Philosophy of Money in Renaissance France

In old regime France, money and coinage were inseparable. Good government created money by applying suitable technical, bureaucratic, and academic or humanistic expertise to the coining of metals. Money was thus a product of the state, but of the state working for the common good as conceived in an Aristotelian and even republican mode. It was an instrument of display and of propaganda, a status that drew it increasingly into the project, already active in the court of Charles V, of reviving the glories of the ancient world. Through the fifteenth century the articulation of this understanding, carried out largely by royal advisors, was closely tied to scholastic philosophy and a specifically Christian ethics. From the early sixteenth century, though, radical new understandings of classical antiquity combined with political, economic, and technological developments opened new perspectives on money, as a historical phenomenon, a creation of the state, or even an epistemological tool of political economy. Still, more traditional ideas maintained their power, and retained a hegemony at least up to the 1590s.