THE BRITISH NUMISMATIST

Our regular round-up of the academic side of the hobby, including the final part of our guide to Gallic coins

War and financial innovation have been inextricably linked over the centuries. In some cases, however, the results could be economically disastrous. One of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon occurred during the French Revolution in late 18th-century France and involved the over-production of paper notes known as assignat. In this article we consider one of these notes in the Fitzwilliam Museum collection and explore its background and the consequences of its massive overproduction

The French Revolution, like the American, was built on paper promises. The Estates-General printed interest-bearing paper bonds known as assignat which were backed against the sale of confiscated church and patrician lands. Initially conceived as a temporary measure they became the official currency in 1790. More than a billion assignat notes were printed leading to massive hyperinflation and the ruin of thousands of people. Assignat production exploded as the Estates-General struggled to finance the new revolutionary economy and very quickly the value of the assignats in circulation dwarfed the value of the lands supposed to back them.

An easy target for domestic counterfeiters (more than 1,300 individuals were guillotined for forging assignats in France), these notes were also imitated by British forgers as a form of economic warfare. Contemporary sources tell us that ‘in the years 1793 and 1794, Government, Mr Pitt being Minister, caused an immense number of assignats of various values to be fabricated in England, and a prodigious quantity was poured into France… from Flanders and from the coast of Brittany for the rebels in La Vendee’.

Finished notes were transported to France via two routes. One was with the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders, directly involving the British military at the highest level. The second was via a base in Jersey, used particularly on the emigre invasion of Brittany in 1794 (Bower 1995, 51).

Money was important financially, but also symbolically. The statesman and economist Edmund Burke condemned the state’s issuing of paper money in suitably harsh terms. He saw ‘this compulsory paper currency as a ‘violent… outrage upon credit, property, and liberty’. Paper money in France, Burke argued, had reversed both the social and the natural order, that the assignat had driven gold and silver coins to ‘hid[e] themselves in the earth from whence they came’ thereby undoing the human labour of mining, and that ‘paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man’ had replaced the ‘real hearts of flesh and blood’ formerly beating in Frenchmen’s bosoms.

The object

Most assignat conform to a fairly utilitarian design, but the earlier pieces printed in the period before the execution of Louis XVI, are more interesting. The piece shown here is a 100 livres note dated 19 June 1791. At this stage the authority of the king still counted for something and so his image was still present on the note. However, after his execution the royal likeness and symbols of the Old Regime were soon replaced with a more appropriate republican visual language on coins and notes.

For contemporaries the assignat were deeply unpopular and draconian measures were introduced to force people to accept them. The war against Austria, the Terror and the Vendee Rebellion led to 13,000% inflation by 1795 and so an assignat that had been worth 100 livres, was worth no more than 15 sous. Several factors contributed to the rampant over-production, rapid depreciation and collapse of the assignats, and they were officially demonetised on 30 January 1796. In early 1796 the assignats were withdrawn and thousands burnt in a public ceremony at the Place Vendôme in Paris. Public relief was short-lived as a new series of paper notes known as the mandats territoriaux were issued in their place and quickly failed.