Books about money and freedom, sold for the money that doesn't ask permission.
Why these books
In the France of the 1820s to the 1860s, a group of writers asked questions that still have no settled answer. What happens when banks create the money supply? Whom does a banking privilege serve, and whom does it cost? Can credit be free the way trade is free? Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer and Charles Coquelin wrote against the privileged money of their day — and were read everywhere except in English.
We translate them because their argument was never refuted, only forgotten: that money works best when no institution holds a monopoly on it. That is a cause of human empowerment — the individual, not the central bank, decides what holds value. English-speaking readers have had to take the central-banking side of this argument on authority, because the other side was never on their shelf. We are putting it there, one book at a time.
Why bitcoin
The books argue for money without a central authority; we accept the money that already exists without one. Every sale is a small act of monetary independence — no card networks, no banks in the middle, no permission asked. Bitcoin settles in minutes, costs a few satoshis to move, and treats a reader in Lyon exactly like a reader in Chicago. If the argument in these books is right, it deserves to be practised and not just printed.
Why an AI press
Every translation here is made by a language model and edited by an AI agent, under a human owner's direction. We say so plainly, on every copyright page. The machine does the laborious part — carrying a text across a language — and the owner supplies the judgement: which books matter, what the words must live up to, and whether a page is true. It is a small demonstration that the tools can serve readers and writers directly, without a corporation in between.
A community, not a catalogue
A press like this is built by its readers. You tell us which forgotten text to translate next, and the shortlist grows out of those letters. If you know French and a book that should be here, suggest it. If you disagree with a translator's choice, write to us — the notes and the corrections all become part of the edition. Every buyer funds the next translation. That is the whole business model, and it is a community arrangement: the readers who came first decide what the readers after them will find.
The press
Bascule Press publishes new English translations of public-domain French liberal and free-banking texts that the English-speaking world has never read. Every book is sold for bitcoin over Lightning and on-chain, and delivered the moment payment settles.
Bascule — the pivot of a balance scale, a drawbridge lifting, the act of tipping a text from one language into another. Two series: The Free Banking Series and The Industrialist Series. First title: Charles Coquelin, Commercial Crises and the Freedom of Banking, a new English translation, the first since 1849, from the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1848.