Why the revolution went off the rails

Assignats are the bane of every student of the French revolution without an economics background. They were the bonds issued by the National Assembly from 1789, underwritten by the sale of newly nationalised church property, and all I ever really grasped about them was that they contributed to rampant inflation. In fact, as Ian Davidson shows in his new account of the revolution, their issue and ‘reckless mismanagement’ were as essential to the revolution’s initial success as to its ultimate failure. They may even have been ‘the single most important factor that caused the revolution to go off the rails’. At last someone has not just explained
assignats but made them interesting.

It is all too easy, with a subject as vast as the French revolution, to be distracted by the multiplicity of sources and individual narrative trails one can follow. But Davidson’s book is cool, concise and utterly compelling, driven not by personalities but by the relentless momentum of the revolution itself. This is the clearest and most comprehensive account I’ve read of the economic imperatives and systems of the revolution — the ‘operational perspective’, as he puts it in another context — and how they were conceived and then corrupted over the dramatic five years from the first meeting of the Estates General to the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror.

This is not to say that Davidson ignores the people who starred in this drama. On the contrary, he draws neat and revealing portraits of all the leading and many of the supporting players, memorably describing the Marquis de Lafayette as ‘something of a comic-opera hero’. But it is typical of his approach that when he introduces the young soldier Lazare Hoche, he tells us that an avenue in Paris was named after him but not that during his time in prison he was the lover of the future Empress Josephine.