Just ten years after the start of the French Revolution, on 9th November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte and his supporters organized a coup d’état, overthrowing the Revolutionary Directory and allowing him to be installed as First Consul.
Three years later, in 1803, the first gold coins with Napoleon’s image were minted. These were truly revolutionary in a number of ways, quite apart from bearing the image of the First Consul himself.
- The year was marked as Année XI (the 11thyear of the revolutionary calendar, whose base year had (after years of discussion) been set by the Revolutionary authorities as 1792, the year of the foundation of the French Republic).
- The restoration of ‘francs as the unit of denomination. The term ‘franc’ was first used for a French gold coin – the Franc à Cheval in 1530. French gold coins had not been designated as francs since the monetary reform of Cardinal Richelieu and the minting of the first Louis d’Or in 1640.
- The designation of the Republique Française as the issuing country on the reverse of the coin.
- And, most importantly, the fineness of 900.
Before the French Revolution, the fineness of French gold coins had been determined in ‘carats and grains’ (the duodecimal system). The Revolution standardized all the units of measurement using a decimal basis, which would later be almost universally adopted as the metric system. From then on, most countries that were not part of the British Empire tended to adopt a fineness of 900 for any gold coinage that they issued. Interestingly, the United States, having recently concluded its own revolutionary war, changed the fineness of its gold coins (which had initially followed the 22-carat British coinage) to the French fineness of 900. Why the United States refused to accept the metric system more generally is another story, but one that will not be pursued here!
In spite of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Napoleon coin lived on, at least in name, and in fact until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, with the obverse showing the faces of various kings (during the restoration of the monarchy from 1814 to 1848), emperors and presidents. All of these coins, with face values from 5 to 100 francs have a fixed ratio of monetary value to the weight of contained gold, namely 0.32258 grams of 900 fineness gold per franc. The gold parity of the Napoleon coins was adopted by the Latin Monetary Union in the period 1866 to 1927. The four other member countries of the Union (Belgium, Greece, Italy and Switzerland) issued gold and silver coins with equivalent dimensions, fineness and values to those of the French models.
20 franc coin: Weight: 6.4516 g; Fineness: 900; Diameter: 21 mm
