Paper-Money and Revolutionary Times. The Assignats and the Regimes of historicity

The assignat is that strange monetary instrument which would lead to settle the past – Old Regime debts – while being based on the future – the prospective sale of biens nationaux. Its very nature seemed to echo the new regime of historicity that emerged at the end of the 18th century, that of a past no longer useful for understanding an accelerating present which was more oriented toward a promising future. However if this regime, tended toward “progress”, became dominant, other relationships to time also survived under the Revolution. For example, the Christian eschatological expectation and the old view that “history is life’s teacher” had certainly not disappeared. Now the assignat offers a unique point of entry to consider divergent relationships of contemporaries to time: the assignat’s transactional gesture which has ripped the past and also is seen as an instrument to control the future; its statistical present-oriented dissection aimed at closing up the expectations of a brighten future; the “natural time” of economics and the velocity of money; the so-called jubilee of wealth and the mirroring apocalypses of fanatical counter-revolutionaries and “exaggerated” republicans. In those articulations, everyone tried their best to define paper-money and this new view of space-time that was the French Revolution.