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International audience; "The aim of this paper is to situate the contribution of Antoine de Montchrestien and Antonio Serra in the monetary and financial environment of their time. The contribution of these early writers are placed back in context - that of the profound economic crisis in Europe: the monetary crisis in the Kingdom of Naples, and in France the crisis preceding the General Assembly in 1614 -15. After this analysis it may seem that they are many commonalities between Serra and Montchrestien. There is first of all their external personal situation to the circle of governors. Then there is the failure to take account of their analysis by those in power, the governors. They focus both on the real factors of economic development, investment, workforce. All this in a long-term vision, which excludes any monetary fetishism, puts the focus on combination and relationship between the economy and the state". [Publisher's Text].

International audience; This entry briefly covers the analysis of the balance of payments and exchange rates from mercantilism to the 1980's monetary approach to the balance of payments.

International audience; Understanding the work of Antonio Serra requires some knowledge, however basic, of the economic, monetary, and banking situation in the Kingdom of Naples at the time when Serra wrote his Breve trattato.1 The history of ideas consists all too often in making authors say what they ought to have said, what they are thought to have said, or what we imagine anticipates some later theory or another. Serra’s treatise, it is helpful to remind ourselves, was published in 1613. So it was probably written a few years before then. The two Discorsi of Marc’Antonio de Santis, against which Serra explicitly reacts, were written and presented in 1605 and 1606.2 The time lapse between their interventions, of more than six years, raises the question of what the real purpose of Serra’s Breve trattato actually was.

International audience; History of monetary thought : Edwin Walter Kemmerer

False money appeared as the general common issue in monetary debates that occured in European countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. It first refered to sovereignty, in a time of state-building, as well as to a serious economic problem. Beyond sovereignty and economy, justice and, then, the public faith, were endangered by those who devoted themselves to produce false coins. The thesis of this communication is that one cannot understand clearly the general topic of false money by reading texts of the time with today's general definition of false money. We propose, then, to identify the multiple dimensions of false money : counterfeiting (by individuals), degradations of coins (by individuals and officers of the Mint) and debasement and enhancement (by princes). These dimensions appeared in monetary discourses like Bodin's, Mariana's and Locke's ones, with sometimes a lack of clarity. Then, a general claim to counteract counterfeiting may conceal a claim to suppress any possibility of debasing currency. Making clearer monetary discourses on that topic and establishing a hierarchy between the three dimensions of false money helps to understand why the false money issue was firstly a matter of monetary justice by the prince himself. In order to do so, we pay special attention to Bodin, Mariana and Locke.

International audience; In this paper, we present the monetary debates in Europe from the XVIth to the XVIIIth centuries from the viewpoint of the problem of good and sound money. The framework of the paper is built on a typology of monetary systems, by which a dualist system is distinguished from a metallic one. Under the dualist system, the value in units of account of the specie in circulation was defined by monetary proclamations (Einaudi locates this era from Charlemagne to the French Revolution). Metallist proponents aimed at preventing any kind of manipulations with a radical transformation of the system of payment, which gave birth to a metallic monetary system from the very end of the XVIIth century. The purpose here is not to propose an evolutionary view of monetary systems, which would reduce history to stages to be superseded by the advent of some higher stage; we wish to work on the difficulties of monetary systems and their interweaving, which partake of evolving forms of pluralistic money. Eventually, the advent of an era of monetary stability was a necessary precondition for an effective and sound credit system to develop, which in turn proved to be a pre-condition for the deployment of industrial capitalism—what has been called the ‘monetary revolution’.