‘As solid as and more precious than gold’: Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, John Law and the legacy of the assignats in nineteenth-century France (2020)
Greenfield, Jerome (Author)
French History
Volume: 34
Issue: 2
Pages: 191-212
Publication date: 2020
It is a truism that the experience of the assignats in the 1790s deterred the French from paper-based wealth during the nineteenth century, a notion that dovetails with a long-standing narrative of French economic backwardness in this period, particularly relative to Britain. This article revisits this interpretation through the study of proposals for public borrowing during the late Empire and early Restoration, most notably those promoted by the financier Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard to finance the payment of reparations after the Napoleonic Wars. Ouvrard’s schemes for the mass issuing of bonds embodied ideas that were remarkably similar to those underlying the assignats and John Law’s system of 1716–20, which suggests that the French were much less wary of paper assets than historians have assumed.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Jim Bolton;
Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli;
(2021)
‘Your flexible friend’: the bill of exchange in theory and practice in the fifteenth century†
Book
Stuart John Barton;
(2016)
Policy Signals and Market Responses: A 50-year History of Zambia's Relationship with Foreign Capital
Article
Iain P. Watts;
(2015)
Philosophical Intelligence: Letters, Print, and Experiment during Napoleon’s Continental Blockade
Article
Mirela Altic;
(2024)
Science and imperialism: Setting the maritime sovereignty at the periphery of the French Empire through the survey of the Adriatic Sea (1806–1809)
Article
Charly Coleman;
(2019)
The Spirit of SpeculationJohn Law and Economic Theology in the Age of Lights
Article
Trevor Jackson;
(2020)
Between Independence and Impunity: The Theory of Proto-Central Banking After the Crisis of 1720
Article
Patrice Baubeau;
Eric Monnet;
Angelo Riva;
Stefano Ungaro;
(2021)
Flight‐to‐safety and the credit crunch: A new history of the banking crises in France during the Great Depression
Book
Hubert Bonin;
(2020)
Saint-Gobain et ses banquiers, 1914-2000: enjeux et méthodes du financement d'une grande entreprise, [Saint-Gobain and its bankers, 1914–2000: Issues and methods of financing a large company]
Book
Anders Engberg-Pedersen;
(2015)
Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things
Chapter
Mat Paskins;
(2018)
The Woods for the State
Thesis
Iain P. Watts;
(2015)
"Current" Events: Galvanism and the World of Scientific Information, 1790–1830
Book
David R. Bellhouse;
(2023)
The Flawed Genius of William Playfair: The Story of the Father of Statistical Graphics
Book
Jeffrey Sklansky;
(2017)
Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America
Book
Michael Schiltz;
(2020)
Accounting for the fall of silver : Hedging currency risk in long-distance trade with Asia, 1870-1913
Article
Alexia Yates;
(2021)
Investor Letters and the Everyday Practice of Finance in Nineteenth-Century France
Article
Sebastian Felten;
(2023)
Money Supplies
Book
Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff;
(2014)
Colonising Plants in Bihar (1760-1950): Tobacco Betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane
Book
Jeremy Black;
(2017)
Mapping Naval Warfare: A Visual History of Conflict at Sea
Book
Peter Knight;
(2016)
Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America
Book
Mary E. Hansen;
(2020)
Bankrupt in America: A history of debtors, their creditors, and the law in the twentieth century
Be the first to comment!