IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/spmain/hal-03567487.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Coin memories: New Estimates of French Metallic Currency, 1840-1878

Author

Listed:
  • Marc Flandreau

    (Sciences Po - Sciences Po, Centre for Finance and Development - GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES)

Abstract

Scholars have traditionally argued that the stock of specie in circulation in France in the 19th century was considerable and that this "financial backwardness" accounted for France's slower economic growth in that century. Scholars have also claimed that the French bimetallic system was inherently unstable. It is true that until the 1880's, gold and silver coinage formed the main portion of French monetary stock, perhaps as much as 52% in 1885, but the supposition that this somehow hindered French industrialization requires correction. This is especially true given the fact that no precise figures for the annual monetary stock had existed until recently. As a result of new estimates, two periods of specie can be detected: 1830-52 (predominant silver coinage) and 1853-66 (predominant gold coinage as a result of the depreciation of gold). In general, by the 1850's the stock of specie in circulation was much smaller than conventionally believed and did not exceed by much that in Great Britain. There is no reason to believe that the French bimetallic system adversely affected the French economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Marc Flandreau, 1995. "Coin memories: New Estimates of French Metallic Currency, 1840-1878," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03567487, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-03567487
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03567487
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-03567487. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.