Lorenzo de Tonti proposed the tontine to Cardinal Mazarin in 1653 as a state fund-raising mechanism in which subscribers received annuities that increased as other subscribers died — an early life contingency and mortality-based financial instrument.

Tontines became a popular fictional device in later literature and theatre precisely because of their macabre incentive structure; Robert Louis Stevenson and others exploited the tontine plot for dramatic irony, reflecting how insurance instruments entered imaginative culture.