Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State by Jotham Parsons (review)

In our consumer-oriented and highly commercialized world, it is easy to assume that money is a fact of life, like gravity or death, rather than a socially and historically-constructed phenomenon. In his new book, Jotham Parsons reminds us very powerfully of this important fact, and identifies in sixteenth-century France a series of significant developments in this evolution. The vector for this investigation is the Cour des monnaies, the youngest (created in 1552) of a series of sovereign courts, meaning that its decisions could be appealed only to the royal council. The court’s archives, heretofore virtually unexploited, are housed in the Archives Nationales, and if this book does nothing else, it shines a spotlight on a very poorly understood aspect of early modern history: the creation and regulation of money. But in fact, this book does much, much more: it traces “an outline of the vast web of primarily noneconomic (or not primarily economic) structures within which French Renaissance money operated and on which it depended for its existence” (13). Running throughout the book are ambiguous contemporary attitudes to money as both essential in facilitating beneficial commerce and also as a solvent that threatened the foundations of a hierarchical society.

Chapter one explores the origins of the court as an offshoot of the longer-established Chambre des Comptes, its early brush with scandal and corruption, and its emergence as a technically specialized and competent agent of the royal government. Chapter two focuses on “an intellectual history of economic regulation,” (61) and its connection to current conceptions of money. In particular, the inflation of the sixteenth century raised questions about the value and purpose of money, even as it revealed and heightened the tensions between “a lawless mania for the accumulation of money that short-circuits the ability of commerce to actually satisfy the needs for which exchange should exist” (89). By the early seventeenth century, writers and thinkers were beginning to think about “the ‘economy’ as an autonomous object, regulated by the kind of internal logic we now associate with it” (101). Underlying this conception was the idea that “money and commerce seemed far less threatening and far more healthy in the body politic than would have seemed conceivable a generation earlier” (103).

In large part, these developments were focused in and emerged through the monetary crisis that led to the wide-ranging monetary reforms of 1577. Rampant inflation played havoc with the relationship between the face value of coins and the value of their precious metal content, especially since it was almost generally accepted that the ratio of value of gold to silver was universally constant at twelve to one. Foreign coins, despite numerous schemes to keep them out of the kingdom, continued to cause difficulties and undermined the king’s sole prerogative of issuing and regulating the coinage of the realm. Against all odds, coming as they did in the midst of rebellion and civil war, the reforms of 1577 were remarkably successful, a vindication of the Cour des monnaies’ technical abilities and political dexterity.

Chapter four traces in contemporary literature on government and money the emergence of the identification of control and regulation of coinage with the power of the nascent sovereign state: money “was the perfect indicator. . . of social power and social control in the age of the emerging nation-state” (192). Chapter five, “Crimes against the Currency,” explores both infringements of and efforts to enforce royal control over this increasingly important marker of sovereignty. Once again, attention is drawn to money’s ambiguous nature: necessary to society, but also dangerous insofar as unrestrained pursuit of it threatened the social order: “The self-fashioning, social counterfeiting, and even the desperation of coiners would have appeared to contemporaries as expressions of the ambition, avarice, and danger of unlimited, disordered, arbitrary expansion discussed by the theorists” (234).

Chapter six, “The Monetary Imaginary of Renaissance France,” is the...