We will now look at the course of events in France. Here the livre was
originally a pound weight of silver. It was debased by royal authority
from time to time, as in England, but much more rapidly. M. Béranger,
in his report on the French monetary system in 1802, says that the
ratio of gold to silver was changed twenty-six times between 1602 and
1773, and that the livre at the time when he wrote had been reduced to
the seventy-sixth part of its original weight. The livre is now called
the franc. It is impossible to trace any scientific connection between
these recoinages and the metal ratios except that the divergencies
between the legal and market ratios, whenever they were discovered,
were seized upon by the Government as an excuse for further debasement.
They “fell back alternately from gold to silver and from silver to
gold,” says Béranger, making a profit to the royal treasury each time.
M. Calonne, Comptroller-General under Louis XVI., has given us a list
of the principal recoinages prior to his time, of which there were four
in the reign of Louis XIV. and five in that of Louis XV.
It would be a waste of time to recount them. The ratio existing when
Louis XVI. came to the throne was 14⅝ to 1. It had been adopted in
1726. The legal ratio in England at that time, as we have seen, was
15⅐. Both ratios were, or gradually became, divergent from the market
ratio. Silver was exported from England and gold was exported from
France. A recoinage in the latter country became necessary, and this
was undertaken and executed by Calonne in good faith in the year 1785.
Calonne chose the ratio of 15½. This ratio was in force when the
celebrated law of 1803 was passed, under the Consulate. It was not
exactly conformable to the market ratio at the time. It rated gold
too highly, but Calonne said that he had observed that gold had an
advancing tendency, and he believed that if 15½ was not the true ratio
then, it would become so before long. In this he was right, for when
the law of 1803 was passed, there was no observable tendency to export
either metal, and the Hamburg market ratio, as tabulated by Soëtbeer,
was very close to 15½.