Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

Rebecca L. Spang

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674745421
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearRebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats —a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land"—to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions."This is a quite brilliant, assertive book."
—Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement "Brilliant…What [Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution…She has provided historians—and not just those of France or the French Revolution—with a new set of lenses with which to view the past."
—Arthur Goldhammer, Bookforum "[Spang] views the French Revolution from rewardingly new angles by analyzing the cultural significance of money in the turbulent years of European war, domestic terror and inflation."
—Tony Barber, Financial Times

1

The Time of the Debt

Res mobilis, res vilis.

IN HIS SPLENDID RESIDENCE on Geneva’s most fashionable street, the French king’s representative counted girls. Sometimes, there were thirty of them; at other times, only twenty-nine. Some days, he counted sixty; some days, barely half that number. But always—as often as twice a week or even twice a day—he counted girls. On the first of July 1784, he began the day by ticking off the names of twenty-seven; a few hours later, he carefully noted the presence of over a hundred “ladies and young ladies.” In October of the same year, his formal reception rooms must have taken on a schoolhouse air, as twenty-nine little girls (all under the age of seven) gathered there one morning.¹ On other occasions, the same space was transformed for a few hours into a sort of ballroom environment as dozens of young women—all educated and affluent and known to each other at least by face and name—were ushered onto the premises by their attentive guardians.

During any of these sessions, the French diplomat’s only official interest was in determining whether these girls and young women—all of whose names were on lists before him—were still alive (still alive, a mere six months after the last time he had conducted such an exercise). If they were alive and present to be counted, France owed money to the girls’ fathers and uncles, cousins and brothers, many of whom were bankers who themselves owed money to investors all across Europe. If, by chance, one of them had died, the French state’s debt was slightly reduced. If, in some horrible conflagration, the entire female population of Geneva had perished simultaneously, it might have been as much as 40 percent of the French monarchy’s short-term borrowing that was redeemed in an instant.²

As peculiar and unfamiliar as these regularly repeated headcounts may seem today, they were central to the workings of international credit in the final years of the Old Regime.³ We know that credit mattered in those years because highly charged debates about the size of the monarchy’s debt and the need for higher taxes dominated French public life throughout the 1780s. Yet credit’s day-to-day functioning—the contracts written, the goods acquired, and even the young women counted—is often overshadowed by our knowledge that those political debates ended in what we now call “the French Revolution.” Usually studied because they precipitated something so very unanticipated, our familiarity with those debates about the royal debt has made it increasingly difficult to see what people in the 1780s expected the future to be like. While many of those expectations came to little, we need to take them into account nonetheless, for they were the basis upon which the people of France borrowed money, lent funds, and lived their lives. This chapter therefore leaves aside the public, political debates to focus on how borrowing and lending, debt and credit actually operated. For as other scholars have argued, credit was the basic glue of early-modern societies.⁴ At the local level, as at the international; for artisans, as for princes; over months and years as over decades (and even longer)—relations of debt and credit united communities and gave individuals a strong sense of their own place in the world. Its politicization in the 1770s and 1780s has blinded us to how very routine, stable, and nonrevolutionary the king’s borrowing (and that of his subjects) actually was. It was not the size of the debt, per se, but the scale of political agitation around it, that increased dramatically in the final years of the Old Regime.

Thirty Girls from Geneva

As of the mid-eighteenth century, it had become standard operating policy for the French government to raise short-term funds through a sort of disguised loan contract known as a rente viagère (“lifetime annuity” is a close, but not perfect, translation).⁵ With such a rente, an investor made a lump-sum payment to the French state. In exchange, he or she received a certain percentage of that amount on a semiannual basis for as long as some individual specified in the rente contract remained alive. When that named individual died, the payments stopped immediately—hence the name “viagère” (from the root vivre, “to live”). In legal terms, a rente was not a loan and the state was neither repaying the money in increments nor paying “interest” on it; rather, it was a situation in which a creditor/investor/“lender” (crédirentier) used a certain sum to purchase a future regular income from another party (the débirentier or “borrower,” in this case, the French monarchy through the intermediary of the Paris city government).

Rentes of all kinds—whether contracted between two individuals or between individuals and corporate entities (such as states, cities, or monastic orders), whether contracted for a lifetime or forever—were debt-credit relations that emerged in the thirteenth century as ways of getting around religious prohibitions on usury.⁶ Since the heyday of the medieval commercial revolution, jurists and theologians had repeatedly drawn on an extraordinary variety of authorities (including Aristotle, the early Church fathers, and the sixth-century Justinian Code) to buttress their definition of usury—by which they meant any interest-bearing loan—as a sin against both charity and justice. Many of their arguments turned on claims about money’s inherently “sterile” and inert qualities. Unlike livestock, or even a plot of land on which new crops sprouted every year, money did not reproduce itself organically. Money, Thomas of Aquinas argued, was simply a “measure of utility,” and while useful things might become more or less available, the measure had to remain constant. “Whence to receive more money for less,” he concluded, “seems nothing other than to diversify the measure in giving and receiving, which manifestly contains iniquity.”⁷ (Think of it this way: if an individual went from slim to obese, we would think it fraudulent if he insisted that his weight in pounds was constant but the number of ounces in a pound had changed.) From this perspective, it was legitimate to expect a borrower to return a sum he had been lent, but there was no logical reason to expect that the money had somehow grown in the interim. Medieval law and theology hence considered interest-bearing loans to be unnatural—this was why usurers and sodomites occupied the same circle in Dante’s Inferno.

Rentes, defined not as loans but as forms of sale, made it possible for cash-strapped borrowers and money-burdened lenders to arrange matters among themselves without sinning. With a rente, an individual did not legally lend money; rather, the would-be lender alienated a lump sum in exchange for a regular income stream at a fixed rate. Since the alienation of property was a final sale—that amount of cash was now the débirentier’s to do with as he liked and it, or the goods acquired with it, would pass to his heirs and then to theirs—many rente contracts guaranteed a perpetual income. For decades, or even for centuries, the right to collect and the obligation to pay passed to the descendants of those originally involved. Fixed, and in theory eternal, these perpetual rentes were classed by French property law as a form of immeuble, or immovable property. In contrast, a rente viagère was treated as a meuble, or piece of movable property. Of finite duration, a lifetime rente had none of the permanence predicated by jurists of immovable goods. Life, after all, was far from perpetual (especially in early-modern Europe, where high infant mortality rates made average life expectancy at birth under thirty). If, in legal terms, a perpetual rente was a “commutative” contract guaranteeing that each party received what he expected, a lifetime rente could offer no such assurance. French jurists hence classed rentes viagères as they did investment in long-distance shipping; both were “aleatory,” or subject to chance, both involved elements of risk impossible to predict. “In a rente viagère,” explained one legal dictionary, “the sum received … is not inherently the equivalent of what the recipient then gives, for the person on whose life the contract was based could happen to die a few days after the rente was constituted … and hence one party will effectively have given nothing for the money he received.… one cannot say that the trade was fair and equal.”⁸

Insofar as it seemed plausible for France to raise (rather than lose) money by selling them, rentes viagères belonged to a risk culture in which death was assumed to be as likely—in many ways more likely—than life. Crédirentiers in the eighteenth century nonetheless found ways to prolong the income they received from these rentes. Since the life specified in a rente contract (known as the tête, or “head”) did not have to be the person providing the funds, it became common for middle-aged or elderly people to invest their life’s savings while simultaneously picking a healthy, younger family member as the contract’s tête—this ensured that payments continued to be made long after the original investor had died and the initial capital had been repaid. With state-issued rentes viagères paying at least 6 or 7 percent, the sum alienated could easily be regained in sixteen years and if the rente had been issued on the “head” of a healthy teenager, many further years of payments could be anticipated. Very good money could be made by finding the right heads.

In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and especially following its costly participation in the American War of Independence, the French state relied heavily on rentes viagères to raise funds. To ensure that they were fully subscribed—and hence that the monarchy had the money it needed to meet monthly operating expenses—these new rentes paid ever more attractive rates (up to 10 percent), and the paperwork involved in issuing them was simplified. Yet in order to collect the twice yearly payments, it still had to be established that the “tête” named in the contract was actually alive. Many rentes viagères were therefore issued on the head of the king or the life of the pope, but even more were issued on “thirty girls” or “thirty heads” from Geneva. In this latter configuration, wealth was divided across multiple rente contracts, thereby minimizing the chance of a dramatic loss. Individuals had made use of such strategies for years. For example, rather than investing 3,000 livres on just one of his many children, the Swiss pastor and librarian Antoine Josué Diodati could invest 500 livres on the “head” of his daughter Colombine and an equal amount on each of her five sisters. His total capital outlay would still be 3,000 livres and his revenue from the rentes would be the same, but by dividing his investment he would have greatly reduced the chance of losing his entire income overnight. In the 1770s, a group of Genevan bankers turned this family-based strategy into a business model when they began subscribing large sums of money on the heads (that is, on the lives) of their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and cousins—in short, any affluent young female they could find (including, in fact, Colombine Diodati and at least four of her sisters).⁹ Knowing from life-expectancy tables compiled by members of the local learned academy that women, on average, lived longer than men, and wanting to limit their potential losses as much as possible, the bankers pooled their investments: they consistently placed their money not on a single head, but spread across “thirty young ladies from Geneva” (trente demoiselles de Genève). Should one die, twenty-nine thirtieths of their investment would nonetheless remain intact. By 1789, rente contracts written on “thirty heads” made up a sizeable percentage of the French state’s debt. It was up to the French king’s representative in Geneva to keep track of those heads.

The small and closed nature of Genevan society meant that participation—either as an investor or as one of the “heads from Geneva”—quickly extended far beyond any narrow circle of bankers and their children. Already in 1773, Voltaire commented testily that the city was soon to be more famous for rentes viagères than for its printers “or even for Calvin.”¹⁰ Nearly every member of the city’s intellectual elite was involved: the mathematician and professor Louis Bertrand had four daughters, all of whom were numbered among the “girls from Geneva,” as were at least six of his nieces. So, too, were the daughters and nieces of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, rector of the Academy of Geneva, founder of the Journal de Genève, and renowned Alpine explorer; of the historian and one-time tutor to the crown prince of Denmark Henri Paul Mallet; of the pastor and Orientalist Gedeon Le Cointe; and of the publishers who partnered to reprint Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Gabriel Cramer and Samuel de Tournes. Ticking off names on the first of July 1784, the French king’s representative noted the presence of Jeanne Cathérine and Elisabeth Anne Rilliet, daughters of the city’s former First Syndic; of Marie Thérèse Liotard, the portrait painter’s daughter; and of ninety-nine others—this in a city with a population of roughly 20,000.¹¹ If the best known of Genevan bankers’ daughters, Germaine de Staël (née Necker), seems never to have been among the “heads” enumerated, many of her cousins most definitely were.¹²

Connected by ties of blood and marriage—the mathematician Bertrand, for instance, was married to a banker’s granddaughter and his brother-in-law’s brother was a partner in the Paris bank, Necker et Compagnie¹³—these families also shared a patrician culture in which this scheme made intellectual, financial, and even theological sense. While eighteenth-century Geneva remained profoundly Protestant, its Calvinism was neither as severe nor as ascetic (nor, indeed, as democratic) as it had been a century and a half earlier. No longer a faith that held human depravity as axiomatic, Genevan Calvinism had become “anthropologically optimistic.”¹⁴ The prominent midcentury theologian Jacob Vernet (also the editor of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws), maintained that man was born “to live in society … he is endowed with the faculty of reason [and hence] of reflecting on all sorts of subjects and foreseeing the future.” In the writings and sermons of Vernet, faith and rational calculation often coincided. Observing the world, establishing its patterns, and even “foreseeing the future” all belonged to a natural theology in which “there is nothing more beautiful for an intelligent creature than to study in Nature the ways of Supreme Wisdom.”¹⁵

It is therefore not surprising that at least three of Vernet’s own granddaughters figured among the “girls from Geneva.”¹⁶ A wide variety of factors—from the impressive completeness of its vital-records archives and the insularity of its ruling oligarchy to trends in religious thought and attitudes toward...