I recently picked up a silver 5 Franc and am trying to learn a bit more about it. All the info that I can find seems to be for an alternate mint mark, the B/B from Strassburg: http://www.coindatabase.com/coin_detail_france.php?cdb=S210310 I like that site a lot, but there's no search function that I noticed. CoinWiki is missing an entry on this mint, but has the BB issue: http://www.coinfactswiki.com/wiki/France_1867-A_5_Francs I assume that the fineness and weight are the same, but can anyone tell me the mintage for the Paris mint (A)? Here's the best info I've been able to find specifically on the 1867 A 5 Franc (silver): http://firstcoincompany.com/en/catalog/5-francs-napoleon-iii-1867.html Also, why on earth did the French make both silver and gold 5 Francs at that time? I know that the US had a bit of overlap between silver and gold $1 coins, but always assumed that was caused by availability (due to the Gold rush). Were there other countries that minted coins of the same denomination out of gold & silver (or silver/nickel/copper?) at the same time? I've started putting together a page on this (as I catalog all my coins) but it is pretty incomplete: http://mycoins.co/france_5_franc_1867 I'm still trying to find the mintage number & identify the mintmaster's mark. edited to add: Numista has the mintage number as 6,586,000, which is oddly higher than the BB mintage of 4,224,000. I wonder why the A mint mark seems so much thinner on the ground... http://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1184.html
First of all, use the links you find here to look for information on French coins - http://www.cointalk.com/t13900/ You can also use - http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis.jsp - the site is free to look up basic information. As for the 1867-A 5 franc, it had a mintage of 6,586,442. It was made of .900 silver and weighed 25gr. As for your question about 5 francs being gold and silver - they weren't. Not sure where you got that idea, but they never made a 5 franc gold coin. Anything else you'd like to know about it ?
Maybe I'm confused - wasn't there a gold 5 franc from 1852-1870? http://www.ma-shops.com/galnum/item.php5?id=141&lang=en&curr=EUR
I wish I had found this sooner! I have about 50-60 French coins I've picked up since I speak a little French and love the designs. Haven't gotten into full blown collecting them yet but that will help.
No, you're correct. I screwed up. When I looked it up in the French red book I forgot they separate the gold and silver coins into different sections of the book. They did indeed make a gold 5 francs coin from 1855 to 1889.
Why did some countries do that? It just seems very strange. During WW2, I think a few countries minted dual silver/bronze issues (the British 3 pence comes to mind) but that was due to shortages of silver.
France had the double issues around the late teens also. The 5 and 10 centimes are in both the larger copper coin and the smaller (I believe) copper nickel variety. I think there are also silver francs overlapping with the base metal francs in the early 20s. Then in World War II there are alternate issues made by the two different governments - Vichy and free. It is a little confusing when you think you have all the coins for one year and then find out there's another one. The French coins really proliferate in the 40s. I'm working on this set now actually.
Because they had more silver than they did gold ? There's all kinds of reasons various countries did what they did, and do, with coinage. Why did the US have 1 cent, 2 cent, and 3 cent coins ? Nobody ever used the 3 cent, very few ever used the 2 cent. But they still had the coins, for a while. People are weird, they do and did things for weird reasons, some of which we will never know.
Because at that time the "thaler" tradition was still very much alive. By that I mean large, almost medallic looking pieces intended as your nation's business card to the rest of the world. =)
