Focusing on monetary issues, Rebecca Spang offers a new and disappointing history of the French Revolution. While she has read much of the vast corpus of primarily materials, Spang denigrates or ignores the contributions of economics-trained economic historians. The snarky comment quoted above and others like it this volume are more than a distraction; many financial and monetary historians do care what money, notes, bonds, and bills look like; and the knowledge gleaned from careful inspection has often informed their research. However, they are all lumped together with contemporary economists who she claims “treat the past as if it were the present in fancy dress, as if the only questions worth asking about it concerned the reliability of available data” (p. 277). Full disclosure: footnote 15 (Chapter 2) quickly dismisses this reviewer, as examining the assignats “almost exclusively from quantitative sources,” though he does have has a framed sheet of—yes, carefully examined—assignats—hung on the wall of his study. This reviewer also believes that theory (“abstraction,” though not the Marxian kind) enables rather than enfeebles analysis. Given her stand on theory and evidence, it is not surprising that the author spares the reader any tables or charts. But, there is data, lots of it; there are carefully assembled numbers for prices, money, expenditures, revenues, debt, exchange rates and interest rates are ignored in favor of a number quoted by one source here and another there. Hers is an innumerate economic history.

Spang is quite correct that the long parliamentary discussions on monetary issues have been ignored and she traces the evolution of the assignats that were conceived as being backed by and ultimately retired by the sale of the nationalized lands of the Church and King. She treats this form of money as a French phenomenon with no precedent. However, for a land-based currency, one need look no further than colonial British America where legislatures short of coin to pay their expenses, created loan offices or land banks to issue currency, backed by the purchase of land, and bills of credit, backed by future tax revenues. On this subject, there was an expert with whom the French were familiar: Benjamin Franklin. His insightful 1729 essay A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Money and the modern literature provides important comparisons. Also, a fellow by the name of John Law wrote Essay on a Land Bank (1705), proposing a land-based currency for Scotland.

While Spang delivers a valuable picture of the vast debates on debt and money, the book is marred by the failure to read the relevant secondary literature that would have clarified many issues that seem murky in her book. One stunning example? Spang discusses at great length coinage and especially shortages of coins; but nowhere does she discuss bimetallism—the monetary regime adopted by France. The problems of this regime, when market prices of gold and silver diverged from their mint prices, created headaches for all nations of the period—and coin “shortages.” What might one read? Angela Redish's Bimetallism: An Economic and Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2000) is a fine introduction, emphasizing the technological difficulties of producing and keeping in circulation small denomination coins; and then there is the book The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, 2002) by the Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent and François Velde, which is only mentioned in passing. Sargent and Velde have also contributed an excellent article on the assignat inflation “The Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution,” appearing in the 1995 Journal of Political Economy, which is unmentioned in this book.

Unfortunately, in Spang's view, historians have permitted “classical and neoclassical economics to structure how they see” the monetary crisis of the 1790s. It is just too much money, chasing too few goods; and she regards this focus on quantity as a fatal flaw. Her principal target is Andrew Dickson White's polemical pamphlet Paper Money Inflation in France (New York, 1876), which does offer a simple quantity theory explanation. No modern work—not Sargent and Velde's paper nor my work—intrudes here to blunt her characterization of economists’ tunnel vision. She then points to Seymour Harris’ classic The Assignats (Cambridge, 1930) as providing evidence that inflation often moved ahead of the issue of assignats and concludes that this “reverses” the quantity theory. This dismissal is, of course, too easy; it is all too well known that when inflation takes off into hyperinflation, the link between money and prices breaks down because of expectation of future increases in money. She lays her perception of economists’ failures to their temptation to see events in “transhistorical terms” so that inflation is always explained by one simple deterministic theory, leaving no room for the qualitative factors—unique historical context and political choices—that make all inflations inherently different. Yet, studies applying modern political economy to the French Revolution do directly address this dimension of inflation with clarifying insights—and a bonus of lessons for policy makers.