In late 1789, therefore, tax collection fell far short of its goals. Matters were made worse by the fact that the Assembly was having difficulty collecting the taxes it had authorized, as many French citizens were under the false impression that they did not have to pay anything at all. Upon abolishing such taxes as the hated gabelle (salt tax) and indirect taxes (equivalent to modern sales taxes), the Assembly had endeared itself to the people to the detriment of its own coffers. After taking power, the Assembly had inadvertently made the system of taxation even more confusing. The financial crisis was the result of decades' worth of wanton spending in the form of expensive military endeavors and frivolous building projects, as well as incoherent systems of taxation that differed from region to region. Of the two glaring issues that had originally forced Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General back in May, namely financial crisis and societal reform, the former had been largely ignored in the dramatics of the revolutionary summer.
In November 1789, national bankruptcy became practically inevitable. It was now left to the Assembly to craft something new from the pieces. The oppressive Ancien Régime, it seemed, had been shattered. 1774-1792) of his power, to the point that he and his family were now virtual prisoners of the Revolution. At the same time, popular uprisings such as the Storming of the Bastille in July and the Women's March on Versailles in October gradually stripped King Louis XVI of France (r.
Having abolished feudalism and suppressed the Catholic Church's right to collect tithes in the August Decrees, the Assembly had gone on to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a landmark human rights document that, among other things, denied the French kings' claim to rule by divine right. The National Constituent Assembly, birthed from the dramatics of the Estates-General of 1789, had come to dominate the French political scene. By 1797, the assignats were out of circulation and had been replaced by the franc.īy November 1789, it would not have been unreasonable for one to assume that the French Revolution had come to an end. This was due to the French public's distrust of paper money, investors' lack of confidence in the stability and credibility of the revolutionary government, as well as the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802).
Despite initial success, assignats quickly decreased in value, especially after they had started to be used as a currency. The Assembly's plan was to supply their creditors with assignats, which were bonds with a 5 percent interest rate, who could redeem them to purchase these national lands. Originally issued in December 1789, assignats were backed by the value of national properties that the National Constituent Assembly had recently seized from the crown and the Catholic Church. Yet, assignats soon devolved into a paper currency, the mass production of which led to inflation and depreciation. First issued in the form of bonds, the assignat was meant to stimulate France's economy as a quick means to pay off national debt. The assignat was a paper bill issued by France between 17, during the French Revolution (1789-1799).
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