



Produced by Gordon Keener









FIAT MONEY INFLATION IN FRANCE

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

by Andrew Dickson White, LL.D., Ph.D., D.C.L.


Late President and Professor of History at Cornell University; Sometime
United States Minister to Russia and Ambassador to Germany; Author of "A
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology," etc.




INTRODUCTION

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