Complete control over the lives of citizens seems to be the eventual goal as, from September onwards, France bans people within its borders from making payments of more than €1,000 - down from €3,000 today. The limit for foreign visitors is to come down from €15,000 to €10,000.

In line with the wishes of the Financial Action Task Force, banks and all other 'reporting institutions' will have to report all transactions of more than €10,000 - down from €15,000 today - to Tracfin, the country's financial intelligence unit.

This latest round of controls for cash - which most Western governments would like to abolish - is ostensibly to fight terrorism. In 2013, when there was talk of such an increase in controls, the government then said that its motivation was to stop tax-evaders. Back then, the campaign was going to be called 'Fight Against Fraud.'

Whatever the pretext, the direction of travel is unchanging. The government is keeping the foreign visitors' exemption fairly high, by its standards, in an effort to attract tourism.

The most 'laundrogenic' phenomenon in continental Europe in recent years has been the €500 note, which was predicted to be a great help to money-launderers before its creation in 2002. The prediction was correct; by 2007, an estimated three-fifths of these notes had migrated to the southern costas of Spain, the home to many British gangsters. Today, most of these notes seem to have disappeared without trace and the authorities believe that criminals are hoarding them.

It was in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 that a US Treasury official, her name now long forgotten, made the immortal remark that anti-terrorist controls on small amounts of money would amount to a futile exercise in "draining the ocean to catch one fish." Anecdotal evidence suggests that anti-terrorist investigators do not catch terrorists because reporting institutions detect their tiny transactions, nor do banks do investigators any good by keeping an eye out for the names of potential terrorists; most terrorists have changed their names several times before they ever appear on a list. Nor, incidentally, do investigators need draconian detention and warrantless surveillance laws. Instead, targeted surveillance, infiltration and 'gumshoe' detective work have always obtained the real results, as they did before 11th September 2001. Western governments seem to be compelling reporting institutions to help them impose ever-more-stringent controls on cash for quite separate reasons.

Over time, as governments debase their currencies, fewer and fewer transactions go below the reporting thresholds even when those thresholds merely stand still. The $10,000 lower limit for currency transaction reports in the United States, for example, is set at that amount because that was what the average American earned in 1970, the year the Bank Secrecy Act was passed. By 2011 this had gone up to $26,695.