Rebecca L. Spang is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard).

For [Spang], the issues surrounding Revolutionary paper money, or assignats, were neither simply social nor ideological. They were simultaneously social and political. In fact, the assignat, she deftly shows, was meant to be both state-sponsored, i.e. national, and natural, i.e. worth something that was very real… This is a quite brilliant, assertive book. For Spang, all historians (‘pace Furet’ and ‘pace Soboul’) were wrong, as are—or were—culturally blind, apolitical economists; all Jacobins; some prostitutes and beggars, and, also, Edmund Burke, who explained in 1791 that ‘the utter destruction of assignats, and…the restoration of order, are one.’ Restoring ancient world orders, as we know, usually doesn’t work.

Rebecca L. Spang is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard).

For [Spang], the issues surrounding Revolutionary paper money, or assignats, were neither simply social nor ideological. They were simultaneously social and political. In fact, the assignat, she deftly shows, was meant to be both state-sponsored, i.e. national, and natural, i.e. worth something that was very real… This is a quite brilliant, assertive book. For Spang, all historians (‘pace Furet’ and ‘pace Soboul’) were wrong, as are—or were—culturally blind, apolitical economists; all Jacobins; some prostitutes and beggars, and, also, Edmund Burke, who explained in 1791 that ‘the utter destruction of assignats, and…the restoration of order, are one.’ Restoring ancient world orders, as we know, usually doesn’t work.

Rebecca L. Spang is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard).

For [Spang], the issues surrounding Revolutionary paper money, or assignats, were neither simply social nor ideological. They were simultaneously social and political. In fact, the assignat, she deftly shows, was meant to be both state-sponsored, i.e. national, and natural, i.e. worth something that was very real… This is a quite brilliant, assertive book. For Spang, all historians (‘pace Furet’ and ‘pace Soboul’) were wrong, as are—or were—culturally blind, apolitical economists; all Jacobins; some prostitutes and beggars, and, also, Edmund Burke, who explained in 1791 that ‘the utter destruction of assignats, and…the restoration of order, are one.’ Restoring ancient world orders, as we know, usually doesn’t work.