The germinal franc — 7 avril 1803

The law of 17 Germinal Year XI defined the franc as five grams of silver of nine-tenths fineness and set the gold-silver ratio at one to fifteen and a half. This bimetallic currency, of exceptional stability, remained unchanged until 1914. It gave France and its satellites the instrument of credit that the assignats had destroyed.

Out of the monetary disaster

The Revolution had left the country a ruined currency. The assignat, paper backed by national land, had lost almost all value before being withdrawn in 1796; the territorial mandate that replaced it did not last a year. The franc had existed nominally since 1795, but without a firm metallic definition and without a stock of coin to support it.

The law of Germinal Year XI, in the spring of 1803, settled the matter. It gave the franc a physical definition: five grams of silver of nine-tenths fineness, that is four and a half grams of fine silver.

Bimetallism and the napoléon

The system was bimetallic: gold and silver both circulated as legal tender, in a ratio fixed at one to fifteen and a half. The five-franc silver coin and the twenty-franc gold coin, which usage would call the napoléon, were its two pillars.

The Bank of France, created three years earlier, supplied discount and banknotes; the law of Germinal supplied the standard. Together they gave French credit a base that neither the Directory nor the end of the Ancien Régime had managed to provide.

A standard that crossed the century

The Germinal definition outlived every regime. It served as the basis of the Latin Monetary Union of 1865, which aligned the Belgian, Swiss, Italian and Greek currencies on the franc, and gave way only when war broke out in 1914 and convertibility was suspended.

More than a century of monetary stability: with the Civil Code, it is the reform of the Consulate whose effect outlasted by furthest the regime that made it.