In February 1796, following a period of disastrous hyperinflation, millions of assignats - the revolutionary paper currency originally issued in 1789 as a state bond, its value based on the sale of recently confiscated clerical land were symbolically burned, along with the technology used for their production, in an iconoclastic public spectacle on the Place Vendome. Shortly afterwards trompe-l'oeil composite representations of assignats appeared incongruously in narrative visual histories of the Revolution, and in a variety of other formats, from fans to calendars, in the printshops of Directoire Paris. These prints appear to mobilise the image of the assignat in the services of diverse and contradictory political motivations. In many cases, the prints explicitly reference revolutionary violence, and come complete with hidden silhouette portraits of dead revolutionaries and royalists. However, later versions of this subgenre, such as the print published anomalously in the series Tableaux historiques de la Revolution francaise, minimise these references. This article examines the relationship between these enigmatic images and the assignats they represent as a series of traumatic encounters with the revolutionary past, paying particular attention to the appropriateness of trompe-l'oeil to this task. I read these illusionistic representations of assignats as ambiguous attempts to negotiate the economic, political and psychic alienation which the devaluation of the assignat and the experience of Terror brought about.
