Olivia: Everyone thinks the first 'millionaires' were industrialists or oil barons. Wrong. The word was invented in 1719 for people who got rich overnight in a wild stock scheme run by a convicted murderer. And most of them ended up broke within a year. Jackson: That is an incredible opening line. A convicted murderer invents millionaires? It sounds like a pitch for a crazy streaming series, not actual history. How is that even possible? Olivia: It’s an absolutely wild story, and it’s the heart of the book we’re diving into today: Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance by Janet Gleeson. Jackson: And Gleeson is the perfect person to tell this story. She has a background as an art historian and has worked at major auction houses. You can feel that eye for dramatic detail and human folly in her writing. Olivia: Exactly. She treats this economic catastrophe not as a dry textbook case, but as a grand, tragic opera. And it’s a story that’s received a lot of praise for making this complex history so accessible, though some critics and readers do debate her sympathetic portrayal of the man at the center of it all, John Law. Was he a hero or a villain? That's the big question we're tackling. Jackson: I’m already hooked. A gambler, a duelist, a murderer… and a financial genius? This guy contains multitudes. Olivia: To understand how a man like Law could even get a seat at the table, you have to understand just how broken France was in the early 1700s.

Jackson: Okay, so set the scene for me. How bad could it possibly be? We think of 18th-century France as this place of glittering palaces and powdered wigs. Olivia: That was the facade. In reality, after the death of the Sun King, Louis XIV, France was spectacularly, apocalyptically bankrupt. The treasury was empty. The government was drowning in over 2 billion livres of debt. The currency was a total mess—coins were constantly being devalued by the king to stretch his funds, so nobody trusted them. Out in the countryside, people were literally starving, making flour out of ferns and boiled grass. Jackson: Wow. So it’s less 'let them eat cake' and more 'let them eat grass.' That’s a level of desperation I can’t even fathom. Olivia: Precisely. And into this economic wasteland walks our protagonist: John Law. He's a Scotsman, tall, impossibly charming, and a brilliant mathematician. He’s also on the run, having been sentenced to death in London for killing a man in a duel over a woman. He escaped prison and has spent years drifting through Europe, making a fortune at the card tables. Jackson: Hold on. How do you get past the 'convicted murderer' part on your resume when you're pitching the King's regent? "Greetings, Your Highness. I'm a fugitive gambler. Now, about your national debt..." Olivia: That’s the magic of John Law. And the desperation of the Regent, the Duc d'Orléans. Law didn't just see a nation in crisis; he saw a fundamental flaw in the very idea of money. He argued that a country's wealth isn't the gold and silver locked in its vaults. That's just dead metal. A country's true wealth is its land, its people, its capacity for trade and production. Jackson: That sounds surprisingly modern. Olivia: It was revolutionary. He said the problem was that this real wealth was locked up because there wasn't enough money—enough metal coins—to facilitate trade. His solution? Replace the unreliable metal with something more flexible: paper money, managed by a central bank. Jackson: But paper money? After centuries of gold and silver, why would anyone trust it? It sounds like a scam. It’s just paper. Olivia: Ah, but this is where his genius comes in. He starts small. In 1716, he gets permission to open a private bank, the Banque Générale. And he makes one simple, brilliant promise. The legend on his banknotes read that they were redeemable "in coin of the weight and standard of this day." Jackson: What does that actually mean in simple terms? Olivia: It means his paper was more reliable than the king's own money. While the king could melt down coins and make them lighter overnight, devaluing them, Law’s notes guaranteed you a fixed amount of silver. Suddenly, merchants loved it. It was stable. It was light. You could transfer huge sums without hiring armed guards and a wagon. Jackson: Okay, I can see the appeal. It’s like the difference between carrying a brick of gold and using a debit card. Olivia: Exactly. And to build public trust, the Regent himself pulls a brilliant PR stunt. He has his official carriage, liveried servants and all, pull up to Law's bank and conspicuously deposit coffers filled with a million livres in gold and silver. The message was clear: the state trusts this man. Jackson: That’s a power move. So the bank is a success. But that’s not what caused the bubble, right? This is where it gets really crazy. Olivia: This is where it goes from a smart banking solution to a world-altering financial experiment. Law wasn't content just fixing the currency. He had a much bigger vision. He looked across the Atlantic to France's vast, undeveloped territory in North America: Louisiana. Jackson: Which at the time was basically a giant, mosquito-infested swamp with a few forts. Olivia: To the French public, it was a land of myth and legend, rumored to be filled with mountains of gold and silver, just waiting to be discovered. Law leveraged this fantasy. In 1717, he established a trading company with exclusive rights to this territory: The Mississippi Company. Jackson: And this is the company that made everyone millionaires? Olivia: This is the company. He proposed selling 200,000 shares to the public. And here’s the hook: you could buy these shares not just with coins, but with billets d’états—those nearly worthless government IOUs that were flooding the country. Jackson: Wait, so he’s letting people trade their junk government debt for a piece of a company that promises infinite riches from the New World? That’s a genius way to absorb the national debt. Olivia: It was an economic masterstroke. People rushed to trade their bad paper for what they believed was a golden ticket. The bank, which was soon nationalized and became the Banque Royale, started printing more and more money to fuel the demand. The share price of the Mississippi Company began to climb. Then it started to soar. From 500 livres, to 1,000, to 5,000, and by the end of 1719, it peaked at an astonishing 10,000 livres per share. Jackson: That’s a 20x return in a couple of years. I can see why people went crazy. Olivia: Paris became the center of the world. People from all over Europe flooded in to get a piece of the action. The street where shares were traded, the rue Quincampoix, was a scene of utter pandemonium. Fortunes were made in an instant. A footman made so much money he bought his own carriage, but out of habit, when it arrived, he instinctively jumped onto the back where the servants stand. Jackson: That’s both hilarious and a little sad. And the story about the hunchback… Olivia: It’s legendary. The street was so crowded that a hunchback supposedly rented out his hump as a portable writing desk for traders to sign their contracts on. He made a fortune. This is the moment the word "millionaire" enters the language, to describe these people who had become fabulously, unimaginably wealthy overnight. John Law was no longer just a banker; he was the economic god of France, appointed Controller General of Finances. He was, for a moment, the most powerful man in Europe. Jackson: It sounds like a perfect system. He solved the debt crisis, stimulated the economy, and made everyone rich. What could possibly go wrong? Olivia: And that naturally leads us to the second key idea we need to talk about. He had built a perfect machine, a seven-story building on foundations that could only support three. This is where the genius starts to tip into madness.

Jackson: Okay, so the party is in full swing. Everyone's a millionaire, champagne is flowing. What's the first crack in the facade? Olivia: The first crack is a whisper, a doubt. People start to realize that the Mississippi Company's immense valuation is based on… well, promises. The fabled gold mines in Louisiana haven't materialized. The colony is actually a death trap of disease and starvation. An astute Irish banker named Richard Cantillon, who was an early investor and friend of Law's, got a report from his brother on the ground in Arkansas and quietly sold all his shares, walking away with a massive profit. He saw the writing on the wall. Jackson: The smart money gets out first. A tale as old as time. Olivia: Then the big money follows. And this is where it gets personal. The Prince de Conti, a powerful nobleman, feels slighted by Law in some courtly dispute. In a fit of pique, he decides to teach Law a lesson. He drives up to the Banque Royale with three enormous wagons. Jackson: Oh no. I think I know where this is going. Olivia: He presents millions of livres in banknotes and demands they be converted to gold and silver coin, as promised. Law has to comply. The sight of three wagons being loaded with the nation's hard currency and carted away by a single nobleman sends a shockwave of panic through Paris. If a Prince doesn't trust the paper, why should anyone else? Jackson: It’s the first major run on the bank. And it exposes the fundamental weakness: there isn't enough gold to back all the paper that's been printed. Olivia: Exactly. And this is where Law, the brilliant theorist, becomes Law, the desperate dictator. He makes a series of catastrophic decisions. He issues an edict making it illegal for any citizen to own more than 500 livres in gold coin. He even encourages people to inform on their neighbors who might be hoarding gold. Jackson: He banned gold? He's trying to outlaw the very thing people have valued for thousands of years. That’s insane. It’s like trying to ban gravity. Olivia: It was a massive overreach. People started smuggling their wealth out of the country. One stock dealer named Vermalet supposedly hid a million livres in coins in a cart full of manure and drove it across the border disguised as a peasant. The public's trust, the very foundation of his system, was shattering. Jackson: This is pure herd mentality in reverse. It's GameStop, it's crypto mania. People aren't buying value; they're buying the hype. And when the hype dies, they stampede for the exits. Olivia: And Law couldn't control the stampede. In a final, desperate act in May 1720, he announced that to stabilize the system, the value of both the shares and the banknotes would be gradually cut in half. Jackson: He just told everyone their money was now worth 50% less. I can't imagine that went over well. Olivia: It was the final betrayal. The public went berserk. Riots erupted. A mob descended on the bank, and in the crush, over a dozen people were trampled to death. They carried the bodies to the Palais Royal, demanding justice. Law’s carriage was found and smashed to pieces by an angry mob. He became the most hated man in France. Jackson: Wow. From savior to pariah in a matter of months. What did the Regent do? The man who had backed him all the way? Olivia: The Regent, fearing for his own power, caved. He revoked all of Law's edicts. The system was officially dead. Law was dismissed, and with the help of a friend, he fled France in the middle of the night, a penniless exile, leaving behind a country in financial ruin and a populace who had learned to deeply, profoundly distrust paper money for generations. Jackson: It’s a spectacular fall from grace. It makes you wonder, was the system itself flawed, or was it just the people? As Voltaire famously wrote, "Has half the nation found the philosopher’s stone in the paper mills? Is Law a god, a rogue or a charlatan?" Olivia: That’s the question that hangs over the entire story. And it’s a question that’s just as relevant today.

Jackson: So, in the end, was Law a con man or a tragic visionary? Where do you land after reading Gleeson's account? Olivia: That's the billion-livre question. Gleeson argues he was a visionary, and I tend to agree. He correctly saw that a nation's wealth isn't just the gold in its vault, but its productive capacity, its people, its trade. He invented the tools of modern finance—central banking, credit, even a form of quantitative easing. Jackson: But it all went so horribly wrong. Olivia: Because his system was built for rational actors, and he unleashed it on a public driven by the most irrational forces of all: greed and fear. It reminds me of what Isaac Newton, who lost a fortune in a similar bubble in London, famously said. He lamented that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people." Jackson: And that's the terrifying takeaway. Three hundred years later, with all our algorithms and regulations, we're still susceptible to the same madness. The technology changes—from paper shares to digital tokens—but the human behavior doesn't. Olivia: Exactly. Law’s story is a powerful reminder that any financial system, no matter how brilliantly designed, is ultimately a social system. It runs on trust. And when that trust is broken, it collapses. He devalued the Crown's debt, yes, but he also left a scar on the French psyche. Jackson: Yet his ideas survived. We all live in a world built on John Law's principles. We all use paper—or digital—money that has no intrinsic value, backed only by our collective faith in the system. Olivia: It makes you wonder, what's our Mississippi Bubble today? What are we all wildly speculating on that might seem absurd in hindsight? Jackson: That's a heavy question. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our social channels and let us know what you think. Is history just repeating itself with a different name? Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.