Narrator: What if a single man, a convicted murderer and fugitive gambler, could rescue a great nation from the brink of bankruptcy? What if he could do it not with gold or silver, but with a radical idea: that a country's wealth could be conjured from paper, credit, and public belief? In the early 18th century, this wasn't a hypothetical question. It was the reality unfolding in Paris, where fortunes were being made overnight, the word "millionaire" was being used for the first time, and the entire economy of France rested on the shoulders of one brilliant, audacious Scotsman. This incredible story of innovation, mania, and catastrophic collapse is chronicled in Janet Gleeson’s book, Millionaire: John Law, gambler, financier, and murderer. It reveals how one man’s vision sparked the world's first great stock market bubble, offering a timeless lesson on the fragile line between genius and folly.

Narrator: John Law’s journey from gilded youth to international financial phantom was forged in a crucible of mathematics, risk, and violence. Born into a family of Scottish goldsmiths, Law was exposed early to the world of finance, but his true passions were gambling and probability. He possessed a remarkable intellect, able to calculate complex odds in his head, a skill he honed in the high-stakes card rooms of London. As the Duc de Saint-Simon noted, Law was "the kind of man, who without ever cheating, continually won at cards by the consummate art... of his methods of play."

This life of a charming, high-rolling gambler, known as 'Beau Law,' took a dark turn in 1694. A rivalry with another London dandy, Edward "Beau" Wilson, escalated over a woman and ended in a duel in Bloomsbury Square. Law, a skilled swordsman, delivered a single, fatal thrust. He was arrested, tried for murder, and sentenced to death. The court dismissed his claim of self-defense, focusing instead on whether the duel was premeditated. In the corrupt legal system of the time, Wilson’s powerful relatives ensured a guilty verdict. Law’s life was saved only by a daring, well-funded escape from prison, orchestrated by influential friends. Now a fugitive, Law was forced into exile on the Continent, a brand of murderer forever attached to his name. This experience, however, didn't just make him an outlaw; it solidified his identity as an outsider, unbound by conventional rules and ready to challenge the established order.

Narrator: When John Law arrived in France, he found a nation on its knees. The extravagant spending and endless wars of King Louis XIV had left the country with a staggering debt of over two billion livres. The treasury was empty, trade had stagnated, and the populace was suffering. The traditional economic system, reliant on a limited supply of gold and silver coins, was strangling the kingdom. Law saw not a crisis, but an opportunity. He believed the solution was simple: money is not wealth itself, but the medium by which wealth is exchanged. If France lacked coin, it could simply create more money through credit and paper.

After the death of Louis XIV, Law found a crucial ally in the new regent, the Duc d'Orléans, a man who shared his interest in science and new ideas. Despite fierce opposition from the established financial elite, Law was granted a charter in 1716 to create a private bank, the Banque Générale. Its banknotes, guaranteed to be redeemable for a fixed weight of silver, slowly gained public trust. To further boost confidence, the Regent made a conspicuous public deposit of one million livres in gold and silver, a masterful piece of marketing that signaled royal approval. This was only the first step. Law’s grand vision was to merge the power of the bank with the potential riches of France’s overseas territories. He established the Mississippi Company, a trading monopoly over the vast, undeveloped French colony of Louisiana, and began selling shares to the public, payable in depreciated government debt. In doing so, he was not just creating a company; he was creating a vehicle to absorb the entire national debt and, in effect, put the kingdom's finances under his personal control.

Narrator: Law’s system unleashed a speculative frenzy unlike anything the world had ever seen. As he merged his bank, now the national Banque Royale, with the Mississippi Company, he created a financial behemoth. He issued new rounds of shares, each more popular than the last, and fueled the demand by printing ever-increasing quantities of banknotes. The price of Mississippi shares skyrocketed from 500 livres to over 10,000 livres in just over a year. Paris was gripped by "Mississippi Madness."

The city’s narrow rue Quincampoix became the world’s first open-air stock market, a chaotic scene of frenzied trading from dawn till dusk. Fortunes were made in an instant. A footman who made a lucky investment was able to buy his own fine carriage. A widow who invested a small debt payment became fabulously wealthy, buying a château and hosting lavish banquets. The social order was turned upside down as servants, shopkeepers, and artisans became richer than the aristocrats they once served. It was during this period that the word "millionaire" was coined to describe these new titans of wealth. The mania was so intense that a hunchback famously earned a fortune by renting out his hump as a writing desk for traders to sign contracts on in the crowded street. For a brief, intoxicating moment, John Law seemed to have found the philosopher’s stone, turning paper into gold and transforming Paris into a city of dreams.

Narrator: The dream, however, was built on a foundation of pure confidence, and that confidence began to crack. Savvy investors, including Law’s own friend Richard Cantillon, realized the company’s share price had become completely detached from the actual, dismal reality of the Louisiana colony. They began to quietly sell their shares and convert their paper fortunes back into tangible assets like gold, silver, and land. The Prince de Conti, after a falling out with Law, dramatically sent three wagons to the bank to cash out millions of livres in banknotes, a public act of defiance that sent a shockwave of doubt through Paris.

To stop the drain of precious metals, Law made a fatal error. He used his power as Controller General to issue a series of increasingly desperate decrees. He restricted the amount of gold and silver an individual could own and eventually banned its use as currency altogether, effectively making paper the only legal tender. This was a step too far. Rather than stabilizing the system, it triggered widespread panic. The public, feeling trapped, rushed the bank in a desperate attempt to get anything of value for their paper. The ensuing riots led to violence and death. On July 17, 1720, a crowd of 15,000 people mobbed the bank, and in the chaos, over a dozen were crushed to death. The public’s fury turned squarely on Law. His carriage was smashed to pieces by a mob, and he was forced into hiding. The system had imploded.

Narrator: John Law’s fall was as swift as his rise. He was dismissed from his post and, with the help of the Duc de Bourbon, fled France in disgrace, his vast fortune confiscated. He spent his final years in Venice, haunted by his failure, gambling to survive, and dying of pneumonia in 1729. Yet his legacy is far more complex than that of a mere charlatan.

Law’s system, for all its disastrous consequences, did manage to wipe out a significant portion of France’s national debt and temporarily stimulated its economy. More importantly, his ideas were visionary. He was one of the first to understand the power of credit and paper currency as tools for economic growth, concepts that are the bedrock of modern finance. The collapse of his system, however, left France with a deep-seated distrust of national banks and paper money that lasted for nearly a century. The story of the Mississippi Bubble became a cautionary tale, echoed in subsequent financial manias from the South Sea Bubble of his own time to the dot-com crash of the 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from John Law’s story is that financial systems are not just about numbers, theories, or even genius; they are about human psychology. Law’s brilliant model failed because he underestimated the powerful, irrational forces of greed and fear. He believed he could control the system with logic, but he could not control the madness of the crowd.

Janet Gleeson’s Millionaire is more than a biography; it is a mirror reflecting the cyclical nature of our own economic world. It challenges us to ask whether, for all our sophisticated models and regulations, we are any less susceptible to the speculative fever that gripped 18th-century Paris. Law’s story serves as a powerful reminder that the line between innovation and reckless speculation is perilously thin, and that public trust, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain.