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New Forms of Money for the Twenty-first Century and the Legacy of France’s Assignat Experiment

The assignat, the French Revolution’s innovative but failed currency experiment, is amongst the most instructive in the entire history of currency innovations. Although the example of the assignat is often invoked to demonstrate the importance of restraint in the issuance of token money, and to illustrate the evils of uncontrolled inflation, it has so far received little attention in the debate surrounding contemporary currency innovations, such as crypto-currencies and stablecoins. This paper pursues a three-pronged objective: first, to explore the core lessons of the unsuccessful assignat experiment for money, in general, and for contemporary currency innovations, in particular; second, to identify, on their basis, the main determinants for the success of currency experiments; and third, to apply to twenty-first Century currency innovations the lessons drawn from the assignat experiment’s failure, with a view to assessing the prospect of their success, as viable alternatives to fiat currencies, relative to the assignat.