500 Livres Assignat

Assignats at this denomination were deeply unpopular from the start — 500 livres was far beyond the reach of ordinary wage earners, making the note functionally useless for daily trade and circulating mainly among merchants and speculators who distrusted paper currency in the first place. The Convention had already authorized enormous volumes of lower denominations by this point, and inflation was accelerating regardless.

Gatteaux, a medal engraver of genuine distinction, produced work for several assignat series. Counterfeiting of high-value assignats was rampant enough that the Revolutionary government eventually made forgery a capital offense — a deterrent that did almost nothing to slow production of fakes, many printed abroad by émigré networks and British-backed operations.