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

The most spectacular monetary collapse in modern history happened not in some distant failed state, but in France at the height of revolutionary idealism. When the French government faced crushing debt in 1789, it made a fateful choice: print money. What began as assignats backed by confiscated church lands devolved into an uncontrolled printing press that destroyed the French economy and devastated its most vulnerable citizens. Andrew Dickson White, drawing on extensive primary documents, reconstructs this financial catastrophe with precision and moral clarity. The paper currency that promised to fund liberty and equality instead enriched speculators while wiping out the life savings of workers, servants, and small merchants. By 1795, the assignat had collapsed to roughly one-three-hundredth of its face value, then to nothing. White's account remains essential reading not as dry economic history, but as a stark demonstration of how political idealism combined with monetary experimentation can produce ruin on a national scale. The lessons here extend far beyond the 1790s.