Now that we have come to the end of this economic history of the French Revolution, I hope to have convinced the reader of the pertinence of the model outlined in its opening pages. This model advances an explanation of the processes of escalation and outbidding involved in the Revolution during the period running from the spring of 1789 to Thermidor, Year II. It fleshes out the otherwise intangible notion of‘the force of circumstances’, which has been invoked for the past two centuries by historians, and brings out the interactions between politicians’ decisions, whose objectives are very short-term, the unfavourable consequences of these decisions in the longer term, and the reactions to these consequences, whose beneficial consequences are once again immediate only.

Our model implies a fundamental relation, but one that we have frequently asserted but not yet demonstrated, namely, that the proliferation and only the proliferation, of the assignats may, for a period of several years, account for their depreciation and the corresponding rise in prices. The politicians of the revolutionary period understood this very well, but it would seem often to have been forgotten since. In order to make at last some progress on this old debate regarding the role of paper money, I propose that we resort to the modern methods of econometry. Since the results thereby obtained constitute a crucial part of our thesis, the reader will need, in spite of their technical nature, to pay especial attention to the proofs involved.