French Conders

elverno

Like Great Britain, France suffered from extreme shortage of small change during the 1790s. The unrest of the times meant that people hoarded as much metal coinage as they could and by 1792, the date of these two tokens, no one wanted to do business with the hated paper assignats either. The combination meant that businessmen couldn't sell their product and employers had a hard time paying their people as well. In all it wasn't something that could last long and on both sides of the channel businessmen responded by producing their own "money". While Conders were technically illegal the government winked at that since the country would have come to a screeching halt if they didn't circulate. In France it was actually legal to produce your own money; that is until the tokens were more valuable than the government's, then it was made punishable by death!

In the period of time that it was legal the Lefevre Lesage et Compagnie of Paris produced three different tokens with a couple of varieties of each. What you see below is the 5 and 10 sols tokens, I've yet to see one of the 20 sols pieces.


The 5 sols is actually 17 mm.


The 10 sols is 22 mm.

PuddlePirate

Those are just - Besides the French aristocrats had the right idea - peasants what did they need money for anyway... weren't they eatting cake?

AuldFartte

Fascinating bit of history, Vern.
That's another reason I love this place ... so much to learn

Cool coins ... er ... "condeurres"

farthing

Those are really

cosmicdebris

Cool and great history behind them.

elverno

Thanks, I love these little pieces.

The 5 sols is actually a variant not listed in Hennin's 1826 catalog. He noted two different varieties the difference being the size of the numbers on the reverse. In the case of this one the little symbol that looks like two lower-case "t" that follows the 50 on the reverse just isn't there. Normally he would have made a legend difference another variety so I can only assume that he hadn't seen this one at the time of his book.

I didn't mention the fact that they are paper thin; so thin that the reverse weakness on the 10 sols is because of the metal pulling to fill out the obverse detail.

Steve27

Thanks for the info, and nice tokens!

elverno

This next one pretty dramatically shows the relative difference in value between silver and copper. This is one of the famous Monneron Brothers 5 sols tokens. Common as sin, 40 mm in size and often mistaken on eBay as medals these were produced by Matthew Boulton in Birmingham and duely shipped to Paris during the war, where they were extensively used as money. There are at least 8 major variants in 1791 and 1792 with the one shown the most common. One of the least common looks identical but says L'an III de la Liberte instead of IV.

Askari

Those are a really neat piece of French history and basically unknown to most collectors. "Condeurres" -- I kinda like that!