The Story of the Fabulous Inflation of Assignats During the French Revolution.

This resonates strangely with our times, and shows why we need hard money like Bitcoin.

The observation is without appeal. “Today, my goods are 90 to 100 times the prices of 1789”. We are in the fall of 1795. It is the industrialist Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf who says it. He managed to continue the production of his famous Jouy fabrics despite troubled times. But at what price!

The political decisions of the time are strangely reminiscent of today's wanderings. With the assignats, the authorities created money in immense quantities. With the law of the General Maximum, they vainly blocked the prices. Are we condemned to live again with soaring prices? What is certain is that inflation is intimately linked to the history of the French Revolution. It financed it, amplified it, and also triggered it.

For inflation did not wait for the storming of the Bastille to take off. It came from a rare event: terrible weather that led to two consecutive years of bad harvests, in 1787 and 1788. The shortage of grain caused tax revenues to plummet, forcing Louis XVI to call a general assembly at a time when his finances had been drained by France's participation in the American Revolutionary War.