10 Livres Assignat

Assignats began as interest-bearing bonds secured against confiscated Church and émigré property, then were converted into circulating currency by degrees — a political improvisation that the Assemblée Nationale never fully resolved. This 10 Livres denomination sits in the middle period of that experiment, after the interest-bearing function was abandoned but before the catastrophic overprinting of the mid-1790s had undermined public confidence entirely.

Gatteaux, a medallist by training, brought an engraver's discipline to the plate work. The watermark was the primary defense against forgery, though counterfeiting was rampant regardless — the British government famously sponsored mass production of fake assignats as a deliberate instrument of economic warfare against Revolutionary France.