Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution by Rebecca L. Spang

Author:Rebecca L. Spang
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic History, Money & Monetary Policy, History, Europe, France
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-01-06T01:07:44.549000+00:00

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 fought to position itself as the sole legitimate maker of money. Both conflicts 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 fulfill 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 conflict 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.

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