 25 (2011), especially 37– 40; Jean-Pierre Poussou, Bordeaux et le Sud- Ouest au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: EHESS, 1983), 326–328. AP 18:605 (appendix; Sept. 5, 1790). AP 23:190 (Feb. 14, 1791); Lacroix, ed., Actes de la commune de Paris, 2nd series, vol. 2, 578–583; A.P.P. AA 74 (Feb. 14–17, 1791). That these concerns were tightly interrelated is especially clear from the writings of the populist Jacques-René Hébert. See his La grande visite du Père Duchesne à Mesdames, au sujet de leur départ pour Rome, n. 22 of Je suis le véritable Père Duchesne (Paris: Tremblay, 1791); La grande joie du Père Duchesne sur l’arrestation d’une diligence, n. 29 of same (1791); and Vous ne partirez pas, ou Grand colère du Père Duchesne marchant à la tête des sections de Paris, pour s’opposer au départ des Tantes du Roi, n. 31 of same (1791). Marat treated hoarding grain and exporting coins as equal threats, see his L’Ami du peuple 377 (Feb. 20, 1791). Marie- O. Monod, “Lettres de Guillaume-Benoit Couderc, bourgeois de Lyon, deputé à l’Assemblée Constituant à son oncle, M. Vernet-Dupan, à Genève, 1781– 1792,” Revue d’histoire de Lyon 6 (1907), 57 (letter from Passavent to Vernet-Dupan, Oct. 17, 1790). Vernier repeatedly referred to bankruptcy as the only hope of those who opposed France’s “regeneration”; A.D. Jura 5E 561/P15 (Vernier’s letters of Dec. 21, 1789; Jan. 26, 1790; March 7, 1790; July 25, 1790). See also Barère’s impassioned speech, AP 23:507–508 (Feb. 25, 1791) and accusations from the faubourg Saint-Antoine, AP 37:433 (Jan. 15, 1792). François-Alphonse Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, recueil de documents (Paris: Jouaust, 1889–1897), vol. 2, 442; M. E. Quereau-Lamerie, ed., “Lettres de Michel René Maupetit, député à l’Assemblée nationale constituante (1789–1791),” Bulletin de la commission historique et archéologique de la Mayenne 22 (1906), 460– 461 (May 18, 1791). Anne-Marie Malingrey, ed., Correspondance de l’abbé Rousselot, constituant (Paris: les Belles Lettres, 1992), 123 (undated letters, April–May 1791). See also Gaston

318

49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

Notes to Pages 148–156 Maugras, Journal d’un étudiant (Edmond Géraud) pendant la révolution, 3rd ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890), 138–139. AP 25:346–350, 595–598 (April 26 and May 5, 1791); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans. Wilmoore Kendall (1782; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 68–71. Dale Clifford, “Can the Uniform Make the Citizen? Paris, 1789–1791,” EighteenthCentury Studies 34 (2001), 363–382. AP 25:623 (May 6, 1791). AP 25:598 (May 5, 1791). Rabaut’s position here was very similar to the one Louis Sébastien Mercier took the following month in De Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la Révolution (Paris: 1791), 78– 81. On Mercier, public credit, and Fichte’s “closed commercial state,” see Michael Sonenscher, Sans- Culottes: An Eighteenth- Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 129. AP 25:348–350 (April 26, 1791); 25:600 (May 5, 1791). AP 25:604 (May 5, 1791). Supplément à la Gazette Nationale du vendredi 29 avril 1791, 249–250; see also, L’Ami du roi May 8, 1791, 1, and AP 25:623 (May 6, 1791). AP 26:142 (May 17, 1791). AP 26:254 (May 20, 1791). Letter of Aug. 5, 1789 cited in Edna Hindie Lemay, ed., Dictionnaire des constituants (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), vol. 1, 182. AP 26:732 (June 4, 1791). Ibid. Le Couteulx de Canteleu had made this point several weeks earlier, when the debate on small- denomination assignats had just begun; see AP 25:624 (May 6, 1791). AP 26: 220 (May 19, 1791). Sarot, Assurance de la perception des impositions (Paris: J. Grand, 1791), 2. A.N. F4 1051 (Ardeche administrators to the commissioners of the National Trea sury, Aug. 1, 1791); A.N. F4 1056 (Manche officials to the minister of the interior, Sept. 9, 1791); A.D. Drôme L 863 (comité général of Romans to the department, Aug. 15, 1791); A.D. Nord L 1747 (mayor of Dunkirk and municipal officers to the department, Aug. 27, 1791). In August, the deputy Thibeaudeau sent 3,000 livres in small assignats to the municipality of Poitiers, presumably in exchange for larger ones he had been sent; see Antoine René Hyacinthe Thibeaudeau, Correspondance inédite, ed. H. Carré and P. Boissonnade (Paris: Champion, 1898), 180; municipal officials in Montpellier asked Cambon to send them some, but he refused, telling them they would have to work through the regular district- and department-level channels; E.-D. Grand and L. de La Pijardière, Lettres de Cambon et autres envoyés de la ville de Montpellier de 1789–1792 (Montpellier: Serre et Ricome, 1889), 83– 84 (letter of Jan. 2, 1792). A.D. Jura 1L 691 (receiver of the district of St. Claude to the department receiver, March 15, 1791); A.D. Nord L 1761 (receveurs des biens des pauvres to

Notes to Pages 156–158

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

319

municipality of Valenciennes, May 27, 1791); A.D. Seine-Maritime L 854 (district of Dieppe to department, Sept. 2, 1791). A.N. F4 1052 (Côte- d’Or administrators to the taxation minister, Dec. 6, 1791). See also A.N. F4 1054 (Ille-et-Vilaine officials to the minister of the interior, Aug. 30, 1791) and A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine L 692. For a comparative perspective, see Craig Muldrew and Steven King, “Cash, Wages and the Economy of Makeshifts in England, 1650–1800,” in Peter Scholliers and Leonard David Schwarz, eds., Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe Since 1500 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 155–182. “The butchers and bakers refuse to give credit . . . in the market, the peasant sets his own law and only accepts specie,” Louis de Launay, ed., Une famille de la bourgeosie parisienne pendant la Révolution d’après leur correspondance inédite (Paris, 1921), 266 (letter of Feb. 18, 1792, from son in Strasbourg). Raymond Aubert, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous la Révolution (Paris: FranceEmpire, 1974), 56, 66, 68 (entries for May 24, June 27–28, and July 6, 1791). Other rentiers protested they would be ruined if they were paid in assignats; see A.N. D VI 27 (Rouget, homme de loi, Besançon; petition dated May 9, 1791). A.P.P. AA 86 (Sept. 6, 1791). Elsewhere in Paris, bakers complained that crowds of people bought just a single loaf of bread in order to get change for a fi velivre assignat; one asserted since he could not possibly get enough small change, he had either to abandon his business or risk his life, A.P.P. AA 198 (Aug. 13–14, 1791) quoted in Haim Burstin, Le Faubourg Saint-Marcel à l’époque révolutionnaire (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 1983), 153. A few retailers tried to encourage business by announcing they would “accept assignats for the convenience of those who do not want to pay in cash [donner de l’argent],” but even they did not promise to make change. Presumably, the idea was to run a tab in reverse or establish store credit; see AAAD May 27, 1791, 1970. The staff included an administrator, a head cashier, and a bookkeeper, as well as several men employed simply to count bills and others to verify they had counted correctly, A.N. F30 188. See also [Municipalité de Paris], Caisse d’echange des assignats de cinq livres (Paris: Lottin, 1791) and Lacroix, Actes de la Commune de Paris, 2nd series (Paris: Cerf et Noblet, 1907), vol. 5, 288–291. De Launay, ed., Une famille de la bourgeosie parisienne, 245 (letter of Jan. 11, 1791). Albert Mathiez, “Un essai de taxation populaire au printemps de 1792,” Annales révolutionnaires 9 (1917), 290; A.N. F4 1061 (letter from the Directoire of the Haute Vienne; Feb. 15, 1792). Gifford, ed., A Residence in France, vol. 1, 8. A.D. Nord L 1757 (March 1– 8, 1792). AP 11:57 (Dec. 31, 1789) and Jacques de Cock, ed., Les Cordeliers dans la révolution française, vol. 2 (Lyon: Fantasques, 2002), 276–295; AP 16:147 (June 8, 1790) and 18:403 (Aug. 29, 1790); Armand-Antoine Véron-Réville, Histoire de la révolution française dans le département du Haut-Rhin, 1789–1795 (Paris: Durand, 1865),

320

76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

Notes to Pages 158–161 48– 49. See also A.P.P. AA74 (Feb. 14–17, 1791); Actes de la Commune de Paris, 2nd series, vol. 2, 578, 634– 638; Révolutions de Paris (April 2–9, 1791), 655– 657. AP 35:94–95 (Nov. 16, 1791); 36:46– 47, 310–315 (Dec. 13 and 22, 1791). Some historians have described popu lar action in the Eure as a subsistence crisis, but other accounts make it obvious means of payment were also an issue. See Louis Boivin- Champeaux, Notices historiques sur la révolution dans le département de l’Eure (Evreux: Auguste Hérissey, 1868), 242–245 and Christine Peyrard, Les Jacobins de l’ouest (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 93–98. The monthly salary total for firemen is listed as 480 livres, 10 sous “plus for discount on the assignats given in payment, 36 livres,” A.N. C 2455; see also A.N. C 2465 (“Mémoire des avances faites par Vaquer, inspecteur de la salle de l’assemblée nationale, pendant le mois d’octobre 1790”). Mercure universel (Dec. 8, 1791), 128. For the Paris section’s resolution, see Thermomètre de l’opinion publique, cited in Sigismond Lacroix, Actes de la commune de Paris pendant la révolution, 2nd series, vol. 4 (Paris: L. Cerf, 1905), 308–309. A.N. F4 1056 (extract from the register of the municipality Saint Georges de Villaines la Juhel [Mayenne], March 7, 1792). Gabriel Noël, ed., Au temps des volontaires: Lettres d’un volontaire de 1792 (Paris: Plon, 1912), 117 (letter of March 5, 1792). A.N. D VIII 3 (petition from commissioner for the Louvre section, Jan. 30, 1792); B. H. V. P. fonds Cousin, Pétition présentée à la convention nationale par la section de Molière et Lafontaine, le 14 octobre 1792, available via gallica.bnf fr at ark:/12148/bpt6k40137d; Jean Gabriel Peltier, Le martyrologe, ou des martyrs de la révolution (Coblentz and Paris: 1792), 304, 453; Journal de l’Assemblée Nationale ou journal logographique 9:124 (Jan. 22, 1792). Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, the Middle Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 83– 84. AP 58:182 (Feb. 3, 1793). In the Legislative Assembly, the Jacobin Thuriot said the National Assembly had erred in making numéraire into merchandise, but one of his colleagues swiftly responded that their predecessors had done no such thing; AP 38:491– 495 (Feb. 14, 1792). For the abolition of usury see AP 9:337 (Oct. 3, 1789). In the September 1790 debate on the assignats, Montesquiou asserted: “Money is a good of first necessity, like wheat. The price of wheat only falls when vendors compete with each other. When the grain trade was dangerous, wheat was scarce and expensive; the same is true for money/silver [argent] in exchange for assignats. A prejudice has made money selling dangerous; we must enlighten the people by a decree . . .” His proposal for a decree—an amendment to a text already in discussion—seems never to have come to a vote; see AP 18:721–722 (Sept. 12, 1790). The following day, Thomas Lindet wrote to his brother that money was now “commercial merchandise,” but he immediately qualified his statement by noting such a decree had been proposed but nothing had been

Notes to Pages 161–164

86.

87.

88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

93.

321

voted; see Armand Montier, ed., Correspondance de Thomas Lindet pendant la constituante et la législative (Paris: Société de l’histoire de la révolution française, 1899), 216 (letter of Sept. 13, 1790) and L’Ami du Roi, des français, de l’ordre, et surtout de la vérité 105 (Sept. 13, 1790), 3– 4. In May 1791, it was again proposed that the money trade should be protected; this led to the vote supporting Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély’s motion, AP 26:147 (May 17, 1791). Two years later, Cambon again repeated that the Constituent Assembly had passed a law making money into merchandise, AP 61:442– 443 (April 8, 1793). Those who wanted to set a “fi xed price” for money were, wrote Vernier, “looking for the philosopher’s stone.” See Théodore Vernier, Transaction sur différentes questions relatives aux monnoies et aux assignats (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1792), 36. Steven Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth- Century France (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982) and Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). Moniteur 7:308–309 (Feb. 6, 1791); see too 8:481– 482 (May 25, 1791). Rabaut Saint-Etienne referred to the “sottise” (stupidity) of the people in beating money changers, AP 25:348 (April 26, 1791). The Monarchien Malouet and the noted radical Reubell agreed on this point, AP 26:145–146 (May 17, 1791); “La Municipalité de Paris aux citoyens, du vendredi 18 février 1791,” in Lacroix, ed., Actes de la commune de Paris, 2nd series, vol. 2, 636– 637; Révolutions de Paris (April 2–9, 1791), 655– 657. An unnamed member of the Paris Jacobins proposed that money selling was “infamous” and should be outlawed, but few agreed with him; Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, vol. 3, 231–232 (Nov. 1, 1791). Tackett, When the King Took Flight, 69–74. Quotation from “La Municipalité de Paris aux citoyens, du vendredi 18 février 1791,” in Lacroix, ed., Actes de la commune de Paris, 2nd series, vol. 2, 636– 637; Cynthia Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Steven Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy under Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). That functional “free markets” require treating money, land, and labor as something other than “free” is a fundamental insight of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944). Thanks to Charles Walton and Clare Crowston for orga nizing a panel on Polanyi at the 2011 meeting of the Western Society for French History. A.N. F4 1054 (letter from the department of the Landes to the minister of the interior, Feb. 27, 1792); A.N. D VIII 2 (Nov. 15, 1791).

322

Notes to Pages 166–170

94. “Thus, the Greeks used the same word for money and law, as we say law (loi) and alloy (alloi)”; Jean Bodin, Response aux paradoxes de M. de Malestroict, cited in Jotham Parsons, “Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 59–79, at 62. 95. Soldiers’ refusal was a regular problem in garrison towns; see for instance A.D. Nord L 1747 (Sept. 11, 1791), A.D. Nord L 1761 (Jan. 21, 1792, in which the department reports to the ministry of the interior that “soldiers’ complaints about the five-livre assignats leave us gravely concerned for public safety”); A.D. Nord L 1757 (March 21, 1792). 96. Hébert, La France sauvée, ou les bienfaits de la révolution et la grande joie du père Duchesne sur l’émission des petits assignats, n. 5 of Je suis le véritable Père Duchesne (1791). 97. A.D. Nord L 1747 (municipal officials in Dunkirk to the department, Oct. 22, 1791). For a specific reference to Jesus and the moneychangers, see Germain Bapst, “Lettres d’un attaché de la Légion de Saxe à Paris (suite)” in Charles d’Héricault and Gustave Bord, eds., Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution, 2nd series (Paris: Sauton, 1885), vol. 2, 231. 98. AP 12:608 (April 9, 1790); Richard Herr, Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 79– 82. 99. AP 60:17, 98 (March 9 and 11, 1793). 100. William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The idea that money, like many other goods, has marginal utility—in other words, the more of it you have, the less useful it becomes—is central to the “marginal revolution” of neoclassical economics but is not part of the illusion Reddy identifies.

5. Civil Wars in France 1. A.N. D I §1 11, correspondence between Michel Frezet, inspector at the Marais (Jouy-sur-Morin, Seine-et-Marne) paperworks and the National Archives (Frimaire 26 and 29, Year II). 2. A.N. D XLII 11 (reports of Frimaire 17 and Nivôse 3, Year II) reproduced in Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la terreur (Paris: A. Picard, 1910–1978), vol. 6–7, 305, 324. In the journées of May 30–31, 1793, the Paris sections denounced “the assignat administration and the post office,” AP 65:652 (May 31, 1793). 3. A.N. D I §1 10. 4. The best single work on the Year Two remains R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). See also Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Terror, vol. 4 of Baker et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–1994); Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006); and Patrice Higonnet, “Terror, Trauma and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation of Jacobin Politics,” P&P 191 (2006), 121–164.

Notes to Pages 171–179

323

5. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305. Elsewhere, Baker describes the Revolution as “a new political game . . . [in which] some rhetorical moves came to trump others.” For him, the National Assembly declared the Rousseauean “general will” to be the trump card in autumn 1789; thereafter, Terror was in the cards; see the “Introduction” in Baker, ed., The Terror, xx. 6. Baker, Inventing, 305, 13. 7. For a brilliant dissection of how technocratic expertise emerged in the 1790s as political exculpation, see Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (1997; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 296–303. 8. Judith Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Annie Jourdan, La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris: Flammarion, 2004). 9. William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Sans- Culotte Rhetoric of Subsistence,” in Baker, ed., The Terror, 249–270, and John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); see also, Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, “Sans- culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of Luxury and Necessity in Eighteenth- Century France,” in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 37– 62. 10. The literature on moral economies and the idea of a “fair price” in early modern Europe is enormous. For one classic statement, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” P&P 50 (1971), 76–136. See also James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 11. Baker, Inventing, 305. 12. Gabriel Noël, Au temps des volontaires: Lettres d’un volontaire de 1792 (Paris: Plon, 1912), 45, 51. 13. Ibid., 31, 72, 107, 110–111. 14. Ibid., 116–127. 15. Noël’s godmother reported to him that other volunteers had done so. Ibid., 75. Their motivation may have been more complex than Madame Durival imagined. Another volunteer, writing at the same time, reported that many soldiers eagerly exchanged a six-livre coin for ten livres in assignats because that increased their pay; see Maxime Mangerel, ed., Le Capitaine Gerbaud, 1773– 1799 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit 1910), 52. Stationed in Châlons- sur-Marne, in the heart of Champagne, Gerbaud was at least fi fty miles from any international border. 16. Noël, Au temps des volontaires, 117, 129. 17. Ibid., 61– 62, 126. 18. AP 37:604 (Jan. 23, 1792). 19. Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France et affaires politiques de l’Europe (Jan. 14 and 17 and Feb. 16, 1792), 61, 74, 207.

324

Notes to Pages 179–181

20. Courrier français (Jan. 30, 1792) cited in Léon Kahn, Les Juifs de Paris pendant la révolution (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1898), 222. 21. For more on this episode, see Albert Mathiez, La Vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris: Payot, 1927), 29– 49; Haim Burstin, Une révolution à l’oeuvre, le faubourg Saint-Marcel (1789–1794) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), 329–344; Jones and Spang, “Sans- culottes, sans café.” 22. Noël, Au temp des volontaires, 5; Révolutions de Paris 126 (Dec. 3–10, 1791), 445; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Campaign in France in the Year 1792 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1849), 154–155. 23. AP 36:50–51 (Dec. 13, 1791). 24. “Discours de P.-L. Roederer prononcé à la Société [des amis de la Constitution], le 18 décembre 1791,” in A.  M. Roederer, ed., Oeuvres du comte P.  L. Roederer (Paris: l’Institut, 1858), vol. 6, 619– 622; François-Alphonse Aulard, La Société des Jacobins, recueil de documents (Paris: Jouaust, 1889–1897), vol. 3, 323–331; Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, the Middle Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 84. 25. Chronique du mois (Jan. 1792), 102–135 and (Feb. 1792), 66–95. 26. See Timothy Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792,” AHR 105 (2000), 691–713. 27. Officials in charge of assignat production regularly sent descriptions of discovered counterfeits to local authorities; see Tableau des différentes espèces d’assignats faux imprimés, soit en lettres, soit en taille douce, qui ont paru dans la circulation jusqu’au 21 septembre de l’an deuxième de la République française, une et indivisible (Paris: veuve Delaguette, 1793); compilations were also published by commercial presses; see Le Plus précieux des almanachs, contenant des moyens sûrs pour se garantir des faux assignats ou collection de tous les procès- verbaux dressés jusqu’à ce jour (Paris: Patris, 1793). 28. Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France et affaires politiques de l’Europe (March 14, 18, and 24, 1792), 324, 335, 347, 375; Noël, Au temps des volontaires, 134; L’Ami du peuple (April 28 and May 10, 1792) cited in Jean Bouchary, Les Faux- Monnayeurs sous la révolution française (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1946), 25; Correspondance du Georges Couthon, député de Puy- de-Dome (Paris: A. Aubry, 1872), 109 (letter of March 20, 1792, to elected officials in Clermont-Ferrand). See also Francisque Mège, ed., “Lettres sur l’Assemblée législative adressé à la municipalité de Clermont-Ferrand par Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, belles- lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand 11 (1869), 324 (letter of March 17, 1792). A visiting German reported rumors of the queen’s involvement with the counterfeiters and the king’s planned abdication on the same day, A. Laquiante, ed., Un prussien en France en 1792 . . . lettres intimes de J.  F. Reichardt (Paris: Perrin, 1892), 320. For more on the charge of “Austrian” complicity in the counterfeiting of assignats, see Thomas Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: MarieAntoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003), 606– 607.

Notes to Pages 182–187

325

29. Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 30. Roussel, ed., Correspondance de Le Cos, évêque constitutionnel d’Ille- et-Vilaine (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1900), 41 (letter of June 11, 1792); A.P.P. AA 183; Les Révolutions de Paris 166 (Sept. 8–15, 1792), 467. 31. F. Braesch, ed., Procès-Verbal de l’Assemblée générale de la section des Postes, décembre 1790–5 septembre 1792 (Paris: Hachette, 1911), 219 (Aug. 23, 1792). More prosperous, less radical sections, such as Louvre/Muséum, also devoted themselves in these weeks to apprehending accused counterfeiters and passers of counterfeit notes, see A.P.P. AA 184 (Aug. 16, 1792). 32. AP 49:230 (Sept. 3, 1792); other accounts also emphasized that counterfeiters had been among the first victims, whereas those jailed for debt or other civil offences had been spared. See Les Révolutions de Paris 165 (Sept. 1– 8, 1792), 430. 33. Edouard Lockroy, ed., Journal d’une bourgeoise pendant la Révolution, 1791–1793 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881), 302 (Sept. 6, 1792); for further examples, see Timothy Tackett, “Rumor and Revolution: The Case of the September Massacres,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 4 (2011), 54– 64. 34. Francisque Mège, Le conventionnel Bancal des Issarts. Etude biographique suivie des lettres inédits (Paris, 1887), 238, 247–248 (letters of Sept. 18 and Nov. 8, 1792); AP 56:229 (Jan. 5, 1793). 35. B. L. FR 436(16) [Protot], Maison des secours, lombards et monts- de-piété, etablis dans des différents quartiers de Paris, et qui offrent à toutes les classes de la Société, des ressources promptes faciles et non dispendieuses: Prospectus (Paris: de la Chave et Jamain, 1791); B.N.F. V 15010, La Maison de secours, rue des filles Saint Thomas, à ses concitoyens, 24 septembre 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie de la Maison de Secours, 1791); A.N. F15 101 (Maison de secours, June- Sept. 1792). 36. A.M. Nevers 6F 47/1; A.N. F4 1055 (letter from departmental administration in the Loiret to the minister of the interior, April 3, 1792); Moniteur 12:29, 66 (April 4 and 8, 1792). As far away as Brive (Corrèze), the discredit of local billets was blamed on “the disastrous example of the Paris Maison de Secours,” A.N. F15 101 (letter from the Society of the Friends of the Republic, Nov. 8, 1792). 37. AP 41:1– 4 (March 30, 1792); see also Correspondance de Georges Couthon, 112 (letter of March 31, 1792). 38. H. Monceau, “Les Caisses patriotiques et les billets de confiance dans l’Yonne,” Annuaire historique du département de l’Yonne 57 (1893), 275–339; A.D. SeineMaritime L 858; A.P.P. AA 88 (March 4, 1792) and AA 183 (June 22, 1792); AP 52:567, 569 (Oct. 18–19, 1792) and 54:724–726 and 748 (Dec. 9–10, 1792); Les Facteurs et factrices à la halle aux farines, à leurs concitoyens (Paris, 1792). 39. AP 41:3, 8 (March 30, 1792) and 52:569 (Oct. 19, 1792). 40. Earlier legislation had effectively outlawed all billets for more than twenty-five livres by making them subject to the stamp tax; for the debate and resulting action, see AP 39:85– 86 (Feb. 25, 1792) and 40: 67, 111, 495–500, 563–570 (March 17–18, 26, and 28, 1792).

326

Notes to Pages 188–197

41. For instance, departmental authorities in the Meurthe expected the Caisse Patriotique in Nancy to act as a central clearinghouse for the exchange of all billets issued in the department on the grounds that it had issued more than other caisses had and it was located in the chef- lieu of the department. Administrators of the Caisse refused, insisting they were simply one private issuer and could accept only their own bills, A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle L 1285. 42. A.D. Nièvre 1L 321 (register, January 1793); A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine L 695 (register, January 1793). 43. A.N. F4 1057 (letter from Varzy [Nièvre], Dec. 16, 1792). 44. A.D. Seine-Maritime L 859 (letter dated Saint Brieuc, Dec. 7, 1792). 45. Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 34; Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chapter 3. 46. AP 61:442– 450, 592–593 (April 8 and 11, 1793). 47. A.N. H1 1445 (Clavière to the Legislative Assembly, June 9, 1792). 48. AP 81:275–276 (Dec. 10, 1793). 49. B. L. Add. Mss. 8072, Puisaye Papers, fols. 11–12 and Add. Mss. 37858, Wyndham Papers, vol. XVII, fol. 25. For more on the intrigues around this manufacture, see Maurice Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution: Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 167–171. 50. AP 38:366–371 (Feb. 10, 1792) and 39:135–145 (Feb. 27, 1792). 51. A.N. H1 1445 (March 30, 1793). 52. AP 38:129–132 (Feb. 4, 1792). 53. AP 63:157–160 (April 23, 1793) and 67:670– 671, 686– 688 (June 30, 1793). 54. Posters were widely produced to explain this new technique; for examples, see A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle L 297 (Ventôse 26, Year II), A.D. Nord L 1761 (Ventôse 17, Year II); and A.M. Nantes F6 carton 2, dossier 3 (Ventôse 17, Year II). 55. Armand Gaston Camus, Histoire et procédés du polytypage et de la stéréotypie (Paris: Baudouin, Year Ten). 56. B. N. mss n. a. f. 21657, fols. 33–36 (“Troisième mémoire sur la fabrication des assignats,” unsigned and undated); A.N. H1 1445 (letter from Clavière to the Legislative Assembly, June 9, 1792); AP 45:179 (June 13, 1792). 57. Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 184; Pierre Casselle, “Printers and Municipal Politics,” in Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, eds., Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 98–106. There seems to be no serious scholarship on the widow LeJay, despite her ties to Mirabeau, assignat production, and Louis Gustave le Doulcet de Pontécoulant, the Girondin whom she hid and then married. 58. Condorcet and Lavoisier, two other noted skeptics of the assignats, helped finance Dupont de Nemours’ publishing and printing venture. See Marc Bou-

Notes to Pages 197–198

59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

327

loiseau, Bourgeoisie et révolution: les Du Pont de Nemours, 1788–1799 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1972), 65– 68, 84– 88. The elder Dupont de Nemours encouraged his son to contract to print more assignats; see Bessie Gardner du Pont, The Life of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont from Contemporary Correspondence (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1923), vol. 2, 41 (letter of Nov. 21, 1792). AP 49:423 (Sept. 7, 1792). For an example of all the costs and responsibilities that still fell to individual printing entrepreneurs, see A.N. DI §1 11 (contract between E. I. Dupont and Delamarche, Dec. 19, 1792), and for an assessment of the printers in the different workshops (LeJay’s were described as prone to insurrection but Dupont’s appeared “attached to their boss”), see A.N. T 775 (“Notice sur les imprimeries avec les éclaircissements”). Gardner du Pont, Life of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, vol. 2, 91–92 (letter to his father, April 2, 1793). For the Caisse’s orga ni zation as “completely separate from the Trea sury” and “administered by a commissioner named by the King,” see AP 21:200–201 (annex; Dec. 3, 1790). As of winter 1792 and the decision to issue assignats for 10, 15, 25, and 50 sous, the scale of production had become so large that some of that work had been relocated from the Caisse’s offices to space in former monasteries; see the correspondence in A.N. F4 1013 and H1 1445 (June 1792, passim). A.N. Min. Cen. VII-519 (Dec. 31, 1792); A.N. H1 1445 (Oct. 13, 1792; Larcher et al. to Clavière); A.N. H1 1445 (Ringuet to Clavière, Feb. 1, 1793, and Delamarche to same, Feb. 10, 1793) and B. N. n.a.f. 21657 fol. 41 (letter signed Roussel, Feb. 6, 1793). A.N. H1 1445; Réponse du citoyen Arthur au mémoire prétendu justificatif de Delamarche (Paris: Imprimerie rue Neuve de l’Egalité, cour des Miracles, 1793), 10; Vincent Jean Ollivault Duplessis, Réplique du citoyen Ollivault, sous- directeur de la fabrication des assignats, à la réponse en 42 pages in- 4° de De la Marche (Paris: Provost, 1793). Delamarche’s ties to the Paris municipal government had been denounced earlier in Marat’s L’Ami du peuple 487 (June 12, 1791), 6. A.N. H1 1445 (Clavière to Ollivault, Aug. 27, 1792, and correspondence between them, Nov. 1–11, 1792); A.N. DI §1 11 (Delamarche to Clavière, Sept. 1, 1792). A one-time lawyer (avocat) in the Paris Parlement, Ollivault Duplessis had been active in section and Jacobin politics since early in the Revolution. In addition to his charges against Delamarche, he elsewhere claimed to have helped invent the Caisse Lafarge and to have been cheated of his due rewards by Joachim Lafarge and the National Assembly; see Vincent Jean Ollivault Duplessis, Adresse à l’Assemblée Nationale, sur les loteries, considérées sous tous leurs rapports (Paris: Gattey, [late 1791?]). On Rutledge (or Routledge), who advocated an alternative land-bank system and protested the introduction of assignats payable to the bearer, see Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford: Oxford University

328

65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

Notes to Pages 199–202 Press, 2009), 180, and Rachel Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794 (Woodbridge, England: Royal Historical Society, 2005), 83–115. Simon Delamarche, Pièces justificatives, à l’appui du Mémoire du Citoyen Delamarche (Paris: Patris, 1793), 18. A.N. W 294b (“Affaire Lamarche”); in presenting the case against Brissot and the other Girondins, Hébert briefly referred to Delamarche. See Buchez and Roux, vol. 30, 9. Buchez and Roux, vol. 24, 434–438 (Jan. 30, 1793); AP 56:715 (Jan. 10, 1793); Discours des commissaires de la Section des Piques, prononcé à la Tribune des Jacobins, dans la séance du 28 octobre, l’an Ier de la République (Paris, 1792); “Demands of the Central Committee of Resistance to Oppression” (B. M. Caen, Fn. B2634), reproduced in Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 245–247; “Adresse à la Convention Nationale au nom des Républicains, formant le conseil de la Commune et des Sociétés populaires de Nantes” (April 22, 1793), in La Commune et le Milice de Nantes (Nantes: Camille Mellinet, 1840–1843), vol. 7, 203. Delamarche, Pièces justificatives, 11. Denunciation named specific enemies even as its fairly uniform vocabulary minimized the denouncer’s own authorial voice; see Colin Lucas, “The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution,” JMH 68:4 (December 1996), 768–785, especially 780–781. Buchez and Roux, vol. 24, 435– 436; see also Joseph-Marie Belgodère, Dénonciations faites à la barre de la Convention nationale, par un citoyen du Département de Corse; contre un nommé Delamarche, directeur- général de la fabrication des assignats et contre le ministre Clavière (Paris: C-J Gelé, 1793), 7. “l’auteur du renversement du tout ordre,” AP 58:552 (Feb. 14, 1793); JosephMarie Belgodère, Supplément aux éclaircissements, pour servir de base à l’opinion qu’on doit avoir sur le citoyen Lamarche (Paris: Vezard et le Normant, 1792), 4. James Rutledge, “Opinion sur les éclaircissemens qui précèdent,” in Larcher, Eclaircissements pour servir de base à l’opinion qu’on doit avoir sur le citoyen Lamarche (Paris: Mayer et cie, 1792), 28, and in AP 58:556 (Feb. 14, 1793). This formulation was inspired by the psychoanalytic notion of nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”); for a short introduction, see “Après- coup,” in Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967), 33–36. Loi concernant les assignats . . . 18=24 novembre 1790 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1790). A.N. Y 9521 (police dossiers on cases of counterfeit lottery tickets). A.N. H1 1445 (Delamarche to Clavière, letter of resignation); A.N. W 294b (dossier Lamarche) and A.N. F7 4760 (“affaire du citoyen Lamarche”). Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, 189; see also Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 67– 68.

Notes to Pages 202–209

329

78. A. H. M. A. M. série “Assignats,” dossier 72 (“Etat général des objets ayant servi à la fabrication des assignats, qui doivent . . . être brisés sur la place Vendôme, le 30 Pluviôse, au matin, de l’an IV”). 79. A.P.P. AA 208 (April 2, 1793); A.P.P. AA 209 (Sept. 14–15, 1793); A.N. D XLII 11 (report of Nivôse 17, Year II), reproduced in Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur, vol. 6–7, 339. 80. For a compatible analysis of other aspects of the Revolution, see Isser Woloch, “The Contraction and Expansion of Democratic Space during the Period of the Terror,” in Baker, ed., The Terror, 309–326. 81. B.N. mss n. a. f. 21657, fol. 83 (Commissaires de l’Académie des sciences et bureau de consultation des arts et métiers, “Précis analytique des divers rapports faits au comité des assignats,” May 31, 1793). 82. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 14. 83. The vernacular use of “corset” to mean “five-livre assignat” was widespread. See, for example, Mangerel, ed., Le Capitaine Gerbaud, 52. 84. In spring 1795, “corsets” continued to demand a particularly high price in the money trade; see Moniteur 24:405 (Floréal 17, Year III). 85. An inventory of the factory’s contents listed “two bags of black and white marbles, for picking signatures,” A.N. D I §1 12 (“Inventaire de la Direction des artistes de la fabrication des assignats,” Floréal 11, Year III). 86. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 161, 168. 87. Though see Miller, Mastering the Market; Bernard Harcourt’s The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011) begins with the Old Regime grain trade and devotes considerable space to late- eighteenth- and nineteenth- century debates, yet oddly says nothing about the Revolution itself. 88. Marat, Le Publiciste (Feb. 25, 1793), cited in Mathiez, Vie chère, 151–152. 89. AP 73:357–358 (Sept. 3, 1793). 90. Jean- Clément Martin, Violence et révolution. Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 10, 214. See also Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 91. Cambon, cited in Marion, Histoire financière de la France vol. 3, 76 (Aug. 15, 1793). 92. Higonnet, “Terror, Trauma, and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation,” 150, 152. 93. A.D. Loire-Atlantique L 465 (correspondence, January–June 1793). 94. For the creation of the post of verifier general, see AP 56:80– 89 (Dec. 31, 1792) and 56:191–196 (Jan. 4, 1793); later decrees put it under the direct supervision of the Committee of General Security, see AP 77:571–572 (Oct. 26, 1793). For the location and contents of the verifier general’s offices, see the inventory in A.N. O2 436 (Floreal 24, Year III). 95. A.D. Loire-Atlantique L 491 (letter from Deperey dated Vendémiaire 27, Year IV, cited by the local verifier in his report dated Brumaire 5, Year IV). See also A.D. Rhône 1L 631 (undated poster, Year III).

330

Notes to Pages 210–215

6. The Revolution That Would Not End 1. Jacques Henri Meister, Souvenirs de mon dernier voyage à Paris (Zurich: Orell et al., 1797), 342; Raymond Aubert, ed., Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous la Révolution (Paris: France-Empire, 1974), 570; A.N. F1c III Seine 16 (Thermidor 8, Year III) and A.N. F1c III Seine 18 (Nivôse 2, Year IV), reproduced in Aulard, Paris sous le Directoire, vol. 2, 111 and 557. Gilles Postel-Vinay, La Terre et l’argent: L’agriculture et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début de XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 138, and Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 200–206. 2. Journal d’un voyageur neutre (London: Richard White, 1796), 159–160 3. A.N. F1c III Seine 17 (Frimaire 5, Year IV), reproduced in Aulard, Paris sous le Directoire, vol. 2, 425 and 429. 4. A.N. Min. Cen. XXXV-981 (Messidor 25, Year IV). 5. A.N. Min. Cen. XVIII-961 (Vendémiaire 3, Year VI). 6. A.N. AF III 135A (Pluviôse 19, Year VI). 7. Duodecimal coins remained legal tender until 1834, provoking endless squabbles about conversion rates. 8. A.D. Meurthe- et-Moselle, L 326-1(letter dated Vendémiaire 17, Year VI). 9. A.D. Nièvre 1L 278 (Thermidor 1–2, Year IV). 10. See, for instance, John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 191. 11. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), 56. The bibliography on class formation in early nineteenth- century Europe is enormous and cannot be properly summarized here. In addition to E. P. Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), see William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and the same author’s Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 12. For extended arguments compatible with this claim, see William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 2, and Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 13. It is the first example in Forrest Capie, ed., Major Inflations in History (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1991). 14. Andrew D. White, Paper-Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended (New York: Appleton, 1876). When he reissued the text during the 1896 presidential campaign, he added to it slightly; this later version was published under the title Fiat Money in France (New York: Appleton, 1896). For

Notes to Pages 215–221

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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the author’s account of his many presentations on this subject, see The Autobiography of Andrew D. White (New York: The Century Company, 1914), vol. 1, 113– 117, 263. Examples include www.321gold .com; usagold .com; gold- eagle.com; goldonomic.com. S. E. Harris, The Assignats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 186, 221. Harris calculated there were 7.6 billion livres of assignats in circulation in August 1794; by November 1795, there were 19.7 billion. Even Milton Friedman himself was unsure when he had first claimed, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” In 1994, he wrote, “I believe that I first published the statement in these words in Friedman (1963) which was reprinted in Friedman (1968).” See Milton Friedman, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 262. AP 70:59 (July 31, 1793). Nicolas Bergasse, Protestation de M. Bergasse, député de la sénéchaussée de Lyon, contre les assignats-monnoie (s. l. n. d.); the editors of the Archives parlementaires wrongly included this pamphlet as if it had been part of the first debate on the assignats; see AP 10: 681– 689 (Dec. 19, 1789). See also the assertion that the assignats were “based on such obvious theft” that they could only lead to ruin, Joseph de Gissac, ed., “Compte-rendu à ses commettants, par M. le Marquis de MontcalmGozon, député de la noblesse . . . ,” Mémoires de la société des lettres, sciences, et arts de l’Aveyron 11 (1874–1878), 44–57; quotation at 52. Antoine François Claude Ferrand, Tableau de la conduite de l’Assemblée prétendue nationale (Paris, 1790), 9, 11, 33. See also his Lettre au roi du 15 juin 1790 (s. l. n. d.). E. Leflaive, “Le Premier représentant de Beaune au parlement: Claude Gantheret,” Société d’archéologie de Beaune. Histoire, lettres, sciences et arts. Mémoires 42 (1925–1929), 98–99. Hundreds, if not thousands, of sources assert the assignats triggered “the first modern hyperinflation”; see Capie, Inflations in History, and Stanley Fischer, Ratna Sahay, and Carlos Végh, “Modern Hyper- and High Inflations,” Journal of Economic Literature 40 (2002), 837– 880. For a more congenially historical approach, see Fred Hirsch and John H. Goldthorpe, eds., The Political Economy of Inflation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). AP 63:152 (April 23, 1793). Aubert, ed., Journal d’un bourgeois, 532. Anne Vassal, ed., Nicolas Ruault. Gazette d’un parisien sous la Révolution, lettres à son frère 1783–1796 (Paris: Perrin, 1976), 376, 382, 384. Aubert, ed., Journal d’un bourgeois, 175, 570, 575. A.N. F12 1547b; reports from Tarascon (Arriège), Germinal 2, Year III; Ruffec (Charente), Ventôse 17, Year III; Avalon (Yonne), Ventôse 13, Year III. A.N. F12 1547b; report from Bourg (Bec d’Ambez), Germinal 3, Year III. A.N. F12 1547b; reports from Romans (Drôme) and Rodez (Aveyron), Germinal 1, Year III.

332

Notes to Pages 221–225

30. In the aftermath of the king’s arrest in Varennes, one member of the National Assembly reassured his correspondents that biens nationaux were selling “for very elevated prices,” thereby demonstrating that people had “rallied around” the Revolution and the Constitition. See R. Rumeau, “Lettres du constituant Roger,” Révolution française 42– 43 (1902), 68– 82 (letter of June 26, 1791). 31. AP 25:602 (May 5, 1791). 32. Courier de l’Egalité, Floréal 1, Year II, 156, and Prairial 4, Year II, 417. 33. [Pierre Joseph] Cambon (fîls ainé), Rapport sur les moyens à prendre pour retirer des assignats de la circulation, et sur la création d’une loterie: présenté à la séance du 3 pluviôse, an troisième (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1795), 5. 34. For more on this, see my “Nobody Called It Inflation,” French Historical Studies (forthcoming). François Hincker, “Comment sortir de la terreur économique?” in Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Le Tournant de l’an III: réaction et terreur blanche (Paris: CTHS, 1997), 149–158, also says the discourse of political economy was not settled at this point. 35. In the second half of the 1790s, legislators annulled election results, imposed direct military rule on large sections of France, and limited political power to property owners alone; see Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 36. Moniteur 21:611– 615 (Fructidor 11, Year II). For another analysis of this speech, see Keith Michael Baker, “Introduction,” in Baker, ed., The Terror, vol. 4 of Baker et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–1994), xiii–xiv. 37. Quoted in Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153; Moniteur 23:45 (Nivôse 3, Year III). 38. Moniteur 23:45, 52–53 (Nivôse 3– 4, Year III). 39. Georges Lefebvre, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la révolution française, new ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 662 (where Lefebvre distinguishes “terreur économique” from “terreur proprement dite”). A JSTOR search reveals the phrase to be twice as common in articles about the Soviet Union as in articles about revolutionary France; a fast survey of texts scanned by Google Books confirms this impression, though it also reveals the phrase in other contexts (such as descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan’s activities). 40. Harris, The Assignats, 186. 41. Cambon, Rapport sur les moyens. 42. A lottery was, however, introduced to hasten the sale of many remaining biens nationaux, chiefly movable property seized from émigrés. See Première Loterie nationale, tirée en fructidor III (Paris: Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales, III). 43. Rapport en deux parties sur la contribution foncière, fait au nom du Comité des finances, séance 26 pluviôse [an III]. Première partie, rédigée par Ramel, Inconvéniens de la con-

Notes to Pages 225–230

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

333

tribution en nature. Deuxième partie, rédigée par Beffroy, Avantages de la contribution en nature (Paris: Convention Nationale, 1795). See, for instance, the extremely hostile exchange between Cambon and Tallien over the former’s proposal to increase the wages paid to public servants, Moniteur 22:458– 460 (Brumaire 18, Year III). François-Louis Bourdon, Opinion de Bourdon (de l’Oise) sur les finances (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1795); Edmond Louis Alexis Dubois- Crancé, Moyens de rétablir l’ordre dans les finances de la République française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1795). Moniteur 24:112 (Germinal 11, Year III); my analysis here is indebted to Haim Burstin, “Echos faubouriens des journées de prairial,” AHRF 304 (1996), 373–385. Moniteur 24:106, 117 (Germinal 11–12, Year III). Ibid., 24:309–310 (Floréal 6, Year III). The first major fi nancial and monetary report produced under the Directory made this same argument. Even though the assignats had depreciated especially steeply over the course of Year III, blame for the situation was laid on the politics of Year II; see La commission des Cinq sur les causes de la situation des finances, et sur les moyens de les régénérer, fait en comité général par Eschassériaux ainé, dans la séance du 22 brumaire, in the Moniteur 26:497–505 (Brumaire 22, Year IV); see also Marion, Histoire financière, vol. 3, 400– 406. Moniteur 24:163 (Germinal 18, Year III). Ibid., 24:474– 476 (Floréal 27, Year III). Ibid., 24:497–507 (Prairial 1, Year III). Ibid., 24:500 and 514. Alfred Roussel, ed., Correspondance de Le Coz, évêque constitutionnel d’Ille- et-Vilaine (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1900), 123. Soldiers complained regularly about the assignats; see for example E. Picard, Au service de la nation, lettres de volontaires 1792–1798 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1914), 79– 81, and L. J. Bricard, Journal du cannonier Bricard (Paris: Delagrave,1891), 162—the latter reported soldiers were stealing and killing pet cats because there was no other way to get meat. A.N. F4 1052 (Frimaire 26, Year IV). Ibid. and A.N. F4 1059 (letter from Executive Directory of the Haute Saone, Pluviôse16, Year IV). Alphonse Aulard, Recueil des actes du Comité de Salut Public (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889–1923) vol. 24, 145–148, 224, 449– 445 (breakdown of military discipline following demonetization, Prairial III) and vol. 25, 60, 146– 148, 310 (further examples, Messidor III). For a particularly full set of documents concerning one mayor’s resignation and attempts to retain him, see A.D. Seine Maritime L 2754 (Nivôse-Pluviôse Year IV); Jacques-Dominique Ruffi n, mayor of Bolbec, had been mayor or member of the municipal council since 1789. A.N. F4 1059 (Pluviôse 16, Year IV); A.D. Seine-Maritime L 2754 (Messidor Year IV).

334

Notes to Pages 230–240

59. Baker, “Introduction,” xiv. 60. Aubert, ed., Journal d’un bourgeois, 532. For the price of theater tickets, see Arthur Pougin, L’Opéra comique pendant la révolution (Paris: Albert Savine, 1891), 168–170. 61. Roussel, ed., Correspondance de Le Coz, 121. 62. The assignats, for instance, are never mentioned in Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 63. Aubert, ed., Journal d’un bourgeois, 575; Aulard, Paris, vol. 2, 388 (report of Brumaire 25, Year IV) and 404. 64. Rapport de la commission des Cinq sur les causes de la situation des finances, et sur les moyens de les régénérer, fait en comité général par Eschassériaux ainé, dans la séance du 22 brumaire in the Moniteur 26:497–505 (Brumaire 22, Year IV); see also Marion, Histoire financière, vol. 3, 400– 406. 65. Lettre de Cambon, fils aîné, à ses concitoyens sur les finances (Paris: Journal des hommes libres, Year IV). 66. Rapport de la commission des Cinq, in the Moniteur 26:500–501 (Brumaire 22, Year IV). 67. Resolution of Ventose 26, Year IV, in Moniteur 28:6. 68. Code des mandats territoriaux (Paris: Imprimerie des frères unis, Year IV), 15–16. 69. Jacques Defermon, Rapport fait au nom de la commission des finances, 2 floréal an IV (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, Year IV). 70. See, for instance, A.N. Min. Cen. XXXV-981 (Fructidor 2, Year IV). 71. Code des mandats. 72. Aulard, Paris, vol. 3, 103 (Germinal 19, Year IV) and 153 (Floréal 11, Year IV). 73. A.N. Min. Cen. XXI- 636 (Ventôse 11, Year V); XXXV-983 (Pluviôse 25, Year V); XXXV-981 (Fructidor 11, Year IV). 74. A.D. Sarthe 4E 37/828 (LeRiche de Vandy and LeDouay, Sept. 7, 1790); see also A.N. Min. Cen. II-749 (August 3, 1790). 75. Judith Miller, “The Aftermath of the Assignat: Plaintiffs in the Age of Property,” in Howard Brown and Judith Miller, eds., Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 70–92; Gilles Postel-Vinay has argued currency depreciation’s main effect in the countryside was to allow farmers to pay off their debts; see his La Terre et l’argent (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 76. For more on these debates, see Miller, “Aftermath,” and Marion, Histoire financière. 77. For economists’ assessments of these tables, see Harris, The Assignats, chapters 4–5, and Eugene White, “Mea sur ing the French Revolution’s Infl ation: The Tableaux de dépréciation,” Histoire & Mesure 6 (1991), 245–274. 78. A.D. Aube Le1 30, fol. 79– 86, in A. Boutillier du Retail, “Le tableau de réduction du papier-monnaie dans le département de l’Aube (An V),” La Révolution dans l’Aube 2 (1909), 27– 44.

Notes to Pages 240–248

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79. Ibid., 38; A.N. AF III 135A (letter from Cournault, rue des Noyers 7, to the Executive Directory; Pluviôse VI and petition “Classe infortunée des créanciers, Côte d’Or,” undated). 80. James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), chapter 6; Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror. 81. Collection générale des tableaux de dépréciation du papier- monnaie, publiés en exécution de l’article V de la loi du 5 messidor an V (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, Year VI), republished under the Restoration (when émigrés were being indemnified for the seizure and sale of their property) as Collection générale des tableaux de dépréciation du papier- monnaie, publiés dans chaque département (Paris: Decle, 1825). The earlier text lists the local experts responsible for constructing each department’s tableau; the later one omits this information. 82. A.N. AF III 135A (LeRoux, Pluviôse 13, Year VI, and Directoire of the Haute Saône, Frimaire 11, Year VI). 83. Encyclopédie, art. “Bigarrure, Diversité, Variété, Différence.” 84. A.N. AF III 135A (Durieux, chargé de pouvoirs du commerce de la commune d’Amiens, Vendémiaire 11, Year VI). 85. Taws’ argument is particularly strong as an analysis of how this imagery does, and does not, fit within the series of prints known as the Tableaux historiques. See his, “Trompe-l’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror,” Oxford Art Journal 30 (2007), 353–376. 86. A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 1.

7. Taking the Old Regime out of Circulation 1. Gazette des tribunaux (Sept. 2, 1845) reproduced in La Réforme (Sept. 8, 1845), 3. 2. La Réforme (Aug. 20, 1845), 3. For an extended description of the procedures involved, see Gazette de France (Aug. 19, 1845), 3. For how this was announced to the public, see the poster, Préfecture de Police. Avis au public (1845), B.N.F. Lf163 76. 3. La Réforme (Aug. 16, 1845), 3. 4. Ibid.; A.D. Nord P 104/17 (Aug. 6, 21, and 26, 1845) and P 106/5 (July 2, 1845). 5. La Populaire de 1841; Journal de Reorganisation Sociale et Politique [1845?], no date or page. 6. Rafe Blaufarb, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s–1830s (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), chapter 7; Bernard Bodinier and Eric Teyssier, L’événement le plus important de la Révolution (Paris: Société des etudes robespierristes, 2000). 130. 7. Founded in 1835, the Revue de la numismatique française played a significant part in making “national” (as opposed to classical) numismatics respectable. For one numismatist’s attempt to determine when he would have collected “enough” assignats, see A. M. Lille Fonds Gentil 15143; it was in consulting this

336

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Notes to Pages 248–253 collection that Jules Michelet first learned billets de confiance had been issued; see his journal entries for August 1846. Marion, Histoire financière, vol. 5, xi; Guy Antonetti, Les ministres des Finances de la Révolution française au Second Empire: dictionnaire biographique (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2007) similarly leaves currency questions completely untouched. For the only existing scholarship on this topic, see Guy Thuillier, La Monnaie en France au début du XIXe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1983). On the nineteenth-century emergence of territorial currencies, see Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) and Benjamin J. Cohen, The Geography of Money (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). F. Clerc, Instruction sur les mesures républicaines et les mesures anciennes du département de l’Ain (Bourg: 1799–1800), 5, 12; P.-L. Lionet, Manuel du système métrique (Lille: Vanackere, 1820), 10–11. Lionet, Manuel, 26; Damis, Tableau de comparaison entre les nouvelles et les anciennes mesures agraires (Amiens: veuve Darras, 1840), 101; Annuaire pour l’an 1851 (Paris: Bachelier, 1850), 95. Under the Third Republic, the franc germinal became an emblem of stability; its near heroic status helps explain the anguish generated by the 1928 currency devaluation and the creation of the “franc Poincaré.” See Kenneth Mouré, Managing the Franc Poincaré: Economic Understanding and Political Constraint in French Monetary Policy, 1928–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In the aftermath of a later revaluation, the sociologist and demographer Alfred Sauvy asserted that changing the franc had been as difficult for “la France conservatrice” as was giving up Algeria; see his “Sur la maturation,” Revue française de sociologie 5 (1964), 7– 8. Production numbers from cgb.fr. “Etat des fabrications d’espèces d’or et d’argent fait de 1726 à 1794, de celles de ces pièces qui ont éte refondues au 30 juin 1827, et de celles qui sont présumés rester encore en circulation,” A.M.P. L4, chemise L/16 (August 22, 1827). Alexandre Raymond Devie, Manuel de connaissances utiles aux ecclésiastiques sur divers objets d’art (Bourg and Lyon, 1836), 41– 47. Elemens d’arithmétique républicaine, suivant le nouveau calcul décimal (Paris: Cointeraux, n. d.). Loi qui change la manière de compterle [sic] pièces de monnaie d’or et d’argents dans les caisses publiques et dans le commerce, à dater du 1er vendémiaire an VIII . . . (Paris, 1799). A. N. F4 1058 Circular, administration centrale of the Department of the Rhône to municipal administrators (Vendémiaire 7, Year VIII). A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 2 (Thermidor 15 and 16, Year XI). A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Vendémiaire 5, Year XIII); A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 2 (August 26, 1806). A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Floréal 17, Year XIII).

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22. A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Messidor 8, Year XII). 23. A.D. Vosges 110P 1 (correspondence, Frimaire- Germinal, Year XII); see too A.D. Côte- d’Or IP1 k1 (Fructidor 23, Year XI, and Nivôse 19, Year XII). 24. Guy Thuillier, La Monnaie en France, 134. Merely the discussion of possible currency reforms, as occurred in the Chamber of Deputies in winter 1821–1822, was enough to spark panic across southern France from the Pyrenées to the Alps and north to the Nièvre; see A. N. F7 6918. 25. A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (May 2, 1817). 26. A.D. Sarthe 1P 220 (May 13, 1818). 27. AP second series 39:327 (April 14, 1823). 28. A.M.P. L 3, chemise L/14 (Sept. 12, 1834). 29. AP second series 95:531 (May 8, 1835). 30. Ibid. 87:479 (March 15, 1834). 31. AP second series 95:533 (May 8, 1835). 32. A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 6 (letter dated August 11, 1838). 33. Marion, Histoire financière, vol. 5, 144–145; see also Antonetti, Les ministres des Finances, vol. 2, 327–397. 34. For instance, Le National (Oct. 5, 1834) reprinted an article from L’Auxiliaire (Rennes) about a peasant from Ploërmel (Morbihan) with a hoard of 60,000 livres in écus. Located on the outskirts of Paimpont Forest (said to be the birthplace of Merlin), Ploërmel was later the setting for Meyerbeer’s opera Dinorah, which is based on a Breton folktale about the hunt for cursed trea sure. 35. For more on the cat-rabbit rumor and its politicization, see my The Invention of the Restaurant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 224–232, and “Pulling a Rabbit out of a Cat,” Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture 35 (Fall 2009), 7–11. 36. Sandy Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) and Michael O’Malley, Face Value: The Entwined History of Money and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 37. [Lord Feeling] Antoine Fontaney, “Esquisses du cœur: les bouquets,” Revue des deux mondes second series no. 1 (Jan. 1833), 324–335. 38. Comptes rendus des séances hebdomadaires de l’Académie des sciences 23 (1846), 1023. 39. “Rejet du projet de loi sur la refonte des monnaies de cuivre et de billon,” Journal des économistes 5 (April–July 1843), 271–275. 40. De l’organisation monétaire en France et de la refonte des monnaies de cuivre (Paris: Blondeau, 1842), 21, 25; “Rapport fait au nom de la Commission chargé d’examiner le projet de loi relatif à la démonétisation des espèces . . . ,” in Procésverbaux de la chambre des députés (Paris: A. Henry, 1843), vol. 8, 319–360; quotations at 324–325. 41. A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (undated 1838); A.D. Côte- d’Or IP1 k2 (undated 1838); A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 6 (Sept. 7, 1836); A.D. Jura 1P 139 (undated 1838); P.-M. Roux, ed., Répertoire des travaux de la société de statistique de Marseille, vol. 2 (Marseille: Carnaud, 1838), 353; A.D. Dordogne 1P 6, cited in Joseph Confavreux,

338

42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

Notes to Pages 261–266 “Usages sociaux et politiques de la monnaie en Dordogne dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle,” Ruralia 7 (2000), 37. A.D. Vosges 110P 1 (Sept 1, 1838). One author polemically asserted that three- quarters of the families in France only saw a silver coin once every ten years; see Alphonse Bonneville, Nouveau système de réforme monétaire pour la refonte des monnaies d’argent, de billon, de cuivre et de bronze: présenté pendant la session de 1843 (Paris: Renard, 1843), 26. “Rapport fait au nom de la Commission chargé d’examiner le projet de loi relatif à la démonétisation des espèces . . . ,” in Procés- verbaux de la chambre des députés (Paris: A. Henry, 1843), vol. 8, 327. For one such example, see A.D. Ille- et-Vilaine 11P 6 (Dec. 1835). On the giving of Old Regime coins as alms, see L’Ami de la religion 126 (August 16, 1845), 411. A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Aug. 11, 1838). Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent du Châtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, second ed. (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1837), vol. 1, 142. Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1835); A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Aug. 16 and 17, 1845; letters from the mayor and a justice of the peace in Sablé). A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (responses from Le Mans and Saint Calais, Aug. 11, 1838). In Auxonne, the subprefect estimated that at least one-fifth of the coins in any roll would be rejected, see A.D. Côte d’Or IP1 k2 (undated). A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (Aug. 16, 1845); Maurice Agulhon, Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique: Toulon, de 1815 à 1851 (Paris: La Haye, Mouton, 1970), 65; according to the historian Peter Stearns, “they were simply too resigned.” See his “Patterns of Industrial Strike Activity in France during the July Monarchy,” AHR 70:2 (Jan. 1965), 371–394; quotation at 374. For a similar argument based on research in southwestern France, see Bernard Traimond, “La Fausse monnaie au village: Les Landes aux xviiie et xixe siècles,” Terrain 23 (1994), 27– 44. P.-M. Roux, ed., Répertoire des travaux de la société de statistique de Marseille, vol. 2, 352–353; A.D. Jura 1P 139 district Dole (August 29, 1838); elsewhere, another subprefect noted that the prevalence of copper in retail transactions made livestock purchases particularly contentious since the dealers discounted copper 1–2 percent, see A.D. Vosges 110P 1 district Mirecourt (Sept. 3, 1838); Répertoire des travaux de la société de statistique de Marseille, vol. 2, 351. Annales médico-psychologiques, Journal de l’anatomie, de la physiologie, et de la pathologie du système nerveux 10 (1847), 265–267. Chambre des Députés, session 1843. Projet de loi, relatif à la refonte des monnaies de cuivre (March 4, 1843), 1–8; the notion that French money was “deplorable from an artistic point of view” was mocked in Le Charivari (June 1, 1843), 1. For a detailed and enthusiastically positive summary of the report, see Horace Say, “Du projet de centralisation de la fabrication des monnaies,” Journal des économistes 4 (1843), 366–382.

Notes to Pages 266–272

339

57. “Discours . . . à propos d’un projet de loi relatif à la refonte des monnaies (30 mai 1843),” in Ledru-Rollin, discours politiques et écrits divers (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1879), vol. 1, 69–75. 58. “Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée d’examiner le projet de loi relatif à la démonétisation des espèces de billon par M. Michel Poisat, député de l’Ain (6 mai 1845),” in Michel Poisat, Discours et rapports sur les monnaies et les métaux précieux (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1851), 68– 87. 59. Annales du parlement français publiées par une société de publicistes, t. 7 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1846), 784. 60. Actually, the six-liard and ten- centime coins were supposed to be completely withdrawn as of Dec. 31, 1845, while a further six-month grace period was granted for the fifteen- and thirty-sou coins; Almanach national des villes et campagnes, pour 1845, 155. 61. “Recueil des actes administratifs de la Préfecture de Loir-et-Cher (1845), n. 19, art. 118,” reproduced in Journal des conseils de fabriques, des curés, desservants, vicaires, aumoniers des établissements religieux et du contentieux des cultes 11 (1844–1845), 350–352. 62. A.D. Nord P 104/17 (August 21, 1845). 63. For the procedures to be followed in the exchange offices, see A.D. Nord P 104/17 (Aug. 19, 1845); Le Charivari (Aug. 20, 1845), 2. 64. La Réforme (Aug. 15, 1845), 3. 65. A.D. Nord P 104/17 (Aug. 8, 1845); A.D. Sarthe 1P 221 (letter from juge de paix Proust, Aug. 12, 1845). 66. Procès- verbal des séances de la chambre des députés 1846, vol. 5 (April 1846), 133. According to Eugen Weber, the liard continued to be locally meaningful in remote regions (such as the Bourbonnais, Savoy, or Morbihan) long after 1845, as did other demonetized coins; see Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 33–35. 67. “Discussion d’un crédit supplémentaire de fonds secrets demandé pour l’exercice de 1843 [March 1, 1843],” in François Guizot, Histoire parlementaire de France: recueil complet des discours prononcés dans les Chambres de 1819 à 1848 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1863–1864), vol. 4, 64–74.

Conclusion 1. Friedrich von Gentz, On the State of Europe before and after the French Revolution, trans. Charles Herries (London, 1802); Alexandre d’Hauterive, L’Etat de la France à la fin de l’an VIII (Paris, 1800); Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 5. 2. For more on the quasi-ritualistic quality of much revolutionary historiography, see my “Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution?” AHR 108:1 (February 2003), 119–147, and my “Self, Field, Myth: What We Will Have Been,” H-France Salon 1:1 (November 2009), 24–32.

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Notes to Pages 273–277

3. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Who Intervened in 1788? A Commentary on The Coming of the French Revolution,” AHR 71:1 (Oct. 1965), 77–103; Richard Mowery Andrews, “Social Structures, Political Elites, and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris,” Journal of Social History 19:1 (autumn 1985), 71–112. 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 28, cited in Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 262. 5. On “economics” versus “political economy,” see especially Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), chapter 5, and Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, From Political Economy to Economics (New York: Routledge, 2009); on Friedman’s universalizing (and impossible to date) aphorism, see Chapter 6. 6. I am grateful to Thomas Dodman for extended discussions, which helped me sharpen the argument here. 7. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993).

Acknowledgments

I will admit right now: like the book itself, these acknowledgments are hard to write. Granted, the genre conventions are well established—but they are almost too much so. After more than a decade’s work, a page or two at the end feels woefully inadequate. Not, I hasten to add, because those pages are paper (or a digital display) but because they are so brief, so incommensurate with the depth of my gratitude and the scale of my memories. Thank-yous delivered in such a staccato fashion can easily look like nothing more than lists of names. But they are intended as tiny little monuments. The research for this book was conducted chiefly in France’s departmental archives, the Archives Nationales (Paris), the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the British Library. Without these public institutions, it would have been impossible to write this book—I am grateful to all who work there and to the governments and taxpayers who support them. Special thanks must be paid to Jean-Marie Levesque, at the Musée de Normandie (Caen, Calvados), who gave me access to the billets de confiance collected by the Société des Antiquaires de Normandie; to Anne Chanteux in the archives of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers; and to Jean-Marie Darnis, who welcomed me into the archives of the Monnaie de Paris. A grant from the Leverhulme Trust and a term’s research leave from the Arts and Humanities Research Board provided material support for this work, as did sabbaticals granted by the history departments at University College London and Indiana University (Bloomington). Helen Matthews, Nazneen Razwi, Becky Bryant, and Deana Hutchins processed forms, handled receipts, and provided many other sorts of unofficial support. Martin Daunton, Colin Jones, Jim Livesey, and Hamish Scott all generously backed this research even in its earliest and most ill-formed stages; Sophia Rosenfeld’s thoughtful reading of the introduction was especially helpful in the final ones. Dror Wahrman, when he was associate editor of the American Historical Review, and David K. Smith at H-France invited me to write review essays in which some of the concerns developed in this book took shape. I suspect this book would be quite different if Michael Kwass and Daniel Gordon had not asked me to contribute to the issue of Historical Reflections they edited on “Money and the Enlightenment.” Many, many other colleagues have involved me in conference panels or listened to

342

Acknowledgments

me speak about this material; I am grateful to all who responded with questions, comments, and criticisms when I presented parts of this work at meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies, the Western Society for French History, and the American Historical Association. For their repeated interest in this work, I owe Paul Cheney, Bill Sewell, and Charles Walton par ticu lar thanks. I also want to express my gratitude to colleagues and friends who shared references and insights with me or gave me bibliographical pointers: Rafe Blaufarb, Clare Crowston, Jennifer Heuer, Helen Thompson, and, especially, Tim Tackett. Michael Cooperson helped me make sense of the Hebrew and Arabic characters used by printers of billets de confiance, and (as always) inspired by his own enthusiasm. I did much of the research for this book during my final two years in London, and it is hard to think of how it all started without feeling homesick for Walthamstow and my attic office in Gordon Square. It would take much more than a paragraph to explain what this book owes to having been at UCL, but I know a decade of even the most passing conversations with Wendy Davies, Michael Crawford, Julian Hoppit, and David D’Avray had an effect on how I think about history. The wonderful discussions I had with every group of “Rousseau, Marx, Freud” students left me with surely the best classroom memories anyone can have. This is, in some ways, my “Rousseau, Marx, Freud” book. It is also my History Workshop book. I am grateful to the entire Editorial Collective for welcoming me and especially to Barbara Taylor, Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, and Poppy Sebag-Montefiore for their friendship and hospitality. David Feldman and Catherine Hall are two of the most special people I know; I cannot hope to imitate their generosity and patience but I can at least express my very deep gratitude for it. On coming to Indiana University, I found a new family home in the Center for Eighteenth- Century Studies. Kon Dierks, Jesse Molesworth, and Rob Schneider all took time to comment in writing on some part of this manuscript; other colleagues, including Jonathan Elmer and Mary Favret, inspired by their interest and their example. I am especially grateful to Richard Nash for his perception of something electrical in my stuff and to Dror Wahrman for having done so much to make the eighteenth century at Indiana what it is today. Eric Sandweiss, my most poetic colleague, thought of a better title; Lindsay Waters and Susan Wallace Boehmer at Harvard University Press convinced me to hold onto the one I had. Were it not for the superhuman patience and efficiency of Shan Wang and Edward Wade, this book would not yet exist. It is a real source of plea sure that many of the most acute comments on earlier versions of this text have come from former students now turned close and trusted colleagues. Miranda Spieler commented with characteristic intensity and intelligence; Rob Priest, with wisdom and wittiness. Ralph Kingston and I have been talking about the French Revolution and its historians for fifteen years; his readings were invariably perceptive and astute, informed by his own deep familiarity with the archives and generosity as a teacher. Thomas Dodman read with lightning speed and razor sharpness, always pushing me to make my theoretical and historiographical claims more explicit. Thank you. And, fi nally (because that is what the genre conventions dictate), my family. My parents, siblings, in-laws, nephews, and nieces have, I think, all tolerated at least one

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343

absence and/or abrupt conversation (and in some cases, many more) because my book still was not done; they made clear their faith in me and kindly avoided asking when I would be fi nished. David Polly endured endless conversations about money, stuff, and revolutions, and he read the book nearly as many times as I wrote it. Because the deepest gratitude is the most difficult to convey, I dedicate this book to him.

Index

absolutism, critics of, 13–14, 15, 20, 30, 51–52, 79– 80, 144–145 Aiguillon, duc d’, 59 Alder, Ken, 203, 323 Allarde, baron d’, 73 Althusser, Louis, 4, 6, 271 American Revolution, 23, 62, 79, 140 Angers, 88, 120, 208 Anisson-Duperron, Etienne Alexandre, 104–105, 110, 193, 197 Anson, Pierre Hubert, 64, 76–77, 79– 81, 83, 105, 153, 298n11, 301n44, 303n74 Antiquity (Biblical and Classical), as example, 2–3, 32, 43, 77, 144–145, 166, 181, 226 Arthur, Robert-Jean-Jacques, 18, 193, 199–200 Assignat Committee, 83, 96, 102–103, 111, 152–153 assignats, as individual objects, 105, 109, 110, 125–126, 133–134, 201 assignats, as saviour of France, 81– 84, 88– 89, 95, 102, 154, 166, 176, 218 assignats, counterfeit. See counterfeit and counterfeiters assignats, creation of, 58– 60, 61–72 assignats, defi ned, 8–9, 57–59 assignats, depreciation of, 180–181, 190, 210–246, 248 assignats, design of, 104–110, 127–128, 141 assignats, interest-bearing, 68, 77, 78, 81, 86, 112, 225 assignats, mass production of, 101, 110–111, 132–134, 140, 152–153, 169–170, 192–209 assignats, monetization of, 75– 83

assignats, opposition to, 68, 87–91, 92–94, 107–108, 129–131, 217 assignats, verification of, 123–125, 131, 132, 209 Baker, Keith Michael, 171–172, 296n100, 332n36 bakers and bakeries, 45– 46, 147, 156, 157, 168, 173, 176–177, 228, 239, 247, 254, 263–264, 268 Bank of England, 66, 69 bankruptcy (personal), 51, 75, 142, 184, 187 bankruptcy (state): rejected, 15, 63– 64, 69, 70–71, 72, 153, 299n28; fear of, 52, 67, 75, 147–148 Banque de France, 255, 269 barber-wigmakers, 45– 46 Barnave, Antoine, 87, 89, 93 Barthes, Roland, 4 Bastille Prison, 17–18, 55, 57, 135, 142, 151, 296n2 Belfort, 158 Bell, David, 205 Bergasse, Nicolas, 68, 82, 129–131, 217, 229, 312n84 Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Jacques Henri, 44– 45 Bertrand, Louis (Genevan mathematician), 24, 288n13 Besançon, 127, 157, 188, 297n6, 311n75, 319n68 biens nationaux, 58, 68– 69, 76, 78–79, 85– 87, 90, 96, 127, 129, 150, 217, 221–222, 227, 229, 233, 248 billets de confiance, 9, 112–123, 172–173, 181, 184–189, 190, 205; confl icts over, 115,

346

Index

billets de confiance (continued) 116, 122–123, 158, 164, 168, 185–189; design of, 117–121 bills of exchange, 10, 12, 46– 47, 50, 56, 78, 81, 107–109, 117, 147, 165, 190, 201 Biron, duc de, 71, 302 Boisgelin de Cucé, archbishop of Aix, 49, 75 Bourdon (de l’Oise), 225, 227–228 Brissot, Jacques, 184 Brittany, 49, 55, 100, 113, 122, 159, 188, 191, 252–253, 258 Burgundy, 240, 90, 154 Burke, Edmund, 9–10, 57, 271 Butler, Judith, 6 Caisse d’Escompte, 65– 66, 68, 69, 71, 76, 77, 81, 157, 255 Caisse de l’Extraordinaire, 66, 68– 69, 81, 83, 111, 198 Caisse Lafarge, 30–31, 290n34, 327n64 Calais, 143, 221 calendar, revolutionary, 16, 72, 170, 196 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 30, 38, 52, 144, 191, 299n25 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph, 187, 189, 207, 224–226, 232 Cambrai, 157–158 Camus, Armand Gaston, 92, 195 Capuchin Club, 75, 93 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 223 Catholic Church, 21, 36, 58, 71, 75, 90, 91, 102, 128 Cazalès, Jacques-Antoine, 87, 90, 215, 301n44, 306n119 centralization, 17, 55, 100, 122–123, 196–199, 202, 208, 253, 266, 275–276 Cérutti, Joseph-Antoine, 130, 162, 176, 178 Chateaubriant (Loire Atlantique), 115 Chateauneuf- d’Isère (Drôme), 115 Cheney, Paul, 52 Cherbourg, 154 church properties. See biens nationaux circulation, 39– 42, 55, 75–76, 81– 83, 86– 87, 103–104 citizenship, 94, 137, 138, 149, 167–168, 205 Clavière, Etienne, 59– 60, 180–181, 196, 198–200, 208 cockades, 140–143 coins, 1, 6, 11–12, 37–38, 43, 135–138, 144–146, 247, 249–270 colonies and colonialism, 28, 83, 94, 99, 137 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 42 Condorcet, marquis de, 3, 326n58

consequences, unintended, 1–2, 13–14, 15, 58–59, 218 copper, 5, 8, 10, 44, 49, 100–101, 105–106, 138, 145–146, 154, 166, 250, 254, 260–266, 270, 283n18 Corsel, Jean, 155, 203–204 counterfeit and counterfeiters, 100, 123–126, 128–132, 153, 175, 179–180, 181–183, 187, 191, 194–195, 204, 246, 265 Cour des monnaies, 99–100 Couthon, Georges, 172, 181 credit: in Old Regime France, 13, 20–31, 44–51, 69; collapse of (during the Revolution), 56, 61– 62, 74, 156–159, 165 Crowston, Clare, 13, 292n59, 321n92 currency, foreign, 137 Cussy, Gabriel de, 151–152 Danton, Georges Jacques, 206, 216 Daston, Lorraine, 26 David, Jacques-Louis, 140, 193 debt, state, 15–17, 19–31, 51–52, 57, 63– 64, 70–72, 207–208; investors in, 27–28, 30–31, 72 debt and social difference, 47– 49 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 60, 79, 85, 136, 138, 165 deficit, state, 61– 63, 65, 71–72, 74 Delamarche, Simon Francois, 7, 198–202, 204, 283n17 demonetization, 216–217, 224, 227–230, 231–232, 247, 254–255, 267–268 Deperey, François, 132, 209 deregulation, 161–166, 175, 181–182, 211, 218, 222–224 Desmarest, Nicolas, 105 dialectics, 54, 218 Dickens, Charles, 16 Didot family (printing trades), 110, 193, 197 Diodati, Antoine Josué, 23, 29 Dorizy, Claude, 193–194 Dubois- Crancé, Edmond-Louis-Alexis, 72, 183, 225 Dunkirk, 154, 322n97 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 31, 49, 80– 81, 197, 216, 301n44, 326n58 Duval d’Eprémesnil, Jean-Jacques, 90, 92, 94 economic thought, history of, 3– 4, 7, 59– 60, 103, 273–274 emigration (revolutionary), 61– 62, 96, 147–148, 191

Index Encyclopédie, 2–3, 15, 24, 25, 32, 36, 39, 43, 99, 144, 176, 242 Estates- General, 1, 15, 54–55 federalism, 199–200 Ferrand, Antoine, 217 Ferrières, marquis de, 73–77, 94, 182 Finance Committee (of National Assembly), 59– 60, 64– 65, 67– 68, 72, 75, 78–79, 84– 87, 90, 94, 112, 147, 151–152, 303n74 Finance Committee (of National Convention), 189, 194, 236 Fontaine, Laurence, 47, 49 franc, 249–259 Franklin, Benjamin, 25, 29 free trade, 39– 40, 116, 138–139, 161–168, 172–173, 174–175, 190, 192, 197–198, 205, 222–224 French Revolution, historiography of, 16–17, 51–56, 58, 117, 122–123, 139–140, 170–172, 175, 190, 204–208, 211, 214–218, 219, 230–231, 236, 240–241, 247–249, 269–270, 271–273, 275–277 Friedman, Milton, 274, 331n17 Furet, François, 15, 139, 171, 179 Gantheret, Claude, 90, 96, 301n49 Garat, Dominique, 67– 68, 91 Garesché, Pierre Isaac, 77 Gaston, Raymond, 223 Gauville, baron de, 65, 71 Geneva, 19–31, 51–52, 59– 60 Germinal-Prairial Year Three, journées of, 7, 225–228, 230, 249 Girondin(s), 171, 189, 194, 199, 202, 203, 206, 208, 231–232, 326n57 Gorsas, Antoine Joseph, 179, 193 grain trade, 74, 113, 135, 158, 162–164, 206, 216–217 Guittard, Nicolas Célestin, 156, 218–220, 231 Guizot, François, 269–270 Hébert, Jacques, 166, 223 Hennin, Michel, 1– 4, 91 Hérault, 117, 164, 240–241, 303n76 Higonnet, Patrice, 188–189, 208 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 25, 111 Humann, Jean- Georges, 257, 258 Hume, David, 3 Hunt, Lynn, 140 hypothecation, 35–36, 43, 154

347

iconoclasm, 18 immeuble (immovable property), 22, 32– 44, 76, 78, 85 infl ation, 159, 210–246, 274 international trade, 27–28, 61– 62, 104, 147, 149–150, 154, 165, 180, 226 Jacobin Club (Paris), 72, 92–93, 148, 180, 199–200 Jacobin clubs, 113, 118, 119, 127, 161–162, 167–168, 169 Jeanbon Saint André, 143, 226–227 Jullien, Rosalie, 183, 185–186 Kaiser, Thomas, 13, 295n98 Kessler, Amalia, 52 Kwass, Michael, 13, 52 Lablache, comte de, 105 Labrousse, Ernest, 16 Lafayette, marquis de, 140, 182 Lameth, Alexandre, 71–72, 90, 150, 297 Lameth, Charles, 150 land, 33, 34–36, 39– 40, 76, 80, 89, 130, 149–150, 233–234, 238, 277 Landes, 164 La Neuve-Lyre (Eure), 158–160 La Rochefoucauld, Louis Alexandre duc de, 80, 88 Lavoisier, Antoine, 133, 193, 203, 326n58 Law, John, 63, 79– 82, 130 Le Couteulx de Canteleu, Jean-Barthélemy, 69, 144, 289n24, 298n11, 301n44, 318n61 Le Havre, 92, 116, 129, 161 Le Mans, 67, 237, 255, 261, 338n49 Le Mercier de la Rivière, Pierre Paul, 39– 40 Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau, Louis Michel, 93 Lepoutre, Pierre François, 127, 133, 306nn117,119, 308n15 Lille, 115, 133, 247, 267–268 Limoges, 38, 77, 96, 105, 157, 158, 298n11 Lindet, Thomas, 61, 75, 320n85 Locke, John, 5, 15, 36, 43, 144, 158, 192, 293n68 Lorthior, Pierre Joseph, 105, 112, 193 Lottery, French Royal, 26–27, 50, 201–202 Louis XVI, 1–2, 15, 30, 36, 52, 105, 182 low- denomination assignats, 111–112, 148–168, 192–193 low- denomination money, 49–50, 100–101, 138–139, 145–168, 259–268 Lyon, 49, 68, 88, 114, 117, 129, 148

348

Index

Maillart, Philippe-Joseph, 243–246 Maison de Secours (Paris issuer of billets), 121, 164, 181, 184–187 mandats territoriaux, 212, 232–236 Marat, Jean Paul, 87, 130–131, 133, 181, 206, 216, 306n121, 327n63 Marie Antoinette, 27, 29, 48, 57, 105, 181 Marion, Marcel, 9–10, 248, 295n97 Markoff, John, 17, 286n52 Martin, Jean Clément, 190, 206–207 Marx, Karl, 2, 14, 103, 214, 272–273, 276 mass production. See assignats, mass production of Maupetit, Michel, 57, 61, 64, 67, 88– 89, 103 Maury, abbé, 65, 68, 88, 90, 215, 217, 300n40, 301n44, 312n84 Maximum. See price controls Ménard de la Groye, François, 67, 82, 89, 94–96 Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 179, 210, 318n53 Mercklein, Jean- Godefroy, 194 Mercy-Argenteau, comte de, 27, 57 Mesmerism, 130–131 metals, base, 8, 138–139, 145–146, 150–151, 154, 259–268 metals, precious, 5, 79– 80, 98–99, 154, 211–212, 236–238, 254–257, 265 metric system, 249–251 meuble (movable property), 22, 32– 44, 78 Michelet, Jules, 97, 335n7 mints and mintworkers, 97–101, 104, 145–146, 248, 250, 254, 255–256, 265–268 Mirabeau, comte de, 7– 8, 59– 60, 63, 87–90, 102, 110, 131, 135–139, 145–146, 151, 154, 197, 266, 290n34 Mirabeau, marquis de, 13 money, commodity theory of, 5, 14–15, 42– 43, 144–147, 150, 164, 167, 216–217, 226, 266 money, historiography of, 3, 10–11, 103, 214–216, 248–249 money, iconography of, 105–108, 117–120, 135–137, 138–140 money, material form of, 4– 6, 14–15, 103, 117–118, 127–128, 132–134, 174–175, 191–192. See also assignats, mass production of money, medieval theory of, 21 money, naturalizing metaphors for, 39– 40, 42, 79– 80, 81– 82, 83, 215, 218, 224, 232–235, 277

money, quantity theory of, 214–218, 224, 232 money, regional and local, 12, 100–101, 112–123, 137–138, 253, 255–259 money, source of value, 4, 5– 6, 14, 149, 174, 217, 236, 264, 272 money and social difference, 8, 10–11, 138–139, 145–168, 172–174, 231, 237, 259–270, 273–274 money changers and money dealers, 124, 159–162, 165, 189, 264 “money of the poor.” See low- denomination assignats; low- denomination money; money and social difference Monneron family, 166 Montagnard(s), 161, 171, 185, 199, 202–203, 207, 211, 219, 225, 231 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 24, 43, 53 Montesquiou-Fézensac, marquis de, 65, 68, 84–86, 105, 121, 151, 273, 301n44, 320n85 moral economy, 158, 174, 179 Mornet, Daniel, 17 Nantes, 101, 119, 208, 223, 188, 199, 208, 213, 223, 256 Napoleon, 246, 247–248 National Assembly (1789–1791), 2, 15, 17, 57–96, 102, 104, 112, 129–131, 132–133, 139, 145, 147, 159, 164, 171, 188, 266 nationhood and nationalism, 135–139, 143–145, 145–154, 158–159, 161, 166–167, 178, 188–189, 241–243 Naurissart, Louis, 77, 96, 102, 105 Necker, Jacques, 24, 42, 52, 61– 63, 65– 68, 72, 75, 129, 163 Nevers, 93, 116, 184 Niort (Deux Sèvres), 117–118 Noailles, duc de, 149–150, 221 Noël, Gabriel, 159, 175–181, 185–186, 224 Normandy, 49, 61, 154, 185, 230, 256, 317n41 numismatics, 1–3, 42– 43, 248, 264 Old Regime, money in, 11–13, 37–38, 44–51, 97–101, 104, 190, 249, 254–255 Ollivault Duplessis, Vincent, 198, 200 Paine, Thomas, 15, 285 Palais Royal, 115, 124, 142–143, 156 Panckoucke, Charles-Joesph, 151–152 paper, 10, 58, 102, 104–105, 110, 169, 194–195, 248–249

Index Paris sections, 81– 82, 116, 119, 121, 147, 159, 161, 167–168, 179–180, 182–183, 183–185, 199 Passy, Hippolyte, 256–257 pawn shops, 70, 71, 116, 123–124 payment in kind, 45, 50, 213, 225, 238 peasants, 16, 47– 48, 116, 137, 157, 257–258, 265 Périsse-Duluc, Jean André, 132–134 Pétion, Jérôme (de Villeneuve), 183, 185 Peuchet, Jacques, 162 Physiocrats and Physiocracy, 31, 36, 38– 42, 52–53, 79– 81 Pinteville, Jean-Baptiste, baron de Cernon, 81, 152 Pointe, Noël, 223 Poitiers, 61, 161 popu lar mobilization, 7– 8, 148, 157–166, 167–168, 179–180, 182–183, 222–223 Pous, abbé, 74–75, 87– 88 price controls, 206, 211, 218, 222–223, 231 privilege, 17, 84– 85, 87, 97–101 probability theory, 26 Quesnay, François, 39– 42 quittances de finance, 86 Rabaut de Saint Etienne, Jean Paul, 148–151, 300n38 Reddy, William, 168, 308n20, 322n100 Reims, 113–114 Rennes, 40, 115, 188, 256 rente perpetuelle, 16, 22, 31–34, 45, 48, 77, 210, 237 rentes, 16, 19–31, 34, 45, 69–70, 72, 210 rente viagère, 16, 20–21, 22–24, 31–32, 72 rentiers, 70, 156, 212, 218–219, 238–239 Reubell, Jean-Francois, 73, 321n89 Reveillon, Jean-Baptiste, 110, 193 revolution, modern concept of, 55, 56, 140, 150–151 Révolutions de Paris, 130, 144, 162, 180, 183, 304n92 Robespierre, Maximilien, 60, 87, 128, 149, 170–172, 183, 189, 211, 219, 222–223, 230 Roederer, Pierre Louis, 180, 193–194 Romans, 154, 318n64 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28–30, 53, 148, 168, 171, 175, 201, 207 Roux, Jacques, 206 Roze de Chantoiseau, Mathurin, 42 Ruault, Nicolas, 82, 130, 219 Rutledge, James, 198

349

Saint Aubin, Augustin de, 105–108, 131, 133, 135, 193, 205 Saint- Germain- en-Laye (Seine- et- Oise), 113 Sargent, Thomas, 145 Say, Horace, 261 September Massacres, 182–183, 186, 223 Seven Years’ War, 13, 23, 51, 52, 100 Sewell, William H. (Jr.), 36, 172, 207 shortage of money, 49–50, 61– 62, 73–75, 100–101, 111–112, 147–148, 153, 156–158 Shovlin, John, 40, 52, 172, 230 Sierck (Moselle), 175–177 Sieyès, abbé, 60, 93 signatures, on billets de confiance, 116, 118–119, 122 signatures on assignats, 69, 107–110, 131–134, 152–153, 155, 175, 198–204 signatures on bills of exchange, 46– 47, 109, 165, 201 Simmel, Georg, 103 small change. See low- denomination assignats; low- denomination money Smith, Adam, 3– 4, 60 soldiers, 49, 113, 122, 159, 166, 175–178, 207, 228, 230 Sonenscher, Michael, 13, 52, 294n84, 318n53 sovereignty, 8–9, 17, 100, 122, 127–128, 181–184, 189–192, 195, 206–207, 229–230 Staël, Germaine de, 24 state formation, French Revolution and, 8–9, 122, 206–207, 208, 229–230, 241–243, 276 state formation and money, 12–13, 122–123, 252–256 stereotype printing, 195–196 stuff, 1, 14–15, 36 symbols and political culture, 18, 129, 140–143 Tackett, Timothy, 59, 298n14 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 60, 67, 135, 146, 301n44 Tallien, Jean-Lambert, 183, 199, 223, 225, 230 Taws, Richard, 243 taxes and taxation, 12, 48– 49, 57, 69–70, 73–74, 84, 213–214, 225, 227–229, 248, 252–254, 267 temporality and historicity, 16, 17–18, 35, 50, 53, 64, 66, 72, 75–76, 85, 101, 207–208, 234, 237–240, 245–246, 252, 259, 269–270, 274–277

350

Index

Tennis Court Oath, 15, 17, 55, 151 Terror, 170–172, 175, 204–208, 216, 222–225, 227, 230, 231–232, 236, 276 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 17, 54, 58, 122, 271–272, 275–276 Toul, 110, 113, 116, 119, 309n40 Toulon, 161, 247, 263 Toulouse, 38, 40, 120–121, 161 Troyes, 75, 158 trust, monetary, 6–7, 107–108, 115–116, 124–128, 174, 236, 263–264, 272; breakdown of, 56, 74, 155–159, 166–168, 174–175, 184–188, 208–209, 211–213, 219–221, 228–230, 277 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 31, 36, 40, 43, 47, 163 uncertainty, reactions to, 26–27, 31, 55, 73–74, 89, 210–211, 220–221, 222, 229–230, 231 usury, 21, 161

Varennes, Flight to, 140–141, 162–163 Velde, François, 146 venal office, 33, 43, 69, 84– 85, 87, 89 Vendée, 191, 208 Vernet, Jacob (Genevan theologian), 24–26, 288n16 Vernier, Théodore, 58, 87, 147, 161, 189, 226–229, 317n46 Voltaire, 12, 23, 32, 82, 230 votes and voting procedure, 60, 89–94 wallets, 77, 115, 143, 152 wallpaper, 18, 48, 64, 110, 140, 193, 199 wars, revolutionary, 180–182, 189, 206, 208–209 Weber, Max, 8 White, Andrew D., 9–10, 214–215 White, Eugene, 51, 298n15 Young, Arthur, 16