Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended
    Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended
    Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended

    By Andrew Dickson White

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended" by Andrew Dickson White. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigiCat
    Release dateAug 15, 2022
    ISBN8596547177371
    Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended

    Read more from Andrew Dickson White

    Related to Fiat Money Inflation in France

    Related ebooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Shockwaves Of Revolution

      Jul 8, 2021

      Shockwaves Of Revolution
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Guillotine Mystique

      Oct 23, 2020

      The Guillotine Mystique
      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Paying For Revolution

      Aug 13, 2021

      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 t

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The History Of The Nation State

      Feb 27, 2020

      The History Of The Nation State
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      War-war Leads To Jaw-jaw

      Aug 26, 2021

      THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF historians has been that the proliferation of written constitutions in recent centuries around the globe was primarily the result of a tendency towards democracy. Linda Colley offers a starkly different interpretation and ram

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Connecting The Dots

      Dec 11, 2022

      Connecting The Dots
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Early Worthless Money

      May 20, 2022

      Early Worthless Money
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A New Force Set Loose

      Feb 16, 2024

      A New Force Set Loose
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Tale Of Two Revolutions

      Jul 9, 2020

      A Tale Of Two Revolutions
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Ties that Bind Us

      Mar 31, 2023

      If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely? The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Interview / Kris Manjapra

      Apr 14, 2022

      Ellie Cawthorne: You argue in Black Ghost of Empire that “the history of emancipation from slavery is not a story of endings, but unendings”. What do you mean by that? Kris Manjapra: We tend to think of the ending of slavery as a “once-and-done” mome

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      "The 1848 Uprisings Were A Dissonant Orchestra Of Ambitions And Intentions"

      Apr 13, 2023

      Matt Elton: Before we explore the causes of the revolutions of 1848, could you sketch out where and when they took place? Christopher Clark: In January 1848, revolution broke out in Palermo and N aples, two major cities of what was then called the Ki

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

      Sep 27, 2024

      A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When The Left Thought Free Trade Meant Peace

      Apr 25, 2024

      ‘‘FREE TRADE IS JESUS CHRIST AND Jesus Christ is Free Trade.” Among the litany of arresting claims made about free exchange in the 250-odd years since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, this pronouncement by the British utilitarian and colon

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Reverse The Flow

      Mar 31, 2024

      Reverse The Flow
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Beneath The Glitz And Glamour

      Feb 16, 2023

      Beneath The Glitz And Glamour
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Documenting History

      Mar 18, 2021

      Documenting History
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rebel States To World Power

      Oct 19, 2021

      Rebel States To World Power
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Price of Privacy

      Apr 6, 2022

      The Price of Privacy
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Writing A New Chapter

      Sep 2, 2021

      Writing A New Chapter
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When Money Went Mad

      Oct 11, 2024

      If, on 19 October 1913, you wanted to send a letter from Berlin to Frankfurt, it would cost 10 pfennigs, one tenth of that most solid of things, a German mark. The stamp illustrated, for 50 thousand million marks, was issued exactly ten years later (

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Victorian Form Of Justice

      Jun 10, 2022

      The Victorian Form Of Justice
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Fiat Money Inflation in France

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Fiat Money Inflation in France - Andrew Dickson White

      Andrew Dickson White

      Fiat Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended

      EAN 8596547177371

      DigiCat, 2022

      Contact: [email protected]

      Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      FOREWORD BY MR. JOHN MACKAY

      FIAT MONEY INFLATION IN FRANCE

      How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended

      I.

      II.

      III.

      INTRODUCTION

      Table of Contents

      As far back as just before our Civil War I made, in France and elsewhere, a large collection of documents which had appeared during the French Revolution, including newspapers, reports, speeches, pamphlets, illustrative material of every sort, and, especially, specimens of nearly all the Revolutionary issues of paper money,—from notes of ten thousand livres to those of one sou.

      Upon this material, mainly, was based a course of lectures then given to my students, first at the University of Michigan and later at Cornell University, and among these lectures, one on Paper Money Inflation in France.

      This was given simply because it showed one important line of facts in that great struggle; and I recall, as if it were yesterday, my feeling of regret at being obliged to bestow so much care and labor upon a subject to all appearance so utterly devoid of practical value. I am sure that it never occurred, either to my Michigan students or to myself, that it could ever have any bearing on our own country. It certainly never entered into our minds that any such folly as that exhibited in those French documents of the eighteenth century could ever find supporters in the United States of the nineteenth.

      Some years later, when there began to be demands for large issues of paper money in the United States, I wrought some of the facts thus collected into a speech in the Senate of the State of New York, showing the need of especial care in such dealings with financial necessities.

      In 1876, during the greenback craze, General Garfield and Mr. S. B. Crittenden, both members of the House of Representatives at that time, asked me to read a paper on the same general subject before an audience of Senators and Representatives of both parties in Washington. This I did, and also gave it later before an assemblage of men of business at the Union League Club in New York.

      Various editions of the paper were afterward published, among them, two or three for campaign purposes, in the hope that they might be of use in showing to what folly, cruelty, wrong and rain the passion for fiat money may lead.

      Other editions were issued at a later period, in view of the principle involved in the proposed unlimited coinage of silver in the United States, which was, at bottom, the idea which led to that fearful wreck of public and private prosperity in France.

      For these editions there was an added reason in the fact that the utterances of sundry politicians at that time pointed clearly to issues of paper money practically unlimited. These men were logical enough to see that it would be inconsistent to stop at the unlimited issue of silver dollars which cost really something when they could issue unlimited paper dollars which virtually cost nothing.

      In thus exhibiting facts which Bishop Butler would have recognized as confirming his theory of The Possible Insanity of States, it is but just to acknowledge that the French proposal was vastly more sane than that made in our own country. Those French issues of paper rested not merely on the will of a free people, but on one-third of the entire landed property of France; on the very choicest of real property in city and country—the confiscated estates of the Church and of the fugitive aristocracy—and on the power to use the paper thus issued in purchasing this real property at very low prices.

      I have taken all pains to be exact, revising the whole paper in the light of the most recent publications and giving my authority for every important statement, and now leave the whole matter with my readers.

      At the request of a Canadian friend, who has expressed a strong wish that this work be brought down to date, I have again restudied the subject in the light of various works which have appeared since my earlier research,—especially Levasseur's Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l'industrie en France,—one of the really great books of the twentieth century;—Dewarmin's superb Cent Ans de numismatique Française and sundry special treatises. The result has been that large additions have been made regarding some important topics, and that various other parts of my earlier work have been made more clear by better arrangement and supplementary information.

      ANDREW D. WHITE. Cornell University, September, 1912.

      FOREWORD BY MR. JOHN MACKAY

      Table of Contents

      I am greatly indebted to the generosity of Mr. Andrew D. White, the distinguished American scholar, author and diplomatist, for permission to print and to circulate privately a small edition of his exceedingly valuable account of the great currency-making experiment of the French Revolutionary Government. The work has been revised and considerably enlarged by Mr. White for the purpose of the present issue.

      The story of Fiat Money Inflation in France is one of great interest to legislators, to economic students, and to all business and thinking men. It records the most gigantic attempt ever made in the history of the world by a government to create an inconvertible paper currency, and to maintain its circulation at various levels of value. It also records what is perhaps the greatest of all governmental efforts—with the possible exception of Diocletian's—to enact and enforce a legal limit of commodity prices. Every fetter that could hinder the will or thwart the wisdom of democracy had been shattered, and in consequence every device and expedient that untrammelled power and unrepressed optimism could conceive were brought to bear. But the attempts failed. They left behind them a legacy of moral and material desolation and woe, from which one of the most intellectual and spirited races of Europe has suffered for a century and a quarter, and will continue to suffer until the end of time. There are limitations to the powers of governments and of peoples that inhere in the constitution of things, and that neither despotisms nor democracies can overcome.

      Legislatures are as powerless to abrogate moral and economic laws as they are to abrogate physical laws. They cannot convert wrong into right nor divorce effect from cause, either by parliamentary majorities, or by unity of supporting public opinion. The penalties of such legislative folly will always be exacted by inexorable time. While these propositions may be regarded as mere commonplaces, and while they are acknowledged in a general way, they are in effect denied by many of the legislative experiments and the tendencies of public opinion of the present day. The story, therefore, of the colossal folly of France in the closing part Of the eighteenth century and its terrible fruits, is full of instruction for all men who think upon the problems of our own time.

      From among an almost infinite variety, there are four great and fundamental facts that clearly emerge, namely,—

      (1) Notwithstanding the fact that the paper currency issued was the direct obligation of the State, that much of it was interest bearing, and that all of it was secured upon the finest real estate in France, and that penalties in the way of fines, imprisonments and death were enacted from time to time to maintain its circulation at fixed values, there was a steady depreciation in value until it reached zero point and culminated in repudiation. The aggregate of the issues

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1