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Updated: May 24, 2025
Every week now, the pot-au-feu and other meats for ragouts, without any butter, eggs and other details, cost from seven to eight hundred francs. Washing also goes up so fast that eight thousand francs do not suffice. Nevertheless, I have urgent need of some things for which I should require piles of assignats."
When a great part of France became national property, men were the more easily persuaded that land can serve as the basis of public credit and of unlimited assignats.
They are, I believe, chiefly men who have speculated on the assignats, and as soon as they have turned their capital in a mercantile way a short time, become apprehensive of the paper, realize it, and retire; or, becoming bankrupts by some unlucky monopoly, begin a new career of patriotism. There is, properly speaking, no money in circulation, yet a vast quantity is bought and sold.
Gay equipages were seen in the streets; theatres, prosperous even during the Terror, were now filled to overflowing; gambling, whether in money or in stocks and assignats, was now permeating all grades of society; and men who had grown rich by amassing the confiscated State lands now vied with bankers, stock-jobbers, and forestallers of grain in vulgar ostentation.
"I don't know how you are situated, monsieur, but times are hard, and all salaries terribly in arrears; and when they are paid it is in assignats, and I need hardly say that when you pay in assignats you don't buy cheap." "We have money," Leigh said, "and I would pay any reasonable sum, in gold, for proper papers." "Sapristi! You might almost tempt the maire himself, by offering him gold.
At the instance of Bridoul he had speculated a little in assignats which were constantly fluctuating in value. It was the only negotiation in which Coursegol would consent to embark. He might have trafficked in the estates of the Émigres which the Republic was selling at a merely nominal price; but he had no desire to become the owner of what he considered stolen property.
The real value of the mandats speedily sank to about two per cent of their nominal value and the only effect of this legislation seemed to be that both assignats and mandats went still lower.
Without, the armies were destitute of baggage-wagons, horses, and supplies; the soldiers were in want of clothes, and the generals were often unable to liquidate their pay of eight francs a month in specie, an indispensable supplement, small as it was, to their pay in assignats; and lastly, the troops, discontented and undisciplined, on account of their necessities, were again beaten, and on the defensive.
If the landed man wishes to mortgage, he falls the value of his land and raises the value of assignats. He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must take to contend with him.
The foreign demand, which at first had been stimulated, soon fell off. In no way can this be better stated than by one of the most thoughtful historians of modern times, who says, "It is true that at first the assignats gave the same impulse to business in the city as in the country, but the apparent improvement had no firm foundation, even in the towns.
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