1000 Francs - Caisse des comptes courants

The Caisse des Comptes Courants was a short-lived Parisian private bank founded in 1796 by a consortium of merchants and financiers, operating for only a few years before being absorbed into the newly created Banque de France in 1800. This note belongs to that transitional moment when post-Revolutionary France was still improvising its banking infrastructure, having destroyed the old royal system without yet building a durable replacement.

Firmin Didot's involvement is the detail worth pausing on — he was simultaneously one of France's most important typographers, and his clean neoclassical letterforms give the note an austere authority that sets it apart from earlier assignat-era printing. Percier, who would soon become Napoleon's chief architect, contributed the design before his court career defined him.