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> trade, then French Navy picked those gold bullions from NY I couldn’t find any clear news source or academic reference to that event. I see a lot of referen

• avianlyric 6mo ago
  Gold is very dense. 10 Tonnes of gold takes up less than a cubic meter of volume. Moving tonnes of gold doesn’t look like huge pallets of gold with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a handful of supply crates. I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular basis. Pretty normal for Navy’s to sail into the ports of allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold
  • rdtsc 6mo ago
    For a country like France it would be on the order of hundreds or a thousand tons. So that’s maybe on the order of hundred trips by delivery trucks at most. Yeah I suppose spread out over a few years it wouldn’t be noticed. At least not by the general public. But since the claim is that this triggered the collapse of the Bretton Woods system it would be documented and referenced a lot more, still.
    • lazide 6mo ago
      Most delivery trucks (like a box truck) have capacities more like 10 or 20 tons. A heavy freight truck, like used to load ships? Even more.
      • _heimdall 6mo ago
        Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.
        • vel0city 6mo ago
          The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 set the gross vehicle weight limit for trucks at 73,280lbs. I imagine trucks of the day probably at least came close to that limit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_industry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...
          • _heimdall 6mo ago
            That was likely targeting tractor trailers of the era though, not box trucks.
        • bigfishrunning 6mo ago
          A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.
          • _heimdall 6mo ago
            Yes I understand, that's why I was asking about box trucks of the day. I'll dig into it myself as I am curious now, I've only ever really looked into cab-over bread trucks from that era and those aren't a great comparison either. I was just curious if the GP already knew what 60s era box trucks would have been rated for.
        • rdtsc 6mo ago
          Yup that's what I had in mind, a 60s city delivery truck, not a semi, so googled that and came up to about 10t.
      • jjk166 6mo ago
        The gold would be moved by cash-in-transit trucks which have relatively modest payload capacities of 5000-9000lbs today, a bit less in the 60s. 3 tons per truck is probably on the high end.
      • therealpygon 6mo ago
        You don’t generally just throw gold in a box truck… it typically moves by armored freight.
        • oasisbob 6mo ago
          Maybe in some volumes, but I think most people would be shocked by the overall volume of gold that moves by UPS in small brown boxes.
        • bruckie 6mo ago
          The Hope diamond was famously transported by... USPS. "The postage cost him $2.44, plus $142.85 for $1 million worth of insurance." —https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/hope-diamond.pdf https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/hope-diamon...
• enoint 6mo ago
  https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3545 https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art... Whether the exact ship was a battleship or a destroyer might make the search result.
  • janandonly 6mo ago
    I can’t open that link. Too bad.
    • esseph 6mo ago
      Cloudflare DNS?
      • enoint 6mo ago
        I think I munged the link. Anyway, the answer is in a search result, with some discussion about whether it was a battleship or destroyer.
  • enoint 6mo ago
    https://archive.ph/ioukS https://archive.ph/ioukS
• snikeris 6mo ago
  https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-day-a-french-warship-came-to-new-york-to-repatriate-french-gold/ https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-day-... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/august-15-1971_b_4284327 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/august-15-1971_b_4284327
• bhouston 6mo ago
  > I couldn’t find any clear news source or academic reference to that event. It happened though. Here are the sources for it: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#Criticism_and_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#Criticism_and_decl... - https://www.thegoldobserver.com/p/how-france-secretly-repatriated-all https://www.thegoldobserver.com/p/how-france-secretly-repatr... - https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1994/128/article-A001-en.xml https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1994/128/arti...
  • rdtsc 6mo ago
    What happened is the gold got repatriated. I was looking for a source that a French warship docked and started loading thousands of tons of gold. Your source confirms it as well: > Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would have blown the operation’s cover. Instead, BdF used ocean liners from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
    • rkomorn 6mo ago
      It's something that sounds like a plot point for a heist movie.
      • xethos 6mo ago
        Which almost might have been one of the arguments the Minister of Finance used to dissuade CDG
      • haddr 6mo ago
        Check what happened to the Spanish gold before the end of the Spanish civil war. I think it would be even more dramatic movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Gold_(Spain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Gold_(Spain)
      • esseph 6mo ago
        You should look into how often nuclear weapons are moved by truck. You've probably driven past more than a few.
• mrb 6mo ago
  As a French speaker, I looked up French sources and found https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/stocks-dor-6-cachettes-de-la-banque-de-france-1154241 https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st... - here is a snippet translated to English below. But many more references can be found by googling "opération vide-gousset". 1963: Operation Empty-the-purse ("vide-gousset") It was also by warship that De Gaulle planned to conduct "Operation Empty-the-purse" in 1963, the code name for the repatriation of French gold deposited at Fort Knox in the United States (1). More than 1,150 tons—the result of converting French dollars into gold, a decision made by De Gaulle in response to the lax monetary policy of the United States—were being used to finance a growing trade deficit through the printing of money. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then Minister of Finance, recounts (2): "De Gaulle was getting impatient and asked me at every meeting: 'So, has that gold finally come back?' One day, he told me: 'We need to move much faster: we're going to send the navy cruiser 'Colbert' which will bring back all the gold that's still there.'" “I told him that if we did that, we would alienate American public opinion forever.” Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities. Not for very long, it's true. The events of May 1968 and the ensuing monetary crisis depleted the reserves, which fell from 4,650 tons to 3,150 – 1,500 tons had crossed the Atlantic again to defend the franc, which De Gaulle refused to devalue.
  • rdtsc 6mo ago
    Thank you, this helps and clears up my confusion. I just couldn't imagine this kind of an event, a warship loading this much gold, not triggering some media commentary, even mockery or criticism to defend the US establishment. > Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities. So I think the story about the warship got twisted from a plan or threat to "it actually happened". Doing it in small quantities over a few years was the right way, indeed. Looking back it seems like it didn't make many waves in the news at the time, so Giscard was absolutely right.
• kipchak 6mo ago
  I seem to be having more luck with French language sources, mostly the Bank of France records. From what I can tell the shipping was done mostly commercially with some later by air[1]. Reportedly De Gaulle was frustrated with the speed of change wanted to use the Colbert warship but was dissuaded by the minister of finance.[2] [1]https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115663.365164 https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115... [2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/stocks-dor-6-cachettes-de-la-banque-de-france-1154241 https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st...
  • Reason077 6mo ago
    Gold is routinely transported across the Atlantic (and the world) by air today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRt_Ld5vtHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRt_Ld5vtHI
• JackFr 6mo ago
  One armored car can carry a ton of gold. If they left and drove to the closest US Navy port, where the French ship would dock. it wouldn't raise eyebrows.
  • rdtsc 6mo ago
    It’s just that they repatriated close to 3000 tons. That’s one long convoy of armored cars, all going to a French warship docked in New York. Based on some sibling discussion it seems it just never happened. It was multiple shipments, over many years, going over commercial liners. It may have well been armored trucks but they just didn’t all do it at once. It worked well that it didn’t create much of a media uproar.
• Tangurena2 6mo ago
  Historically, if a ship carrying gold sinks, whoever salvages the gold/loot gets ownership of it. However, if the ship is a warship, the loot belongs - FOREVER - as the property of the nation-state (or their descendants). This has led to some legal battles over nautical salvage in the Atlantic (were those "Spanish Galleons" military or non-military? Hundreds of millions of dollars depends on that answer during some lawsuits in the 1990s) or nautical salvage in South East Asia where artifacts from long gone kingdoms (that didn't reflect borders created centuries after they collapsed) end up in court over what country gets to show them in museums. So yes, if you need to move national quantities of gold/silver across the ocean, then for legal reasons, it is best to ship it via your navy.