Money, Manhood, and Revolutionary Biography: The Limits of Voluntary Selfhood

We examine the ordinary life of a revolutionary ‘nobody’—Gabriel Noël, who served in the army from 1792 to 1796 and who wrote extensively to his mother and sister throughout—to explore how his economic and monetary experiences shaped both his radicalization and his disenchantment with the revolution. Like others, his revolutionary life came saddled with practical questions, none more pressing than how to deal with the assignats, the paper currency introduced by the government but which eventually lost almost all its value. Because of the country’s economic woes, Gabriel’s everyday became an ongoing deliberation between individual liberty and patriotic constraint, a constant soul-searching about his socio-economic identity and the revolution’s purpose, a nagging hesitation about who and what he could trust. Through his travails, we see how individuals navigate the economy: that is, by involuntary feeling as much as rational, conscious thought—just as they do other aspects of their existence.