FRANCE 1 liard 1791 K

Description

Louis XVI was the one who was beheaded by the French Revolutionaries. He tried to do some modernizing but was weak against the opposition of the nobles. A few years of famine preceded the Revolution. Before that, though, he supported the American revolutionaries.

France was ancient Gaul. The Romans were active, then the Merovingian kings maintained a vassal relationship with the Byzantine Empire until the advent of Charlemagne. France diverged from Germany thereafter, going through a period of feudal decentralization. A series of powerful kings gradually brought into being the modern country.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes, stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.