TY - JOUR
AU1 - Jarvis, Katie L
AB - Abstract At the start of the French Revolution, the National Assembly faced two major economic and social challenges: the staggering debt and a society entrenched in corporate hierarchies. This article examines how, as the deputies overhauled the currency system to shore up state finances, money created unexpected popular inroads to both arenas of reform. In order to quickly emit new paper money called assignats, the deputies first printed bills in denominations too large for retail trade. In response, Parisian merchants formed novel coalitions to protect alternative forms of small change. They joined forces across traditional occupational divisions to evaluate currency and call for practical tokens. In doing so, the retailers influenced the trajectory of national monetary reform from 1790 to 1793. Unable to subdivide large assignats, everyday citizens turned to nascent financial societies for usable tokens. The resulting monetary networks delineated new groups of individuals who required common bill denominations, relied on overlapping systems of credit, and shared confidence in local issuers of promissory notes. Thus, rather than petitioning the state as distinct trade corporations, butter merchants, fish wholesalers, carpenters, and others formed innovative alliances as currency communities. Therefore, this article argues that even before the deputies abolished the guilds in 1791, Parisians reached across the boundaries of corporate society. Merchants continued these diverse associations after 1791 in order to avoid charges of illegal syndicalism. While demanding pocket change, the popular classes reimagined social identities and reordered the corporate world from within between 1789 and 1793. On May 21, 1792, Parisian market women called the Dames des Halles filtered into the Legislative Assembly to deliver a curious address. The deputies seated before them had audaciously declared war against Austria one month earlier. Offering a “tribute” to defend the nation, the Dames des Halles presented the deputies with a modest purse filled with promissory coins. Yet, as the clinking money settled on the desk, the merchants suddenly complained about the literal tokens of their donation. Since the revolutionary currency came in denominations far too large to sell a few fish or vegetables, the Dames were forced to rely on these smaller promissory coins. The retailers lamented that the tender caused them “countless losses.” The market women brazenly accused the issuing banks of corporate privilege—the sinister ghost of the Old Regime. “Let this money no longer be a privilege [of the issuers] that excludes us,” the Dames implored their representatives. Would the deputies, they asked, remedy the small change crisis?1 While addressing an Assembly rocked by war, why did the Dames focus more on the physical money they offered than the troops it would support? How could a critique of currency reform overshadow a looming invasion? Much to the deputies’ chagrin, implementing the revolutionary currency called the assignat was a collaborative project. Although historians have discerned how the deputies intended the assignat to function through state and financial institutions, many questions remain about how the assignat affected trade in the marketplace and how everyday trade influenced assignat policy in return.2 The Assembly could order printers to strike assignat notes and could back them with new national lands. However, the Assembly could not guarantee that citizens used the assignats nor could it legislate local confidence in them. There was no other place where this reality was more evident or perilous than in the central food markets of les Halles. The volatile subsistence trade greatly informed Parisian politics, yet it hinged on vulnerable systems of credit and unreliable food supplies. The lack of usable cash and rapid inflation exacerbated food problems. Instability limited credit in commerce and small change became more valuable to buyers and sellers alike.3 When the overwhelmed government deferred to assignat-backed promissory notes to provide merchants with small denominations from 1790 to 1793, the market women found themselves caught in a maelstrom of monetary controversies. As the Dames and fellow merchants repeatedly lobbied the state to shore up their collapsing local tokens, they changed the trajectory of national currency reform. The dearth of small coins encouraged revolutionaries to experiment with innovative socioeconomic partnerships and political identities in the marketplace. This study demonstrates that, despite the veneer of sterile pecuniary formulas, the revolutionaries negotiated monetary reform as an ongoing process. Rebecca Spang has advanced our knowledge of revolutionary money by examining the players who devised the currency and struck the tokens.4 However, we know far less about how this money worked, or did not work, in community transactions. This article first reveals how the Dames and fellow Parisians reinvented themselves to cope with the disarray of cash and credit. Then, it probes how diverse citizens banded together in the struggle to defend tokens for trade. Money, I argue, became a concrete conduit for effecting the core social transformations at the heart of the Revolution. That is to say, it encouraged people to look across the guild boundaries of corporate society to other shared socioeconomic interests. Vegetable hawkers, joiners, haberdashers, fish brokers, printers, and market-goers gradually recognized common currency challenges. Thus, monetary problems unexpectedly spurred the popular classes to restructure social identities through everyday trade. When the Dames insinuated that “privilege” corrupted promissory coins, they exposed the serious social and ideological ramifications of currency. Privilege formed the core of the crumbling corporate world. Trade associations, religious institutions, social groups, and even geographical regions had their own, sometimes clashing, permissions stemming from the crown.5 Guilds, in particular, segregated masters and workers by trade and represented collective interests to state officials.6 This occupational organization of the Old Regime officially screeched to a halt when the National Assembly abolished the guilds in 1791. Past studies have spotlighted the guilds and state officials as the primary actors in reconfiguring the corporate world. Recent work has demonstrated that the guilds were flexible and dynamic organisms during Louis XVI’s reign. Jeff Horn has shown how many masters successfully negotiated market demands and evolving economic policies.7 Scholars such as Steven Kaplan, Michael Sonenscher, Clare Crowston, and Michael Fitzsimmons have examined how guild relations were shaped by collective litigation, employment patterns, reactions to state rationalization, and internal tensions among masters and workers.8 Other research has focused on the role of the state in reconfiguring corporate life. In 1776, the monarchy abolished the guilds, only to reform and reinstitute them six months later. Louis XVI opened all guild memberships to women in this overhaul and boosted the eighteenth-century trend in which women increasingly held personal occupations.9 In 1789, the revolutionary legislators immediately pulled at the sinews of the Old Regime corporate body. Michael Fitzsimmons has argued that the National Assembly drove deep cracks in the foundation of the corporate world through administrative and judicial policies prior to 1791.10 All these rich works conceptualize the guilds and state officials as the major players in the corporate world’s final chapter. In contrast, this article demonstrates that individual citizens played a leading and reoccurring role in unraveling the corporatist fabric from 1790 to 1793. This article takes an experience-centered approach to consider how all citizens induced and shaped the pivotal transformation to a postcorporate society. It uses the ubiquitous lens of money to ask how the revolutionaries recreated socioeconomic groups from below. I probe how the Dames des Halles and their neighbors reinvented the corporate world in ways integral to daily life rather than by reacting to antiguild restrictions. I argue that when the deputies began to overhaul the nation’s currency system in 1789, they unintentionally opened the gates for coalitions that cut across corporate boundaries of trade and rank. Citizens formed novel alliances that centered on political and economic issues but did not constitute a continuation of corporate identities or an explicit reaction against them. Instead, the assignat’s shortcomings galvanized alternative associations based on pragmatic concerns of credit and hard cash. Individuals of different occupations had intermittently cooperated across trades during the Old Regime, but they began to collaborate in a more continuous manner from 1789 to 1793. These new coalitions of citizens pointed to their occupational utility, rather than corporate privilege, to demand that the state protect their tokens. In short, the revolutionaries recast economic and political citizenship in tandem to defend their money. The cash needs of everyday trade compelled the Dames and their neighbors to restructure socioeconomic identities, reconfigure political alliances, and experiment with practices of citizenship. In les Halles, pocket money spurred these changes before and after the Assembly legally abolished the guilds. Reforming Cash, Credit, and Currency Communities When the National Assembly swore to take on the national debt at the outset of the Revolution, it squared off against one of the most debilitating problems of the Old Regime. The representatives’ foundational act required them to overhaul the French monetary system. Most official currency under the previous system consisted of coins whose value corresponded to their metallic worth.11 In December 1789, the revolutionary deputies pivoted to paper notes called “assignats,” which they backed by the titles of biens nationaux or newly requisitioned Church properties. While the state assessed land acquisitions, collected revenue, and printed official assignats, the Assembly converted some bills of a private Parisian bank, the Caisse d’Escompte, into temporary “promesses de fournir des assignats” (“promises to be exchanged for assignats”). The deputies planned to use these interest-bearing “promises” to pay state debts until the Caisse d’Escompte could pull the substitutes from circulation and redeem them for official assignats in the fall of 1790. At this point, the deputies reasoned, French citizens could exchange official assignats for deeds to national lands and the assignats would gradually disappear from circulation.12 In September 1790, the deputies changed course and voted to make the assignats into national money without any interest. Officials portrayed the assignats as “circulating land” in paper note form.13 Nevertheless, the currency’s value was less secure than this simple formula suggested. The assignat had partially liquefied backing in the form of national land immediately sold. Tangible assets in the form of land yet-to-be-sold constituted the remaining backing. Therefore, the assignats provided the state with interest-free IOUs on unsold land whose price and purchase were not certain. Nonetheless, by tying the assignat directly to the biens nationaux and circulating them across the nation, the deputies hoped to stabilize trade across regions, quell inflation, and chip away at the debt. Seven hundred and fifty Dames des Halles stood on the fault line of this seismic monetary shift. The assignats rocked the world of small change and credit, and both were longstanding pillars of the Parisian food trade. Microcredit networks relied on communal knowledge of who had a reputation as an amicable informal lender, who made good on their debts, and what resources were available.14 In les Halles, the Dames often took out “small weekly loans” for supplies from money-lenders whose offices dotted the nearby streets. Each retailer contracted her own loans, but some money-lenders assembled groups of Dames and made them swear to be “all guarantors here, one for the other.”15 Thus, individual retail loans wove the collective fabric of the marketplace. The Dames, their small change, and their credit networks traced a similar trajectory almost everyday. First, provincial suppliers carted their foodstuffs to les Halles where brokers bought these countryside goods in wholesale. Next brokers sold subdivided lots to individual Dames on credit or for a mixture of cash and commercial bills. Finally, the retailers sold fish, butter, and vegetables to consumers whom they attracted by extending credit of their own or offering low prices. After collecting small change or promissory bills, the Dames would repay their debts to their brokers or private lenders.16 This precarious mix of credit and small change supported an astonishing amount of trade. By 1790, the sum total of fish sales alone in Les Halles amounted to the equivalent of 4,464,000 small cod, 2,678,400 large cod, or 70,857,000 smoked herrings.17 The Dames’ economic influence dovetailed with their semicorporate identity and tremendous political influence. Occupational privileges and religious confraternities united the Dames. Since the thirteenth century, the king had granted the poor retailers permission to sell in the Paris markets. Because of their special relationship with the king, the Dames had traditionally represented the Third Estate in royal rituals such as marriages, baptisms, and feast days.18 During October 1789, the Dames marched out to Versailles to escort the king and bread back to Paris. They were the first women to receive medals as “good citizenesses” from the National Assembly for their patriotic actions.19 To win over popular opinion in the capital, any national monetary project would have to satisfy the enormous food trade in les Halles and have the support of the market’s politically powerful retailers. On a quotidian level, the Dames des Halles and their neighbors explicitly engaged in the Assembly’s monetary project by trading assignats, assignat-backed bills, private notes, coins, or credit. Each time a citizen sold or purchased food in les Halles, he or she chose which forms of payment to accept. Although merchants were technically required to accept assignats, passing up a sale or accepting smaller substitutes was often more attractive in the face of impractical assignat denominations.20 Through daily exchanges of eggs, fish, and vegetables, citizens personally assessed the assignat’s value. They signaled their economic confidence in the nation’s properties. In the same gesture, citizens enmeshed themselves in the political dimension of currency. As the assignats passed from one hand to another, the currency became an ever-present symbol of the Revolution. Revolutionaries who bought into the assignat system affirmed the state’s just ownership of the lands requisitioned from the Church. Deputy Pinteville de Cernon, a noble on the Committee of Finances, predicted that the new currency would indeed “give all citizens an equal interest in maintaining and defending [the Constitution].”21 Parisian retailers understood that hard cash functioned as a political passport. In January 1790, the flower-sellers of rue Neuve-des-Bons-Enfants left their street stands to take the assembly floor. Speaking on behalf of all Dames des Halles, the market women asked the deputies’ permission to “establish a patriotic treasury in their hands.” After amassing their donations in this treasury, the retailers would deposit its contents as a lump sum in the national treasury.22 The Dames’ financially superfluous request reflected their localized logic of money. In their understanding, the tender’s origins created its cultural value and nominal worth. Although all assignat-backed tokens were theoretically equivalent, the Dames reasoned that they added patriotic value to the money as it passed through their hands. By depositing their collective treasury into the national treasury, the Dames physically and figuratively merged their funds and loyalty with the new state. The practical requirements of hard cash prevented the Dames from embracing the assignat in daily trade. Beginning in 1790, the government printed assignat bills in extremely large denominations of 1000, 300, and 200 livres.23 The deputies hoped to swiftly generate money for the state from the biens nationaux and disseminate the new currency through large sums handled by financial societies and wealthy citizens. The deputies assumed that small trade could continue to operate on a mixture of coins, local credit, and IOU notes, which the Assembly still permitted as part of a free money market.24 But the deputies’ logistical strategy of emitting large assignat denominations marginalized the Dames and their neighbors. Because they were less “credible” than the wealthy, the Dames and the popular classes relied more heavily on cash for transactions.25 Yet, small change was chronically scarce. Moreover, the market women’s modest trade fell far below the lowest assignat threshold. For a Dame selling Neufchâtel cheese for 4 sous or .2 livres per brick, the smallest assignat of 200 livres proved highly unsuitable for her everyday transactions.26 She would need to sell a client one thousand bricks of cheese to accept a single 200-livre assignat! Clearly, the plan could not address the cash exigencies of marketplace trade. The Dames des Halles were not the only citizens stymied by the new currency. Retailers of all sorts needed small change to sell their goods and pay suppliers. Huge assignats risked paralyzing their businesses and marginalizing them politically. As financial problems exacerbated small change shortages in April 1791, one pro-Revolution pamphleteer unleashed Mère Duchêne, a fictive popular class character, to launch an unbridled critique.27 “[S]mall change,” the famous Mère Duchêne declares, “is absolutely necessary for commerce in retail.” She testifies that without practical denominations, consumers cannot pay her retailer husband, and she cannot pay her debts in turn. The deputies essentially risked crippling “the most numerous portion of citizens.” Mère Duchêne demands that the recalcitrant deputies use logic “more from practice than from theory; more from experience than from reasoning” to guide the nation’s monetary policy.28 From the pamphleteer’s perspective, the National Assembly could continuously crunch numbers, but any currency that disregarded marketplace needs would fail. In order to provide small bills and facilitate trade, the deputies allowed citizens to create local substitutes. Public and private financial societies called “caisses” issued assignat-backed promissory notes or coins. Run by municipalities, societies, and private companies, these institutions issued their own billets de confiance (literally “bills of confidence” or promissory notes) in small denominations backed by their assignat holdings. By directly subdividing assignats into smaller billets de confiance, caisses and their clients could use their money in denominations below the 200-livre assignat note. Thus, banks and exchange caisses played a vital role in allowing daily trade under the sum of 200 livres to continue.29 This decentralized system of small notes and coins mixed public trust in national assignats with confidence in local purveyors of credit.30 While using promissory notes, citizens had to have confidence in the equity of the national lands as well as in the security of local monetary networks. Financial companies found the assignat and billet de confiance system appealing. During the Old Regime, financial societies had routinely issued commercial bills backed by debt contracts or IOUs redeemable against assets. The revolutionary billets de confiance allowed companies to expand their services or found a new business altogether. Some caisses profited by charging a fee to convert large assignat denominations into smaller promissory notes.31 Others coupled exchange with auxiliary services to entice new banking clients. In contrast to the assignats that were backed by national lands, the billets de confiance from exchange caisses were required to have completely liquefied backing in the form of assignat reserves or other bank assets.32 However, since any “convertible tokens are interest-free IOUs,” many caisses waded into illegal territory. They outpaced their assignat reserves and speculated with their own promissory notes.33 The deputies’ attempt to solve the small change shortage spawned unstable networks of ever-changing denominations and issuers. From these eclectic sources, a complex web of promissory bills flooded the marketplace. Critics were quick to pounce on the vulnerable assignat and promissory notes. One biting pamphleteer printed his own fake 100-sous note from the “shitty caisse” to illustrate his complete lack of faith in the promissory money and credit. On the satirical note, the author swapped the 1791 assignat’s stoic emblem of a winged man labeled “reign of law” for an unmistakable flying turd. And, in place of the promise “to exchange against Assignats” held at the issuing caisse, the recipient of this fictitious bill would precariously trust the note’s worth on the word of its issuer “Lichette.” (This likely meant a little drunk person—“licher” is slang for “to drink.”) The markings highlight how the promissory notes, far from being sterile tokens of subdivided assignats, depended on local networks and public confidence in the credit of the issuing bank. In this case, the billet’s origin from the “shitty caisse” coupled with the specification that it is “payable in the mouth of the bearer” (instead of “payable to the bearer”) suggests that the holder of the insecure note would eat shit. Although the crude parody was meant to entertain the reader for Carnival, the work insinuated that the “Good-times” of usable currency were dead under the weight of promissory notes dubiously backed by assignats and local confidence.34 Despite their potential shortcomings, the exchange caisses and their promissory notes provided essential services for retail merchants in les Halles. Due to their low-volume commerce, the Dames des Halles were among the first hit by the problems of the large-denomination assignats. Unable to use large assignat bills, the retailers relied on banks and exchange caisses to provide promissory notes in smaller, practical denominations. The state sponsored some of these caisses whereas private companies ran others. Three new Parisian banks in particular opened in 1791 and furnished marketplace money: the Caisse Patriotique (Patriotic Bank), the Maison de Secours (House of Aid) and the Caisse de Commerce (Bank of Commerce). These banks exchanged large assignats or even business credit for tokens that circulated as usable cash in the capital. Financial societies often specialized in different banking services. For example, merchants could ask the Maison de Secours to liquefy their household assets in exchange for promissory notes. The Caisse de Commerce, in contrast, bought commercial contracts and solvent debts and offered billets in return. Caisses that subdivided large bills frequently specialized in particular denominations of promissory notes. The number of promissory notes backed by company assets, commercial IOUs, and assignats skyrocketed and they changed hands more frequently. By accepting or rejecting assignats, promissory notes, metal coins, and credit the Dames and other merchants personally intervened in currency valuation within local monetary networks. For example, beginning in May 1791, the private Caisse Patriotique issued its own subdivided billets de confiance. It guaranteed these notes with its large-denomination assignat holdings.35 Nonetheless, not all merchants eagerly accepted the substitute tender. Journalist Prudhomme, who had supported the switch to assignats, lamented that it was impossible to force any merchants to take the Caisse Patriotique’s notes.36 The merchants’ refusal damaged confidence in an already fragile system. Prudhomme suggested that willing merchants encourage trade by marking their boutiques with signs declaring “here one takes as payment bills of the Caisse Patriotique.”37 The multi-option promissory note system placed significant power in the hands of neighborhood consumers and traders. The assignat system could cripple their trade, but they too could cripple the assignat system. The precarious monetary situation exposed shared interests that cut across corporate and occupational boundaries in les Halles. Clients and merchants could juggle credit in many directions, but they would eventually need cash to settle their accounts. Concerns over practical currency permeated relationships along entire supply lines in the marketplace. Without sufficient small bills, a vegetable-peddling Dame could not sell peas to consumers in household quantities. The Dames’ broker, in turn, could not sell the Dames small lots from their wholesale purchases without giving the retailers extensive credit. The broker would eventually need hard cash to pay the provincial wholesalers who carted their food into the capital. Consider, for example, the challenges of the cheese-selling Dame. If she sold 15 bricks of cheese for 4 sous to clients, she would need to wait until her clients’ debts reached an amount equal to the 2.5-livre denomination to collect payment. Only then, could the Dame pay her broker for her supplies. And only then could the broker pay the wholesaler who committed to carting the cheese over 125 kilometers from Neufchâtel to Paris. In les Halles, consumers, retailers, brokers, and wholesalers held a vested interest in common promissory notes for daily trade. While the intricacies of available denominations plagued the promissory note system inside les Halles, the makeshift tender risked complete collapse at the edges of the marketplace. Since retailers circulated the billets de confiance emitted by neighborhood banks, the substitute cash maintained its worth from local confidence. Countryside suppliers who hauled food into the capital knew that Parisian promissory notes would lose credit as they left the city. Therefore, provincial wholesalers balked at accepting Parisian notes that zipped about les Halles but might seem suspect back in the countryside. The assignat and the billets de confiance consequently encumbered trade between provincial suppliers and capital merchants who straddled different networks of promissory notes. This was not a Parisian problem alone. From 1790 to 1792, 71% of French departments had ten or more issuers of billets de confiance.38 The National Assembly had issued the assignat to provide a standard currency across the nation. Instead, their tactic hardened regional boundaries forged by the reach of local caisses. The assignat staked out completely new “currency communities” within Paris and throughout France.39 By currency communities, I mean groups of individuals who required the same denominations of cash, who relied on overlapping systems of credit, and who shared confidence in local issuers of promissory notes. Of course, Parisians implicitly belonged to similar monetary networks and used informal IOUs during the Old Regime, but the assignat crisis thrust these latent common interests to the forefront of daily anxieties. The assignat system introduced new backers, new substitutes, and new rationales for monetary reform. The all-encompassing nature of the revolutionaries’ monetary overhaul spawned new currency communities that relied on common tokens defined by denomination, region, and type of credit.40 Moreover, commercial relationships within revolutionary currency communities were more interdependent than the microcredit relationships of the Old Regime. In contrast to microcredit networks where confidence was largely rooted in the personal reputation of individual parties,41 billet de confiance networks depended far more on the collective confidence of the community in specific cash. Before, the Dames could vouch for each other to small money-lenders, but now the billets de confiance tied the Dames to a wider network welded to the credibility of local financial institutions. Therefore, when questionable currency circulated through the marketplace, monetary distrust quickly caused prices to fluctuate. The fallout from even minor currency problems—like isolated counterfeits—dangerously resonated throughout commercial networks like les Halles. The Dames and other retailers fiercely protected the fragile money. When Citoyenne Roudelle, a Dame des Halles, accused another, Citoyenne Fasche, of being “made of lead [a deceiving person], a thief, a maker of false assignats,” seven other Dames des Halles lined up to testify during her summons. It was not unusual for citizens to file complaints at the neighborhood Justice of the Peace, however most disputes brought in three or fewer witnesses. The seven testifying Dames signaled how deeply the forgery insults affected the community. Fasche’s individual honor and credit were at stake, but so too was the stability of the currency community.42 The assignat’s growing pains heightened the interdependency of tenuous commercial exchanges. Rethinking Alliances to Defend Small Change In the revolutionary marketplace, currency communities provided a pivotal framework for individuals to forge socioeconomic relationships that transcended the traditional identities of the corporate world. Retail merchants of all varieties had a vested interest in small change because they all traded at the point of sale. Even shopkeepers and master-artisans who sold their own goods needed small change to pay workers’ wages and settle credit accounts.43 Citizens in the same monetary network joined forces across corporate occupational divisions. The Dames protested conversion policies alongside brokers.44 Wine merchants signed petitions together with carpenters to protect tender. Male and female grain brokers seconded bakers’ complaints against troublesome notes.45 In short, market actors, workers, and artisans reconfigured corporate alliances and reinvented foundational socioeconomic relationships as they struggled to defend pocket change. To demand policy exemptions, request reform, make emergency appeals, and offer cooperative concessions, the Dames des Halles forged money-based alliances. The Dames and their neighbors mounted their first campaign to persuade the government to address their practical currency needs in September 1790. After originally emitting 1000, 300, and 200-livre assignats, the deputies had attempted to provide smaller bills by issuing assignats of 100 and of 50 in early fall of 1790. This was a substantial improvement from the original denominations, but the notes still remained well above most marketplace trade. Therefore, the section assembly of les Halles sent a petition to the Committee of Finances. The section demanded “the establishment of a patriotic caisse for the exchange of 25-livre” which, they testified, the food markets required. Their proposed caisse would exchange these twenty-five-livre denominations without “discrimination” and without an interest-based conversion fee.46 These denominations would at least ease wholesale transactions, but they would not solve the small change problem between retailers and consumers. In 1790, a Dame would still have to sell 25 pounds of fresh butter from Chartres, 55 white herrings, or 146 cheese bricks from Neufchâtel to equal just one 25-livre note.47 Despite the continued inconveniences, any assignat subdivisions would facilitate credit networks and alleviate bulky debts in les Halles. Shortly after the neighborhood assembly’s deliberation in September 1790, more citizens called for the state to address their monetary grievances. Only nine months after the assignat’s birth and five months before the deputies launched their attack on the guilds, ninety-three merchants of various trades signed a petition to the National Assembly.48 They presented themselves as “merchants in Paris, and the majority as traders in retail.” As sellers of various goods, they would have traditionally belonged to separate occupational groups. However, as members of the same currency community, they relied on similar denominations, local billets de confiance, and a shared regional cash network. In this unusual coalition, the ninety-three merchants demanded that the National Assembly permit the Caisse d’Escompte, the precursor to the national French bank, to emit 30 million more livres in the smallest assignat denominations.49 The petitioners attested to the “great inconveniences for commerce in general, and in particular for retail commerce, caused by the rarity of small bills.” The Caisse d’Escompte had already emitted a limited number of 200- and 300-livre assignats, but these bills had disappeared into the countryside after the government permitted their free circulation. The petitioning merchants explained that since “the largest portion of interior circulation of the provinces takes place in small sums, the small bills are those which return the least to the capital.” The provinces’ own need for small assignats drained the capital’s supply. The petitioners predicted that the recent legislation enabling National Guards to carry “some small bills out of preference” across France would soon make matters worse. The lowest assignat denominations would become “still more rare” within Paris. The merchants reasoned that circulating more small notes would rectify the potentially “fatal” “stagnation” of commerce.50 The hodgepodge coalition specifically called for small assignats to expedite their customers’ debt repayments. The merchants explained that, in order to sell their goods, they had to give credit to clients who said they could not make purchases for lack of small notes. Customers then dodged repaying the merchants when their credit came due and used the excuse that they did not have the appropriate denominations.51 Such actions stressed systems of credit for everyday purchases and left merchants in the lurch: Should they lose potential sales by denying credit or should they sell on credit and risk never being paid? Essentially, the small change crisis created a loophole that benefited buyers in their credit accounts with merchants. Technically, the Commercial Code stipulated that all merchants collect repayment within a year of sale or draw up formal contracts.52 Yet the lack of monetary instruments (cash) enabled consumers to delay repayment and attempt to benefit from assignat inflation. Thus, the small change shortage created credit resources for consumers similar to “obligations” (short-term demand loans) but that placed the repayment schedule in the hands of the borrower instead of the creditor.53 Just a few months of revolutionary inflation could pay big dividends for customers and devastate sellers. Any consumer delaying repayment in Paris from January 1791 to January 1792 would have benefited from a 20% depreciation of the assignat and their debt.54 After the National Assembly hesitated to respond to their petition, the merchant coalition sent a letter directly to the Caisse d’Escompte to accelerate its request. Three of the leading four signatories differed from the original petition, which suggested that their budding collaboration lacked a standing organization. The merchants provided the Caisse with a copy of their petition and asked it to join their defense of small change. The framing differences between the original petition and the follow-up letter signaled a striking evolution among the merchants. They signed each document as individuals, which spotlighted their political autonomy as citizens and jettisoned traditional guild representation. But, by the time they drafted the second piece, they corralled their signatures under the expansive collective title “the retail merchants of Paris.” The merchants notably abandoned the language of corporate bodies to portray a novel socioeconomic alliance. They referred to their first petition as a request that they had signed “in harmony with many of our confrères” and asserted that they responded to “the general difficulty, which makes itself felt in all branches of trade” (my emphasis).55 “Confrères” was an appellation usually reserved for members within a common corporation or spiritual association.56 The letter-writers changed the parameters of colleagues to include diverse merchants facing the same monetary predicament. The shared hardship compelled the letter-writers to imagine and talk about themselves using the language of an innovative community. Even before the 1791 Le Chapelier law wiped away the remaining vestiges of the corporate world, the merchants understood that their mutual monetary interests surpassed occupational compartmentalization. To convince the National Assembly to solve their money woes, the retail merchants and their Caisse d’Escompte supporters eschewed corporate privilege. The retail merchants claimed that public good, not particular interests, motivated them. They asserted that, regardless of the treacherous impact of monetary reform on their business, “they had supported it with courage and patience” because it was “for the advantage of the Revolution.”57 The administrators of the Caisse d’Escompte seconded the demands of the eclectic petitioners and asked for permission to print more 200- and 300- bills “favorable to public good.” The decision, they attested, weighed upon “the commerce of the capital,” which was aggravated by a “near general mistrust [that] had dried up the ordinary sources of credit.”58 The state had a responsibility to help merchant citizens because merchant citizens fulfilled their responsibilities to supply the nation. Government officials sensed the petitioners’ shifting tactics and socioeconomic configurations. While discussing the Committee of Finance’s report, the deputies abstracted the petitioners as “the commerce of Paris.” Ultimately, the National Assembly conceded to the ninety-three merchants and the Caisse d’Escompte: it issued the 30 million more assignats to circulate in smaller denominations as billets de confiance on September 16, 1790.59 The government simply published the decree since the petitioners lacked a standing corporation to which it could reply. Allying by currency community rather than trade quite literally paid off for Parisian merchants. The legal demise of the corporate world in 1791 opened a new chapter in associative identities and collective petitioning for the Dames des Halles and other merchants. As markers of legal entities, corporate bodies like guilds and confraternities had continued to interact with the state during the early Revolution. In hierarchical trade disputes, guild masters squared off against their journeymen in court. In other instances, guilds sued one another and solicited the state to protect and consolidate their commercial privileges. Two major laws, the d’Allarde and Le Chapelier laws, overturned this entire system of corporations. Within the context of tax reform in February 1791, the deputies first passed the d’Allarde law, which abolished the guilds and proposed an open commercial license system in its place. Under the regenerated system, each citizen could freely pursue any occupation he/she chose as long as the citizen bought the appropriate license. In June 1791, the deputies disavowed the other half of the corporate equation through the Le Chapelier law. They outlawed confraternities and forbade workers from assembling as an occupational group. In this way, workers would be unable to organize collectively against their now isolated masters.60 By dismantling the guilds and banning corporate bodies from submitting collective petitions, the deputies inadvertently encouraged merchants to cooperate across trade and occupational boundaries.61 Citizens had to reconfigure their political alliances to maintain strength in numbers within these new legal restrictions. Two challenges loomed large. First, how could they maintain a powerful collective voice without corporate bodies? Second, how could special interest groups transcend the coercive specter of corporate privilege? Citizens needed wide-ranging alliances to legally pitch their monetary interests as public interests.62 By April 1791, two months into the guilds’ death rattle, the waves of monetary confusion that pulsed through les Halles and other markets threatened to collapse the caisses along with economic networks that traversed different regions. Different substitutes for the assignat, such as billets de confiance or coins from different caisses, tangibly shattered the mirage of a uniform monetary system. Despite the state’s best intentions in granting financial societies permission to strike assorted tokens, the caisses only amplified the confusion as they emitted more and more specialized notes for local groups. In the capital alone, Parisian merchants and consumers navigated a maze of billets de confiance issued by sixty-three distinct societies.63 These promissory notes maintained their value based on consumer confidence in the signatures of the original issuer and the notes’ successive holders. With the proliferation of different issuing caisses, backing signatures became less and less familiar to users as the billets de confiance traveled through networks of trade away from their place of origin.64 Since wholesalers came from the provinces to supply the capital’s markets, the countryside’s gradual loss of trust in Parisian promissory notes directly affected the ability of the Dames des Halles, their brokers, and other retail merchants to buy their supplies. In May 1791, a private company established the Caisse Patriotique and appeared poised to offer some critical relief to the practical note shortage for the popular classes. Until April 1791, the smallest assignat denomination had been 50 livres. In contrast, the Caisse Patriotique issued assignat-backed notes in denominations of 5, 10, 20, and 25 livres to alleviate the dearth of Parisian usable currency. Although the government planned to begin printing 5-livre assignat denominations in May, it could not keep up with the soaring demand.65 The Caisse Patriotique’s exchange service proved to be so popular that it initially limited exchanges to 50 livres per person to keep pace. Even then, caisse administrators could barely keep up with the intense demand of people flocking to their door.66 By mid-August 1791, La Chronique de Paris alerted readers that the Caisse Patriotique would introduce a still smaller denomination and would “incessantly emit notes of 50 sous” (50 sous = 2.5 livres)!67 To boost this production, the government exempted the exchange caisses from stamp taxes.68 Their decree inadvertently gave billets de confiance “a quasi-official air.” In the popular imagination, the assignat notes and the billets de confiance became more interdependent and less recognizable as distinct entities.69 The company that ran the Caisse Patriotique created it primarily with the capital’s working classes in mind. Its services quickly became indispensable for the Dames des Halles and other merchants. The Caisse Patriotique strove to “relieve the artisan’s and worker’s demands of primary necessity,” that is, to provide them with cash for everyday trade. The Caisse’s mission statement stressed that this popular class performed patriotic services and equated their needs with those of the wider public. Parisian newspapers echoed their sentiments. La Chronique de Paris asserted that the small note shortage was “becoming each day more troublesome for the laboring classes of citizens, it is pressing to bring a remedy to this public unhappiness; & and an aid . . . becomes a duty for the good citizens.”70 Banks like the Caisse Patriotique increasingly cited how Parisians relied on their promissory notes to justify their ventures. Private interests had to benefit the public in postcorporate politics. In the wake of the D’Allarde and Le Chapelier laws, retailers would bet their money on the same logic. The Maison de Secours: Contending with Counterfeits and Negotiating Local Monetary Networks Besides cash, another currency still roamed les Halles—credit. Some revolutionary caisses dealt with credit shortages rather than small change shortages. The Maison de Secours, for example, served the Dames des Halles and other Parisian retail merchants by liquefying tangible assets. In March 1791, this newly established caisse began “to accept furniture and household items in order to facilitate their prompt sale.”71 The caisse provided merchants the much-needed opportunity to turn their possessions into capital, and it offered them “secours” (aid) by acting as a proxy service. Despite the name’s charitable overtones, the Maison de Secours conducted its business for profit. The Maison de Secours truly became a major player in the Parisian monetary market when it, like the Caisse Patriotique, began to emit its own tradable billets de confiance in November 1791. The Maison de Secours similarly justified its new exchange services as a public good. The business announced that it directly responded to “the solicitations of the public, notably the heads of manufacturing and the Dames des Halles.” Indeed, the Maison de Secours supplied the Dames, other retailers, and their customers with small notes for daily commerce.72 Yet, within a month, counterfeit bills of 40 sous (2 livres) circulated throughout the city with the Maison’s name.73 Counterfeiters profited more and more readily from copied billets de confiance in late 1791. Counterfeit bills of the Caisse Patriotique varied from the originals in color and signature, but circulated through the Parisian markets without much resistance.74 The counterfeits capitalized on mismatching tints and denominations. This left illiterate retailers in the lurch. A vegetable merchant, Michelle Feuillerade, and Barthélemy Bureau, a flower seller, faced criminal charges for using a fake billet copied from the Caisse Patriotique. The counterfeit was marked as 20 livres and misleadingly tinted yellow to mimic a different denomination.75 Others knowingly ignored the counterfeit nature because they were eager to have even fake bills of small denominations to conduct their modest transactions. When Dame Robert, a vegetable merchant, attempted to repay her 25 sous debt to Dame Maillot, another vegetable merchant, she partly paid the sum with bills of 50 sous marked from the Caisse Patriotique. Dame Maillot immediately saw that the notes were counterfeit and delivered them to the Justice of the Peace. Dame Robert defended herself by testifying that other market women had already circulated the counterfeits as practical money.76 Just as the government had lost control of the assignat in the ocean of promissory notes, the caisses lost control of their promissory notes in the jungle of counterfeits. In early 1792, more forgeries rocked the volatile currency situation in les Halles. A counterfeit fiasco related to the Maison de Secours in name, if not always in action, began to cripple the trust in commercial networks between the provinces and les Halles. A printer in les Halles named Libarre took advantage of his tools to produce 150,000 counterfeit livres in the form of 2-livre notes bearing the mast of the Maison de Secours.77 Just around the corner from the fruit market, the police discovered his stockpile of false bills and learned that some Dames des Halles had knowingly circulated the counterfeit currency. To avoid possible detection in open trade, these Dames used the counterfeit bills to buy fruit and vegetables from their suppliers from the countryside under the cover of night.78 Two weeks later, La Chronique de Paris praised the provincial wholesalers, “who bring us the fruits and vegetables that we need,” but warned them that the Maison de Secours itself could be involved in currency duplicity. The journal decried that the Maison itself inconsistently used colors corresponding to different denominations. Parisian retailers could take advantage of provincial wholesale merchants who, potentially unable to read and less familiar with the notes, relied on color to recognize the bills’ values.79 Thus, the promissory notes and their backing became a pivotal and volatile component of the relationship between the Dames des Halles, who dealt primarily in the local notes, and their provincial suppliers, who loathed the Parisian system of confidence. Deputies from Chartres arrived at the Legislative Assembly in February 1792 to complain that merchants who came to town with only Parisian billets de confiance worried their inhabitants. The Maison de Secours had emitted most of the notes foreign to Chartres’ currency community.80 It is little wonder that provincial suppliers felt alienated by the Parisian confidence networks. By February 1792, the anticipated failure of the Maison de Secours threatened both the supply and sale vectors of the Dames’ trade. Consequently, in March 1792, an ally of the Dames des Halles made the Assembly a desperate offer. The Dames agreed to incur losses on the Maison’s overextended billets in order to prevent the collapse of the promissory notes on which they so heavily relied. The Dames’ plan reveals how they understood tender to derive its value from local users. After the troubled Maison de Secours fell into bankruptcy and its director fled the city during the night, Femme Gond of the Palais Royal neighborhood began to talk with some Dames des Halles about the impending disaster. While buying her supplies from the retailers, Gond outlined a system to save the Maison’s notes that the merchants depended on for trade. Gond hypothesized that the Dames could collaboratively mitigate the setbacks caused by the Maison’s imminently defunct notes. Gond proposed that the Dames continue to use the Maison’s notes for trade with their customers and among each other, but that they reduce the face value of each note by 2 deniers ( 16 sou or 1120 livre) with each successive exchange. Each Dame would gradually absorb the losses through successive transactions until the Maison’s notes were completely phased out of their monetary network.81 Apart from the Maison’s bills, few other small denomination options existed, and the other available forms could not fill the enormous void. Therefore, the Dames des Halles remained willing to use the Maison’s notes so as not to lose the complete value of their money as Parisian municipal sections frantically struck replacement 10-sous coins backed by assignats. The Dames agreed to mark each bill with small bars to diminish gradually each note’s value. In doing so, the Dames participated in physically reducing the capital held by the billets after each marketplace transaction. These Dames promised Femme Gond to keep devaluing the Maison’s notes until they could be withdrawn and replaced by the 10-sous coins.82 At the bar of the Legislative Assembly, Femme Gond told the deputies that the collaborative system would keep trade viable. She observed that the Dames supported this strategy since “they would be able to still live; that would be better than nothing at all.”83 Little mention was made of the actual assignats and assets that should have backed the overextended notes in the first place. The currency community of les Halles determined the money’s value—in this case, quite literally. Despite the shortcomings of the promissory notes, the battered assignat did not seem much more secure in Parisians’ eyes. A royalist author channeled a fictive fish merchant, Mère Saumon (Mother Salmon), to portray the general contempt for the revolutionary assignat in 1792. The fabricated Dame informs her neighbor in her rough dialect that “silver” and the assignat are “not as equal as you’d weal believe.” She protests that metal “h‘as a real value, instead o’ from one moment to the other, it can happen that th’paper isn’t worth anything anymor’.” According to this logic, Old Regime metal coins were preferable to fickle paper assignats because the metal token carried its own material value. Mère Saumon further explains that the unstable assignat causes marketplace wholesalers to hoard their merchandise “sinc’ no one’ has confidence in it.”84 Thanks to failed monetary reform, the marketplace lacked stable currency and reliable food supplies. Transforming Local Monetary Networks into National Communities: Reining in the Caisses and Small Change Assignats The serious crisis in billets de confiance that the Dames des Halles and the popular classes felt in 1792 forced the Assembly to debate the long term goals of their monetary reform. Whereas the Dames and their allies initially complained about impractical large assignats, the patchwork of small promissory notes introduced new stressors. Marketplace actors now sought the government’s help against counterfeiting, overextended caisses, and the general chaos of too many types of tokens. Faced with the possible collapse of means for barter in the capital, the deputies increasingly considered the workaday implications of revolutionary currency. Deputy Cartier-Douineau, a trader and National Guard colonel from Tours, testified on behalf of the Extraordinary Committee on Finances that the Legislative Assembly had yet to produce “a money useful to the people,” which could support meager transactions between retailers and consumers.85 By negotiating the state’s duty in issuing smaller assignats and regulating the substitute tokens it had permitted, the deputies confronted the place of money in the social contract between citizens and the state. The deputies looked with increasing concern on the labyrinth of small change. Old Regime coins, leather sous, assignats, caisse-isued billets, and counterfeit notes threatened to overwhelm retail trade in Paris. A few months earlier, Deputy Cartier-Douineau had convinced the Assembly that it could only prevent the abuse of proliferating promissory notes by issuing official small assignat notes of 10, 15, and 50 sous (.5, .75 and 2.75 livres), respectively.86 Practical assignat denominations would decrease Parisians’ reliance on the caisses. Moreover, if individuals could redeem assignats for their billets de confiance, it would discourage the caisses from overextending their holdings. The merchants of les Halles bristled at the Assembly’s idea to issue directly assignats in small denominations in 1792 as far too late. According to the journal Annales monarchiques, the merchants feared that their billets de confiance from the Caisse Patriotique and the Maison de Secours would “no longer enjoy any confidence, or any credit” if official assignats now took their place. Furthermore, the merchants shrewdly worried that the government would be unable to replace the sheer amount of small change put into circulation by the Caisse Patriotique and the Maison de Secours.87 Yet, the deputies stood by their small assignats initiative.88 The Parisian retailers were justified in their fears. As the Legislative Assembly attempted to emit small change assignats, it looked with increasing disdain on the promissory notes as parallel monetary tokens. The deputies viewed the substitutes that had initially saved commerce in les Halles as troublesome rivals to official currency. Immediately following the Maison de Secours’s counterfeit fiasco in March 1792, the Legislative Assembly decreed that the municipal governments must audit the accounts of the private caisses, that these caisses could no longer print new billets de confiance, and that only caisses directly run by municipalities could emit new billets de confiance.89 Unfortunately for the Dames des Halles, the Maison de Secours earned top honors as most overextended and formidable rival to the assignats. Nevertheless, the Assembly needed the cooperation of the Dames and their retailer allies to rein in the threatening Maison billets and throw confidence behind small change assignats for everyday trade. The Maison and their customers faced a major challenge when, in April 1792, the worried Assembly ordered the Maison to stamp all their circulating bills to prove that they were backed by assignat holdings. Due to the large numbers of Parisians who relied on the Maison’s credit system, the mayor of Paris implored the populace to seek only gradual reimbursement for old unstamped notes. At the same time, the continued influx of counterfeit billets marked with the Maison’s name widened the devastating gap between the company’s assignat holdings and the billets circulating in their name.90 The future of the Maison de Secours, their billets de confiance, and their users looked bleak. The Maison floundered in counterfeit scandals and could not refute accusations that it overextended its backing. Despite launching official 10-, 15-, and 50-sous notes in 1792, the state was not yet poised to offer a comprehensive network of assignats without decimating popular systems of billets and credit. On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria, which added military payments to monetary concerns. For merchants and consumers, the deputies’ talk of currency theory and war money was no substitute for local tokens. The Caisse de Commerce: Banking on Political Contracts The Dames’ other recourse to practical notes and credit during the 1792 impasse, albeit in larger 25-livre denominations, came from the Caisse de Commerce.91 In December 1791, the Legislative Assembly had allowed a network of privately owned offices called the Caisse de Commerce to act as a discount bank “to favor the merchants and the artisans.” Rather than make direct change for larger assignats, the Caisse de Commerce advertised that it would encourage trade “by facilitating ways private individuals could put into value [liquefy] their effects that they could not circulate [trade].”92 Merchants often sold their goods on credit, but this left them with little cash to pay their own debt and buy new supplies. Therefore, the Caisse de Commerce offered to buy all solvent belongings, including contracted debts owed by clients to merchants, for a tax of 6% per year. In return, the Caisse issued its own redeemable “billets de commerce” that merchants could immediately use as tokens in trade.93 Bypassing usury and heavy speculation, the Caisse de Commerce promised “to feed, to animate, and to fortify all the ramifications of agriculture, of industry, and of commerce.”94 The Caisse de Commerce explicitly targeted retail currency communities and clothed its services in the discourse of charity. It advertised that it would focus on assisting small-scale merchants, specifically “the Resellers, the Women of les Halles and others.” The owners announced that because these modest merchants “often cannot do anything without immediate assistance, the Caisse lends itself to their needs, less by [commercial] interest than by charity [bienfaisance].” The Caisse de Commerce offered to make moderate loans to retailers as well as exchange their clients’ credit for the Caisse’s billets. The Dames considered these options godsends because if their customers defaulted on their accounts or did not pay their debts on time, the Caisse de Commerce, rather than the Dames, absorbed the financial fallout. The owner of the Caisse de Commerce asserted that if his company “on their [the Dames des Halles and retail merchants’] behalf experiences some losses, it expects them, and this service is calculated less on profit.”95 The Caisse’s self-presentation won over public opinion and expanded business. Yet, the Caisse de Commerce proved susceptible to the turmoil of the billets crisis. In the month following the counterfeit debacle that sullied the Maison de Secours, the Dames des Halles felt their other small change options and credit resources slip away as the public began to lose confidence in the Caisse de Commerce as well. Parisians looked just as wearily on the local credit that backed billets de commerce as the supposed assignat holdings that backed billets de confiance. On February 19, 1792, the Dames des Halles resolved to defend the Caisse de Commerce before the deputies. The Dames bypassed the prerequisite Committee of Commerce and directly “captur[ed] the attention of the Assembly” with their urgent requests. Reminding the deputies that they were “the Dames des Halles, the friends of liberty,” the merchants patriotically endorsed the Caisse de Commerce and condemned the “thousands of enemies” who sought to discredit it. They demanded that the Assembly publicly supervise the Caisse de Commerce and support it and its vital billets de commerce.96 To make their case, the Dames sidestepped their identity as a corporate body and avoided asking for privileged exemptions. Instead, the Dames called on the mutual duties of citizens and the state to legitimize their request. They justified their value to the nation by citing the utility of the working classes and their just need for the Assembly’s protection. The Dames asked the legislators “to come to the help of the laborer, the artisan, the merchant, not demanding any other guarantee than probity and talent; is it not to give a free boost to industry and to furnish to everyone the facility to occupy the post in the State where his/her capacity calls him/her [?], such is the purpose of this Caisse.”97 No doubt thinking of the credit they extended to clients and received from brokers in daily trade, the Dames implored the deputies “to give [the debtor] the greatest facility to liquidate his/her debt” through the notes. In its report of the Dames’ visit, La Chronique de Paris stressed that the Dames sought to protect the monetary interests of “the indigent but active part of the people.”98 Both the Dames and La Chronique de Paris eschewed the Dames’ corporate identity and evoked markers of class. The Dames’ self-presentation implied that they did not have a unique interest in the Caisse; rather, they appealed on behalf of the common interests of the impoverished population—small merchants and consumers alike. Their orator insisted that “humanity” had always needed such a socially just caisse but that it had taken a “beneficial revolution” to enable its creation. The Dames asked the Assembly to consider how, without the Caisse de Commerce, greedy financial societies hoped “to attach themselves to the footsteps of the unfortunate to milk their blood until the last drop.”99 Thus, the Dames demanded the paternal protection of the state as they would have done under the Old Regime, but retailers refashioned the relationship as a reciprocal political contract. The Dames attested to their own civic contributions as traders and demanded that the state match their contributions. Moreover, they petitioned the nation as members of a socioeconomic group, bounded by productive labor rather than by corporate taxonomy. The Dames drew on metaphors of a regenerated national family to bolster their revolutionary legitimacy at the bar. They deftly connected their monetary demands to their highest feminine duty as mothers.100 They argued that the Caisse de Commerce’s advantageous services assisted their retail trade, which ensured “ease and peace reigning in our families.” This environment enabled them to nurture “Our children, what am I saying? the children of the fatherland,” who would later serve the nation as “virtuous wives and laboring men.” The Dames told the legislature that they raised productive children sensitive to revolutionary values, who “satisfied with the honest gain that they take from their labor, already envision vice with horror.”101 Similarly, the journal La Chronique de Paris directly credited the Caisse de Commerce with granting the Dames the monetary emancipation necessary to foster families useful to the nation: “Becoming free, they [the Dames] promise to raise their children as citizens, & to teach them to enrich with one hand the state by their work, & to hold with the other [hand] the sword which must defend it.”102 In the Dames’ schema, the benefits the nation would reap from hard-working citizens constituted the return on the state’s protection of their monetary interests. The struggle over the Caisse de Commerce and the Maison de Secours demonstrated the extent to which Parisian currency communities threatened to undermine the national monetary system. One week after the Dames’ push back, the journal Courrier des 83 départements accused the owner of the Caisse de Commerce of arranging for “some women of les Halles to appear at the bar to commit the Assembly to protect this caisse.” The duplicitous caisse, it asserted, was tricking clients by reimbursing two-thirds of their own billets de confiance with “billets of other caisses” that were also failing.103 Within four weeks, the Assembly confronted “public concerns” simmering in the capital due to the Maison de Secours’ notes. The deputies passed a special 3 million-livre advance to the Department of Paris to be put in the capital’s treasury. Then, the Legislative Assembly placed the responsibility for local currency communities squarely on the shoulders of municipalities across France. The Assembly charged each municipality with verifying the ratio of local caisses’ assets to their emitted notes. The deputies ordered the municipalities to halt all production of new billets de confiance from private caisses. The only caisses that could continue to produce billets de confiance would be those caisses run by municipalities. Moreover, the municipal caisses could only back their notes with assignats or metal coins, and department authorities would check their accounts weekly.104 The revolutionaries had initially embraced private billets de confiance as a cash lifeboat. As that ship sank, citizens from disparate former corporations pooled their political capital to buoy their local money. Collective Identities in a Postcorporate World: Parisian Merchants Unite Across Trades Following the Dames’ early lead, other retail merchants formed horizontal alliances across occupational boundaries to bolster the Caisse de Commerce during the Assembly’s investigation. In June 1792, forty-eight citizens from a wide array of occupations signed a petition attesting to the “utility” of the Caisse de Commerce, which enabled their livelihood. Among the myriad supporters of the Caisse’s monetary network, the deputies would find two beverage sellers, a wholesale supplier of the navy, a painter of buildings, a secondhand clothes merchant, a baker, a printer, a National Guard commander, and a former lawyer. This patchwork alliance of various merchants, assorted artisans, service workers, a man of letters, and a militiaman built on its 1790 predecessors. But the heterogeneous configuration was also a careful reaction to the anticorporate Le Chapelier law outlawing collective protest by trade a year earlier.105 The two master fan makers might have needed the Caisse de Commerce’s notes to square accounts with journeymen, and the two cobblers might have needed the same notes to trade with clientele, but they both needed each other to legally defend currency communities after the Le Chapelier law.106 The forty-eight petitioners fervently defended the Caisse de Commerce by arguing that it was the only company that “gives even the artisan, the merchant, the manufacturer, and all classes of citizens a way to find help and some resources.” Like the Dames des Halles, these citizens perceived their families’ well-being as inextricably entangled in the Caisse de Commerce’s economic services for the popular classes. If the representatives took exceptional legal measures to protect the Caisse de Commerce, the petitioners promised, “We will not cease repeating to our children that it is one of the benefits of the constitution, made from your love for the Public happiness.”107 As the Caisse de Commerce’s problems continued to fester over the summer, the Parisian political environment heated up. A Parisian crowd invaded the royal palace on June 20 and a coordinated movement overthrew the king on August 10. With the government crumbling, the monetary situation became so tenuous that the overwhelmed deputies started scrutinizing the Caisse de Commerce on August 11. The Assembly noted that the Caisse had given “the public a motive for confidence” but insisted that its billets must be backed by the real “solidity and credit of the establishment.” The Caisse’s account books failed this test, and the deputies withdrew its private operating license since it had not fulfilled its promise of serving “public utility.” Being acutely aware of the strength of the popular classes, the Assembly decreed that “there is an emergency” and lifted the freeze on the accounts of the Caisse de Commerce on two conditions.108 First, the Assembly ordered that the Caisse show the municipality the securities that “it presents to the public for the reimbursement” of their billets.109 Second, it decreed that officials must stamp the Caisse’s billets de commerce to account for them as they were admitted.110 This August 18, 1792 decision contributed to a rush on the Caisse and left its directors nearly bankrupt. In the face of quickly dwindling monetary resources, the Parisian “merchants and entrepreneurs” convinced more colleagues to craft a follow-up petition to the Legislative Assembly on August 26 to defend the discredited Caisse de Commerce. This coalition of 57 citizens protested that the premise of the decree was “unfair.” They argued that the Assembly’s decree had “ruined and dishonored” the owners because it required them to pay in full commercial bills not yet due. They protested that since the notes of the Caisse de Commerce were “bills, letters of exchange, and other titles drawn on term, and not on the assignats,” the Caisse should not have to retract its critical billets de confiance from circulation.111 The united front complained that the Legislative Assembly hastily passed the fatal decree with many members missing. They asked their representatives to revisit the decree and “render to the capital an establishment made for the happiness of commerce and industry.”112 The 57 merchants and entrepreneurs had augmented their cross-occupational collaboration and solidified their strength in numbers since their first petition in June. In addition to some of the original petitioners, the merchants recruited allies from more varied backgrounds to protect their shared currency community. Although nineteen merchants omitted their occupation, left only illegible traces, or signed as an unspecified merchant, the remaining thirty-six petitioners paint a diverse picture. Retail merchants such as the two grocers and the two beverage sellers participated but so did two wholesale merchants of nonfood goods. According to Parisian guild delineations before 1791, twenty of the signers who specified their occupation would have belonged to ten separate corporations.113 A building entrepreneur passed the pen to four haberdashers, two jewelry merchants teamed up with a printer, and two wine merchants partnered with a merchant wigmaker. Artisans from across the former guild ranks bolstered the alliance, and the petitioners encompassed a broad spectrum of earning power. A master mason, a carpenter, and a master locksmith signed the petition alongside a small hardware merchant, a cobbler, and two joiners or finish carpenters. The four haberdashers may have well had elite merchandise networks across France with rich clientele, while the wine merchants likely had local Parisian buyers.114 The labored handwriting and spelling of Citizen Fenet, a caterer, hinted that he could barely sign his name.115 The nineteen individuals who left no occupation were likely less economically powerful. In contrast with the former corporate system, their collective political and economic request looked like a rag-tag alliance. However, threats to a common currency community encouraged merchants to reimagine their associative identities. The petitioners offered their collective support for the Caisse that, they argued, “has for it the merchants of the capital, the national militia, on horse and on foot, the Dames des Halles, the merchant butchers, and bakers, who have presented petitions to you in favor of this Caisse.” 116 In light of the August 10 uprising against the king and the August 25 abolition of feudal indemnities, the coalition’s claims to defend a broad swath of citizens gained new potency.117 The dramatic political turn raised the stakes in claiming sovereignty as “the people.” The fifty-seven citizens maintained that the collective sovereignty of the popular classes unified them and justified their request. They reminded their representatives that the services the Caisse de Commerce had provided were “the resource of the people,” which “is one of the benefits of the constitution that your justice will maintain.” Hinting that sovereignty came from below, they concluded, “we will bless your work.”118 By associating “people” with commerce and industry, the petitioners underscored their assumption that “the people” implied a class composed of working citizens. The alliance built from this growing legitimacy as citizens responded to currency reform and the legal demise of the guilds. Scrambling to hold new elections and establish a republic, the deputies reacted in a piecemeal fashion in September. By the government’s own count in early September, there were 1,834,292,175 livres circulating across France “as much in assignats as in caisses’ billets or promissory notes for assignats.”119 Since late December 1791, the state had emitted 42 million assignat notes of 15 sous and 31 million assignat notes of 10 sous. Despite the Assembly’s efforts, the billets de confiance continued to be the most readily available option for Parisian merchants, artisans, and workers.120 The mounting pressure from Parisian petitioners to protect local billets clashed with calls from deploying soldiers who needed small assignats to use across regions.121 In one of its final acts, the Legislative Assembly responded by establishing Parisian exchange bureaus that would provide small change but only in assignats. These forty-eight sectional bureaus would offer citizens assignats of ten and fifteen sous in exchange for their billets de confiance worth 50 sous or less.122 The Legislative Assembly ordered any “companies, banks, caisses, or citizens” who had issued billets of 50 sous or less to surrender their corresponding assignat securities to the city. The city would collect, cancel, and return billets de confiance to their caisses of origin. Officials anticipated that 2,400,000 livres would be exchanged in the first Parisian wave. The process, the deputies resolved, would be repeated “until the total extinction of the billets de confiance.”123 In the battle between a national currency community finally armed with small assignats and regional currency communities built upon local promissory notes, the future looked increasingly bleak for the latter. Conclusion In March 1793, the National Convention pulled the plug on promissory notes. The substitute tokens, which had seemed like a godsend in 1790, could no longer circulate as legal tender as of April 1, 1793.124 Since the monarchy’s collapse in August 1792, the Dames and other merchants had continued to expand their socioeconomic alliances and decisively influence monetary reform. In the winter of 1792–1793, the Dames had partnered with their brokers and wholesalers who paid one another with Maison de Secours notes. These powerful coalitions had reached across vertical trade hierarchies and had forced the deputies to momentarily bail out Parisian billets de confiance whose crippling deficit hovered around 5 million livres.125 Early in 1793, the National Convention attempted to put the Parisian caisse disasters definitively behind it by convicting the directors of the Maison de Secours of fraudulent activity and publicly burning their promissory notes.126 The deputies instructed all citizens to redeem their billets de confiance for assignats from their issuing caisses.127 The Convention hoped that its firm assignat-only strategy would streamline the chaotic systems of confidence, credit, and tender. Since 1789, currency had become an economic, logistical, and political choice in everyday trade. But by spring 1793, the price of admission to the nation was payable only in assignats.128 Even after the collapse of promissory notes, other citizens formed currency communities to protect local needs. Citizens across France, like the journeymen, artisans, and “local elite” protesting assignat hardships in the town of La Neuvre-Lyre, continued to join forces across corporate strata to defend shared currency.129 While Mayence was cut off by Prussian siege in May 1793, the war council raised the value of each paper bill by signing the back.130 The counterrevolutionary army likewise created rules for money in Vendée strongholds. Assignats issued by the Republic became acceptable tender if they were “signed and admitted in the name of the king.”131 The lingering trauma of billets de confiance, regional confidence networks, inflation, and war weakened successive attempts to implement national paper money. The revolutionaries replaced the failed assignats with a new currency called the “mandats” in 1796, but these notes collapsed before workers could finish printing them.132 In 1803, three years after establishing the Bank of France, Napoleon cautiously tried his hand by permitting the Bank to emit paper notes within the confines of the capital. When Napoleon attempted to circulate the notes to the provinces in 1809, citizens remembered the assignat nightmare and how the Parisian caisses had been bailed out at their expense. The countryside clung to metal coins until officials printed smaller notes than those in Paris to fulfill the needs of regional commerce. 133 During the three years without sufficient small change assignats from 1790 to 1793, the billets de confiance exposed common economic interests among formerly disparate corporate groups. The Assembly’s early attempts to reform currency encouraged citizens to cooperate innovatively across trade identities and address shared monetary challenges. Citizens joined forces along the contours of currency communities, which sometimes mirrored class. Collaborations that began as economic alliances quickly morphed into political alliances. In this way, the assignats provided the popular classes with new venues for dialogue, cooperation, and cohesion that surpassed the occupationally bound identities of corporate society. These emerging groups tested new visions of citizenship to frame their requests as motivated by public interest rather than particular privilege. Among baskets of fish and piles of vegetables, practical currency sparked a tremendous revolution in postcorporate society and citizenship. In Paris, the corporate titan of the Old Regime arrived tattered on the eve of 1791 antiguild legislation not only because of preemptive attacks by the deputies but because citizens themselves had already begun to reformulate political legitimacy and economic communities. Since 1790, marketplace actors had forged innovative socioeconomic identities to defend usable money. To avoid accusations of corporatism, Parisians continued these tactics after the deputies abolished the guilds. Thus, the assignat catalyzed the transition to a postcorporate world by complicating the material experience of cash, throwing currency communities into the spotlight, and triggering innovative political alliances. By 1793, the Dames and their neighbors had unraveled the corporate world from below to protect small change in the marketplace. Footnotes The author would like to thank Suzanne Desan for her perceptive comments and the anonymous reviewers for their productive suggestions on drafts of this article. The author also wishes to thank Clare Crowston for conversations on merchant strategies and guild structures. The US Fulbright Program and the Commission Franco-Américaine generously funded research for this study. 1 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) C 149, n°252 “Compliment adressé par les Dames de la Halle à l’Assemblée législative, en remettant leur don patriotique pour les frais de la guerre, consistant en une monnaie particulière frappée au nom des sieurs Lefèvre, Lesage et Cie.” See Mavidal and Laurent, ed., Archives Parlementaires, le 21 mai 1792, series 1, Vol. 43: 621. 2 For a general overview of the revolutionary assignat, see S. E. Harris, The Assignats (London, 1930) and Jean Morini-Comby, Les Assignats: Révolution et Inflation (Paris, 1925). On the long history and evolution of IOUs, see Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, 2002). On Parisian banks and financial companies, see Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1 and 2 (Paris, 1941). With the proliferation of numerous promissory notes, counterfeiting became a major problem. For details on the situation in Paris, see Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française (Paris, 1946). Georges Depeyrot has assembled a collection of monetary laws and legislative decrees in Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie Pendant la Révolution (1789–1803) (Paris, 1996). 3 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2015), 74. 4 Ibid. 5 Jeff Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 (Cambridge, 2015), 21. 6 Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, 2001), 257; Steven Kaplan, La Fin de corporations, trans. Béatrice Vierne (Paris, 2001), 600. 7 Jeff Horn, The Path not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 8 Steven Kaplan, La Fin de corporations; Michael Sonenscher, Work & Wages: Natural Law, Politics & the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge, 1989); Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women; Michael Fitzsimmons, From Artisan to Worker: Guilds, the French State, and the Organization of Labor, 1776–1821 (Cambridge, 2010). Earlier research focused on the degree to which guilds fed prerevolutionary social tensions or were viable representative units. George Rudé and Liana Vardi have argued that conflicts within outdated hierarchies of masters and journeymen drove the Revolution forward as a social engine. However, other scholars like Gail Bossenga, William Sewell, and Michael Sonescher make the case that the guilds were not anachronistic in 1789 since they still successfully protected their members’ commercial interests. They argue that few revolutionaries sought to destroy immediately their socioeconomic alliances. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London, 1967); Liana Vardi, “The Abolition of the Guilds during the French Revolution,” in French Historical Studies 15 (1988): 717; Gail Bossenga, “Protecting Merchants: Guilds and Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth Century France,” French Historical Studies, 15 (1988), 695, 703; William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1979); Michael Sonenscher, “Les sans-culottes de l'an II: repenser le langage du travail dans la France révolutionnaire,” in Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 5 (1985): 1087–108. 9 Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women, 209. The number of women who listed a profession separate from that of their husband in tax rolls, judicial testimony, and police documents increased throughout the eighteenth century as women came to identify more with their occupation. See James Collins, “Women and the Birth of Consumer Capitalism” in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Daryl Hafter and Nina Kushner (Baton Rouge, 2015), 163; Daryl Hafter, “French Industrial Growth in Women’s Hands,” in Women and Work, 195; Daryl Hafter and Nina Kushner, “Introduction” in Women and Work 3; Dominique Godineau, Les Femmes dans la France moderne, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2015), 81. 10 Michael Fitzsimmons points to the earlier dissolution of the three orders on the night of August 4, 1789; the reform of the judicial system, which uncoupled privilege and justice; and the restructuring of municipal administrations that jettisoned guilds as representative units of economic and political interest. Michael Fitzsimmons, “The National Assembly and the Abolition of Guilds in France,” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 137, 152, 153. 11 For a detailed discussion of early modern French coinage and minting, see Jotham Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Ithaca, 2014), 3–11. In 1776, the king gave the Caisse d’Escompte permission to print very large paper bills of one thousand, three hundred, and two hundred livres. Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 11. After John Law’s attempt to introduce state paper money in 1718 caused rapid speculation, inflation, and a market meltdown, the French deeply distrusted paper forms of currency. See Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, 2000), 69–95. 12 Jean Lafurie, Les Assignats et les Papiers-Monnaies émis par l’état au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1981), 118; Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 68, 77, 83. 13 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 12; Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 72. 14 Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2009), 170; Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, 2013), 10. 15 Laurence Fontaine, L’économie morale: Pauvreté crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle (Paris, 2008), 156. 16 This sequence describes how the fish market functioned on the eve of the Revolution. I assembled the details from the following sources: Archives de Paris [hereafter AdP] D.Q10 482 Marée à la Halle (Commerce de la) Enquête sur la compagnie Vison, an VII–an IX, n°3353, L’administration Centrale du Département de la Seine au Directeur du Domaines Nationales, signed Picard Paris, le 28 Pluviôse an 7 de la république française; AdP D.Q10 742, Papiers Lenoir (Halles et marchés: Recherches particulières classées par établissement et la nature de marchandises) Dossier: Halles et marchés d’approvisionnements et du factorat dans les marchés, questions d’administration et réformes proposés (1807–1836); AdP D.Q10 742, Papiers de Lenoir, Dossier: Personnel des Halles et Marchés (Nets et Brouillons 1828–1841); AdP V2F4 9, Halles, poisson and divers, le 19ième siècle, Dossier: n°19 Vente en gros du poisson; AN F7 7745a, dossier n°40, “Arrêté du préfet de police sur le commerce des beurres, fromages, et œufs à Paris” (an VIII); AdP D.Q10 742, Papiers de Lenoir, Subdossier: Personnel (Nets), Service; AdP D.Q10 743, Papiers de Lenoir, Dossier Octrois, Mélanges et feuilles numérotées éparses, subfolder: Octrois, volaille; AdP D.Q10 743, Papiers de Lenoir, Dossier: Dépouillement d’un travail fait l’an 6 par M. Gansouard, Commissaire de la Comptabilité Nationale, sur les taxes et produits des droits d’entrée de Paris sous le régime de la Ferme Générale; Archives de la Préfecture de Police [hereafter AdPP] DB 515, Préfet de Police, “Ordonnance concernant le Commerce des Fruits Légumes, Herbages, Fleurs en bottes et Plantes usuelles” le 2 décembre 1816; Rene Marion, “The Dames de la Halle: Community and Authority in Early Modern Paris” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 19; Anne Lombard-Jourdan, Les Halles de Paris et leur Quartier (1137–1969) (Paris, 2009), 100–101. 17 I have used the 1790 base prices from the 1793 price control legislation to calculate these quantities. Cod cost 120 livres per barrel of 108 small fish or 200 livres per barrel of 108 large fish. Smoked herring cost seventy livres per barrel of one thousand fish. AdPP DB 387 “Tableau du maximum des Denrées et Marchandises, Stipulées dans l’article premier de la Loi du 29 septembre 1793, l’an II de la République Française.” 18 Rene Marion, “The Dames de la Halle: Community and Authority in Early Modern Paris,” 21, 106, 162. 19 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 10 octobre 1789, n° 47. 20 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 7, 116. 21 Jean Morini-Comby, Les Assignats: Révolution et Inflation, 17; “Pinteville de Cernon” in Dictionnaire des parlementaires français Comprenant tous les Membres des Assemblées françaises et tous les Ministres français, vol. 4, ed. Adolphe Robert, Edgar Bourloton, and Gaston Cougny (Paris, 1889–1891), 636. Deputies on the Committee of Finances or the Committee of the Extraordinary Caisse most often briefed the National Assembly on the billets de confiance. If Parisians sent a written request to the state concerning money, the Committee of Finances reported their letter to the Assembly. If the Dames and their neighbors presented their own petition in the Assembly, the deputies often sent the request back to the same committee for a report. The Committee of Finances had a diverse political membership with sixty-two elected deputies at its founding. Given the array of members who reported on the committee’s behalf, I do not discern a distinctive Girondin or Jacobin response to the billets de confiance crisis from 1789 to September 1792. On the composition of the Committee of Finances, see Archives Parlementaires, “Table générale, alphabétique, et analytique: États-Généraux et Assemblée nationale constituante,” series 1, vol. 33: 242; Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 60.) 22 Archives Parlementaires, le 23 janvier 1790, au soir, series 1, vol. 11: 295. Rebecca Spang also argues that revolutionaries still focused on personal confidence in individuals who issued assignat-backed promissory notes despite the national monetary system. Individuals concentrated intensely on local confidence networks to conceptualize and evaluate national currency. Rebecca Spang, “Money and Liberty in the French Revolution,” (Paper presented at the annual meeting for the Western Society for French History, November 12, 2011). 23 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 24. 24 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 112, 116, 176. 25 Ibid., 49. 26 Archives de la Préfecture de Police, DB 387,“Tableau du maximum Des Denrées et Marchandises, Stipulées dans l’article premier de la Loi du 29 septembre 1793, l’an II de la République Française.” 27 For the publishing background of this serial pamphlet, see Ouzi Elyada, “La Mère Duchesne. Masques populaires et guerre pamphlétaire, 1789–1791,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 271 (1988), 10–11. 28 “Dixième lettre bougrement patriotique de la Mère Duchêne,” samedi 2 avril 1791, reprinted in Lettres bougrement patriotiques de la Mère Duchêne, suivi du Journal des Femmes: Février- Avril 1791, ed. Ouzi Elyada (Paris, 1989), 89–96. 29 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 24. 30 In times of prior monetary instability, merchants had often explicitly, if illegally, stipulated the form of money attached to business contracts. In 1541, the king had outlawed, without much success, individualized valuations of currency during singular transactions. Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change, 206, 329. 31 F. Hincker, “Billets de Confiance,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris, 2006), 123–24. 32 Spang, Stuff and Money, 117. 33 This definition of exchange tokens comes from Thomas Sargent and François Velde. For more on shifting monetary doctrines in early modern Europe, especially those concerning banknotes, see Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change, 330–31. 34 Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BnF) Reserve QB- 370 (19) - FT 4, “Caisse merdeuse Billet de cent sous: pryable [sic] dans la bouche du porteur . . .” Paris (1790–1792) in Collection de Vinck: Un siècle d’histoire de France par l’estampe, 1770–1870. n° 3123; Franz Gabriel Fiesinger, engraver, “Assignat de vingt-cinq livres” (Paris: Domaines nationaux, 1791) in Images de la Révolution française: catalogue du vidéodisque (1990) 35034-2506; Digital versions of these images are located in this database: Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, French Revolution Digital Archive, accessed July 2014, http://frda.stanford.edu/. 35 Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 82. 36 Andrew Dickinson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France (San Francisco, 1980), 16. 37 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 11 juin 1791, nº162. 38 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 114. 39 Rebecca Spang notes, “Those who willingly use any particular currency form a community of believers: they have faith in particular objects and assume all their cocommunicants share their basic convictions.” Spang, Stuff and Money, 174. 40 Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, 2002), 203. For example, Angers merchants circumvented a 1577 shortage by conducting trade with their own parchment notes that each merchant marked with the symbol that identified their silverware. In the nineteenth century, debtors’ and creditors’ newspapers created a new way to delineate confidence networks among small traders. See Erika Vause, “‘The Business of Reputations: Secrecy, Shame, and Social Standing in Nineteenth-Century French Debtors’ and Creditors’ Newspapers,” Journal of Social History, 28 (2014): 47–71. 41 Julie Hardwick’s study of civil court cases in the seventeenth century demonstrates that individuals participated in “litigation communities” to forge familial credit in local networks. Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2009). 42 AdP D.4 U1 28, nº357, Justice de Paix, Citoyenne Fasce contre Citoyenne Roudelle, le 12 thermidor an V (July 30, 1797). 43 Michael Sonenscher, “Les sans-culottes de l’an II,” 1089. 44 “Mémoire présenté au département” in Archives Parlementaires, le 9 décembre 1792, series 1, vol. 54: 726. 45 Les Facteurs et factrices à la Halle aux Farines, à leurs concitoyens (France: 1792). 46 AN D VI 8, n° 70, “Délibération de la section du Marché-des-Innocents, réclamant une émission suffisante d’assignats pour le remboursement de la dette exigible, émission qui comprendrait un certain nombre de petits billets de 100, 50 et 25 livres, et l’établissement d’une caisse patriotique pour l’échange des billets de 25 livres,” to the Committee of Finances, le 9 septembre 1790. 47 I calculate these examples based on the survey of 1790 prices that the Department assembled to prepare the 1793 Maximum. In 1790, fresh butter from Chartres was 1 livre per pound, a barrel of 120 white herrings was 55 livres, and cheese from Neufchâtel was 2 livre 5 sous per dozen. Archives de la Préfecture de Police, DB 387, “Tableau du maximum Des Denrées et Marchandises, Stipulées dans l’article premier de la Loi du 29 septembre 1793, l’an II de la République Française.” 48 Berthellemot, Degland, Briot, Brunet, Bigeon, et quatre-vingt-huit autres, “Pétition adressée à l'Assemblée nationale par plusieurs commerçants en détail, de Paris, et renvoyée par elle au comité des finances” in Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, series 1, vol. 19: 1–2. 49 Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 11; S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 12. 50 “Pétition adressée à l'Assemblée nationale par plusieurs commerçants en détail, de Paris, et renvoyée par elle au comité des finances” in Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, series 1, vol. 19: 1–2. 51 Ibid., vol 19: 2. 52 Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex, 180. 53 Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets, 15, 158, 181. 54 See “Chart on Depreciation of the Assignat in the Department of the Seine” in S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 127. 55 “Seconde lettre des marchands en détail, de Paris, à MM. les administrateurs de la caisse d'escompte. Paris, le 14 septembre 1790.” Reprinted in Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, au matin, series 1, vol. 19: 6. 56 “Confrère” in Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 4th Edition (1762), Project ARTFL, http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois. 57 “Pétition adressée à l'Assemblée nationale par plusieurs commerçants en détail, de Paris, et renvoyée par elle au comité des finances,” Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, series 1, vol. 19: 4. 58 “Seconde lettre écrite par MM. les administrateurs de la caisse d'escompte à M. le président du comité des finances.” Reprinted in Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, series 1, vol. 19: 3–4. 59 “Projet de décret présenté par le comité des finances,” reprinted in Archives Parlementaires, le 16 septembre 1790, au matin, series 1, vol. 19: 4. 60 Michael Fitzsimmons, “The National Assembly and the Abolition of the Guilds in France,” 149, 150, 152. 61 However, it should be noted that not all merchants readily abandoned the corporate system to forge new cross-occupational alliances. Gail Bossenga has argued that, unlike in Paris, the merchants of Lille sought protect their commercial interests ad integrate revolutionary principles into their guilds rather than jettisoning corporate bodies. Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991). 62 Liana Vardi, “The Abolition of the Guilds during the French Revolution,” 715. 63 F. Hincker, “Billets de Confiance,” 123–24. 64 Archives Parlementaires, le 17 avril 1791, series 1, vol. 25: 172–74. 65 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 26. 66 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, “Instruction sur la caisse patriotique,” La Chronique de Paris, le 26 mai 1791, Supplément au nº146. 67 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 19 aout 1791, Supplément au n° 231. 68 “Décret sur les billets de confiance,” 19 mai 1791, in Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie, ed. Georges Depeyrot, 95. 69 Jean Morini-Comby, Les Assignats: Révolution et Inflation, 38. 70 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, Supplément au N°146, le 26 mai 1791, “Instruction sur la caisse patriotique,” le 26 mai 1791. To complement the goals of the Caisse Patriotique, another caisse opened in July 1791 to exchange five-livre assignats for small money. Its services were so popular that the caisse restricted each individual to exchanging one five-livre assignat for smaller change per day. Jean Morini-Comby, Les Assignats: Révolution et Inflation, 56. 71 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, 73–74. 72 Elphège Boursin and Augustin Challamel, “Maison de Secours,” Dictionnaire de la Révolution française: Institutions, hommes et faits (Paris: Jouvet et Cie, 1893), 458. The small Caisse Lefèvre, Lesage et Cie, which opened to exchange assignats for small coins on May 29, 1792, also justified its establishment as a response to “public sollicitations, notably from heads of manufactures and the Dames des Halles.” Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, 158. 73 Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 83. 74 Ibid., 82. 75 AN Z3 85, 28 décembre 1791–30 avril 1792, “Procédure instruit au 5e Tribunal criminel contre Barthélemy Bureau et Michelle Feullerade.” 76 AdP D.4 U1 23, nº413 Justice de Paix du 4ème Arrondissement Ancien, Section Marché des Innocents, Procès-verbal: Dame Robert contre Dame Millot, le 20 décembre 1791. 77 Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 83. 78 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 13 janvier 1792, nº 13. Bouchary attests that the police arrested some implicated Dames des Halles along with the printer. 79 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 29 janvier 1792, nº29. In November 1791, counterfeiters had used the same tactic of switching green and red paper for false bills of five and twenty livres that they marked as belonging to the Caisse Patriotique. Bouchery, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, 82. 80 The deputies from Chartres arrived at the Legislative Assembly in February 1792. Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, 85. 81 AN C 147, n°218, “Lettre de la femme Gond, veuve Boulliaud, au président de l’Assemblée législative,” le 31 mars 1792. 82 Ibid. 83 Archives Parlementaires, le 31 mars 1792, series 1, vol. 41: 104 84 BnF 8-Z Le Senne-5128, Les Bienfaits de l’Assemblée Nationale ou entretiens de la Mère Saumon, doyenne de la Halle: Suivis des Vaudevilles, March 1792 (Paris, 1792), 138–40, 144. 85 Archives Parlementaires, le 12 décembre 1791, au matin, series 1, vol. 36: 37. “Cartier-Douineau” in Dictionnaire des parlementaires français Comprenant tous les Membres des Assemblées françaises et tous les Ministres français, vol. 4, ed. Adolphe Robert, Edgar Bourloton, and Gaston Cougny (Paris, 1889–1891). 597. 86 Ibid. 1 livre = 20 sous = 240 deniers. 87 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, 28–29. 88 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 25–26. Many of the Parisian caisses issued far more billets de confiance than they could back. The Caisse Patriotique had a reserve of 5 million assignats in April 1792, but they had issued 17.5 million livres in billets de confiance. 89 “Décret sur la vérification des caisses patriotiques ou de secours,” 30 mars 1792, in Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie Pendant la Révolution, ed. Georges Depevrot, 174–75. 90 Jean Bouchary, Les Faux-Monnayeurs sous la Révolution Française, 84. 91 When the Dames des Halles offered a donation for the war effort on May 14, 1792, they generously gave 1,865 livres in the form of one one 1,000-livre bill from the Caisse d’escompte, one five hundred-livre assignat, one one 200-livre assignat, three 50-livre assignats, and one 15-livre assignat. However, these bills were far too large for their everyday businesses. AN F11 1511, “Lettre des Dames de la halle occupant le marché des Innocents,” le 14 mai 1792, as reprinted in Procès-Verbaux des Comités d’Agriculture et de Commerce de la Constituante de la Législative et de la Convention, Fernand Gerbaux and Charles Schmidt, ed, vol. 2 (Paris, 1906), 748. 92 AN D VI 1, “Prospectus, Caisse de Commerce” (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de la Veuve Hérissant), 1. 93 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, 105, 106–8. 94 AN D VI 1, “Prospectus, Caisse de Commerce.” 95 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, 109. 96 AN C 143, nº 158 “Proces-Verbal de la séance [of the Legislative Assembly] du Dimanche 19 février l’an 4 de la liberté,” le 19 février 1792. 97 Archives Parlementaires, le 19 février 1792, series 1, vol. 38: 655. 98 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 20 février 1792, nº51. On the Legislative Assembly session of February 19, 1792. 99 Archives Parlementaires, le 19 février 1792, series 1, vol. 38: 652. See also AN C 143, nº158. 100 Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004), 72, 212. 101 Archives Parlementaires, le 19 février 1792, series 1, vol. 38: 655. 102 BnF Lc2 218, Condorcet, La Chronique de Paris, le 20 février 1792, nº51. Reporting on the Legislative Assembly session of February 19, 1792. 103 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, 112. 104 Georges Depeyrot, ed., Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie, 174–75. 105 The full list of forty-eight citizens who signed the collective petition included: twelve were only labeled “merchant” without a trade or were illegible; one wholesale supplier of the navy; one building contractor; six intermediary traders; five beverage sellers; one manager; two haberdashers; two grocers; one metal smith; one building painter; one seller of lathes; one secondhand clothes dealer; one oats merchant; one baker; one cobbler; one leaseholder of a furnished house; one coquilles; one money broker; one former lawyer; one commander from the National Guard; one National Gendarme stationed near the Tribunals; one furrier; two master fan-makers; one master carpenter. 106 Master artisans paid the majority of their workers daily rates, which made it difficult to delay settling accounts. Although payment could take other forms like meals and lodging, Parisian employers would especially need cash for wages in the insecure monetary environment. Michael Sonenscher, Work & Wages, 190–92. 107 AN D VI 1, “Pétition adressée par des marchands à l’Assemblée législative en faveur de la Caisse de commerce” (sent to the Committee of Finances to write a report), le 19 juin 1792. 108 Collection Générale des Décrets rendus par l’Assemblée Nationale Législative, avec la mention des sanctions et des mandats d'exécution donnés par le Roi, vol. 3 (Paris, 1792), 144. 109 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. vol. 2, 175. 110 Georges Depeyrot, ed., Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie, Pendant la Révolution, 208; Archives Parlementaires, le 18 août 1792, series 1, vol. 48: 331. 111 In an effort to stop caisses from rampantly issuing billets de confiance that far surpassed the value of the biens nationaux and caused the assignat to inflate, the Legislative Assembly had begun to pull some “paper money” from circulation in March 1792. Consequently, the petitioners strove to disassociate the Caisse de Commerce’s billets from the assignat. AN D VI 1, “Pétition adressée par des marchands à l’Assemblée législative en faveur de la Caisse de commerce” (sent to the Committee of Finances to write a report), le 19 juin 1792. 112 The complete list of petitioners included: nineteen marchands, no title, or illegible; four haberdashers; two grocers; one clockmaker; two brokers; one varnisher; two cobblers; two wine merchants; one paper merchant; two jewelers; three tailors; one draper; two makers of small objects; two joiners; one innkeeper; one keeper of valet cars; one printer; one building entrepreneur; two beverage sellers; one entrepreneur; one wigmaker; one ironmonger; one master mason; one master locksmith; and one carpenter. AN D VI 1, “Pétition des marchands & Entrepreneurs de Paris” from the [Legislative Assembly] Séance du matin du 26 août 1792. 113 I calculated this figure according to the six merchant guilds and 44 trade guilds that Louis XVI established in 1776. See BnF F-21193 (22) Édit du Roi, Par lequel Sa Majesté en créant, de nouveau, six Corps de Marchands & quarante-quatre Communautés d’Arts & Métiers, conserve livres centaines genres de Métiers ou de Commerce: Réunit les Professions qui ont de l’analogie entr’elles; & établit à l’avenir des règles dans le régime desdits Corps & Communautés (Paris, 1776). 114 Gail Bossenga, “Protecting Merchants: Guilds and Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France,” 702. 115 AN D VI 1, “Pétition des marchands & Entrepreneurs de Paris” from the [Legislative Assembly] Séance du matin du 26 août 1792. 116 AN D VI 1, “Pétition des marchands & Entrepreneurs de Paris” from the [Legislative Assembly] Séance du matin du 26 août 1792. 117 John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA, 1996), 465. 118 AN D VI 1, “Pétition des marchands & Entrepreneurs de Paris” from the [Legislative Assembly] Séance du matin du 26 août 1792. 119 Archives Parlementaires, le 3 septembre 1792, series 1, vol. 49: 198. 120 S. E. Harris, The Assignats, 26. 121 Archives Parlementaires, le 13 septembre 1792, series 1, vol. 49: 602. For conflicts in other regions between locals and deploying soldiers who attempted to use hometown billets de confiance, see Spang, Stuff and Money, 122. 122 Georges Depeyrot, ed., Monnaie et Papier-Monnaie, 225. 123 Plon-frères, ed., Réimpression de l’Ancien moniteur, le 16 septembre 1792, n°260 (Paris, 1854), 701. 124 Louis Joseph Hullin de Boischevalier, Répertoire, ou Almanach historique de la Révolution française, Volume 2 (Paris, 1793), 374. Although they banned billets de confiance in March 1793, the revolutionaries did not attempt to partially reestablish a metallic standard until the fall 1796. S.E. Harris, The Assignats, 215. 125 Jean Bouchary, Les Compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, 118. 126 Ibid., vol. 2, 131, 143. 127 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 188. 128 Of course, illicit currency still circulated among merchants without regulation. During the Terror in January 1794, police spies noted that many merchants made change for assignats with “small écus” (Old Regime money) or with coins worth 6 and 13 sols. AN D XLII 11, 14 nivôse an II (4 January 1794), as reprinted in Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur: Rapports des agents secrets du ministre de l’intérieur, Tome VI (Paris, 1964), 30. 129 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money, 159. 130 Jean Lafurie, Les Assignats et les Papiers-Monnaies, 132–33. 131 Ibid., 135. 132 Ibid., 9–10, 122. 133 Tristan Gaston-Breton, Banque de France: Deux siècles d’histoire (Paris, 1999), 23, 26. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Exacting Change: Money, Market Women, and the Crumbling Corporate World in the French Revolution
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shw115
DA - 2016-10-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/exacting-change-money-market-women-and-the-crumbling-corporate-world-aJs1krRab8
SP - 1
EP - 868
VL - Advance Article
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -