This thesis addresses the following question: how can money contribute to the viabilization of an ecologically sustainable economy? Drawing on monetary institutionalism, critical social ecology, and regulation theory, it proceeds in three parts structured around the French case since 1945.

Part One establishes that the Fordist and neoliberal monetary regimes have contributed to rendering socially viable a capitalism in metabolic rupture, through five institutional mediations that orient, validate, temporalize, and spatially displace socio-metabolic flows while dissociating the apparent reversibility of monetary circuits from the material irreversibility of biophysical flows.

Part Two evaluates the transformative potential of monetary financing forms – from empirical cases to utopian proposals – and of the hypothesis of a moneyless economy, showing that such potential increases with the degree to which capitalist social relations are called into question, without this proving sufficient to fully resolve the ecological question.

Part Three draws the normative consequences by articulating principles of monetary metabolic self-limitation: upstream of the metabolic flow, the substitution of in-kind calculation for ex nihilo monetary creation as the basis for any production; downstream, a distributive, "compostable" currency – issued as an equal, unconditional, capped allocation and destroyed at the point of payment – organizing the distribution of drawing rights over a contracted metabolism.