5 ideas
The Revolution did not simply change monetary policy; it dissolved the shared assumptions that let people treat coins and notes as self-evidently valuable. Once sovereignty, property, and the social order were all open to question, what money was and who guaranteed it became open to question too.
Instead of reading hyperinflation as the planned result of radical ideology, look at the everyday practices that made money work: making change, counting, signing, forging, accepting or refusing notes. Outcomes that look like policy choices often came out of improvised habits and unintended consequences at the counter and in the marketplace.
Early assignats came only in large denominations, so ordinary workers could not buy bread with them and coin vanished from circulation. Municipalities, clubs, and private businesses issued their own local notes, the billets de confiance, which splintered the monetary system into many competing, unevenly trusted currencies.
When no one could be sure a note would keep its worth, each purchase became a judgment about the Republic's credibility and the other person's honesty. Price disputes, refusals to accept paper, and accusations of hoarding or counterfeiting turned ordinary commerce into a site of suspicion, surveillance, and terror, as with the laws of the Maximum and the penalties for discrediting the assignat.
Money holds value only while enough people keep acting as if it does, so its stability depends on continuous collective confirmation, not on intrinsic backing alone. The assignat was backed by real land, yet it failed because the web of expectations, habits, and institutional trust around it broke down.