Value of Livres in 1807? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

The "livre" Napoleon refers to was actually a franc, which replaced the livre during the Revolution. But the franc and livre were almost identical in value (at least at first), so perhaps unsurprisingly people continued to refer to the new currency by the old name for some time.

Thomas Piketty writes:

Ultimately, prices measured in francs in the period 1800-1810 were roughly the same as prices expressed in livres tournois in the period 1770-1780, so that the change of monetary unit during the Revolution did not alter the purchasing power of money in any way. The novelists of the early nineteenth century, starting with Balzac, moved constantly from one unit to another when characterizing income and wealth: for contemporary readers, the franc germinal (or "franc-or") and livre tournois were one and the same. For Père Goriot, "a thousand two hundred livres" of rent was perfectly equivalent to "twelve hundred francs," and no further specification was needed.

What follows are a series of prices and incomes I've encountered in a range of sources while researching my podcast on 19th Century France, The Siècle. Most of these are from about a decade after Napoleon wrote but outside of periods of intense strain prices remained pretty stable during this period. (Use caution applying these figures to 1813, for example, during the post-Russia collapse of Napoleon's empire.) In no particular order:

An unskilled laborer earned about 1.1 francs per day in 1820 (with some variation between regions).
It cost about 80 francs to travel from Paris to Bordeaux by "diligence," a huge stagecoach that sat between 16 and 20 travelers — half for fares and half for expenses along the way. This “represented a whole month’s wages for a skilled worker.” (The rich could spend far more — a team of four horses to rush someone along the same Paris-Bordeaux road could cost 1,300 francs.
Cloth workers along the Rhône in 1820 earned 2 to 2.25 francs per day.
In Paris, a locksmith earned 5 francs per day, a roofer 4.5, a stonecutter 3.5, a carpenter 3.25. In all these cases, we're looking at between 1,000 and 2,000 francs per year for skilled laborers.
A quote from the Restoration-era prefect of the Loire-Inférieure describes two to three thousand francs per year as a modest income for a gentleman: "When a country gentleman with an income of two or three thousand francs, without a knowledge of proper spelling, without an agreeable disposition, and even without an army commission, looks down on landowners, lawyers, and physicians, they react against him and add a seething rage to their proverbial aversion."
In Père Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac's family's "tiny" estate in the south of France “was worth perhaps three thousand francs a year, not allowing for the instabilities inherent in the wine trade.”
An army captain on half-pay right before the Hundred Days earned 74 francs per month, or 888 per year; this was seen as insultingly low and helped drive many veterans back to Napoleon's cause.
Clergy could earn 700 francs per year for curates, 1,500 for parish priests.
Rural teachers might earn as little 200 francs per year in the poorest villages that could still afford a teacher, though this might come with a house or other perks outside salary.
A family of four in Bellême needed 500 francs per year to avoid begging; many peasants did not reach this.
A typical noble family during the Restoration earned perhaps 5,200 francs per year, though this was down from around 8,000 francs before the Revolution (and these averages varied from region to region).
One marquise lamented after the Revolution that the loss of feudal dues had cost her family "58,000 of its original annual income of 80,000 francs," which forced them to "contrive a living, sometimes by sale of the few possessions remaining to us, sometimes by taking salaried posts." (They were, mind you, still earning 22,000 francs per year.)
In Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a village priest has a private income from an inheritance of 800 francs per year, an income called "good solid money."
Among government employees, a third-class clerk could earn 2,000 francs/year, an engineer 5,000.
A rural cottage might cost 50 francs per year in rent; in Paris, the median rent was 289 francs, but varied by arrondissement from averages as low as 147 francs to as high as 604. In Père Goriot, room and board at a once-nice boarding house ranges from 540 francs per year (and note this includes food) for a shabby attic room to 1,800 francs per year in the nicest apartment.

I could go on, but that should suffice to give you a general picture: 15,000 livres in annual income is an upper-class income for a family, above the average for a noble family, though not on par with the richest of the rich. Most well-off landholders or salaried professionals earned a third or less of that total.

Sources

These have been collected from a half-dozen or more different works, from histories to novels; I've tried to make a note any time someone mentions how much something cost or how much someone earned. Among my sources:

Corbin, Alain. The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
De Bertier de Sauvigny, Guillaume. The Bourbon Restoration. Translated by Lynn M. Case. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966.
Jardin, André, and André-Jean Tudesq. Restoration & Reaction, 1815-1848. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.
De Balzac, Honoré. Père Goriot. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black. Translated by Horace B. Samuel. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.