French Colonies (1670-1767)

The coins in this series all came from the royal mints of France. Only a handful of issues were ordered with New France, Louisiana or the French islands in mind; the rest were coins of the kingdom that also crossed the Atlantic.

The first was the silver coinage of 1670. A decree of February 19, 1670, obtained by Colbert, set up a special coinage for the lands of the French West India Company: pieces of 15 and 5 sols in silver and copper doubles. The silver coins were struck at Paris that summer and are known as the Gloriam Regni pieces after their Latin legend. Writers gave them to Canada for more than three hundred years, but François Jambu's study of the French archives shows they were made for the West Indies, with some reaching Canada.

Later issues tried copper. An edict of December 1716 ordered copper pieces of 6 and 12 deniers for the colonies at Perpignan, and a royal edict of March 9, 1717 made them legal in Canada, but the copper sent to the mint was poor and the work stopped after trials. A second attempt followed after the John Law years, when Law's Compagnie des Indes held the right to coin money in France: an edict of June 1721 ordered a copper coinage for the colonies alone, and Rouen and La Rochelle struck nine-denier pieces dated 1721 and 1722 on Swedish planchets, inscribed COLONIES FRANÇOISES. Canada took few of them; Louisiana accepted them for a time. The last colonial issue was a copper sou approved in late 1766 and dated 1767, meant for the Lesser Antilles, which refused it. Guadeloupe later counterstamped its stock RF and used it during the Revolution.

Between these issues the colonies used the ordinary coins of the kingdom. The billon mousquetaires of 30 and 15 deniers (1709-1713) are long collected with colonial coins, though most stayed in France. The billon sou marqué of 24 deniers, created by an edict of October 1738, and its half were shipped to Canada in the 1740s and 1750s, and in 1763 the worn pieces were called in, counterstamped and sent to the islands.

Mint letters. Every royal coin carries the letter or sign of its mint: A Paris, AA Metz, B Rouen, BB Strasbourg, D Lyon, E Tours, H La Rochelle, K Bordeaux, Q Perpignan, W Lille, X Amiens, 9 Rennes, and back-to-back crescents, written )( here, for Besançon. The titles in this series give date and mint letter, as in 1739-BB Sou Marque, and overdates are written with a slash, as in 1741/39-R Sou Marque.

Designs. The 1670 sols carry the legend GLORIAM REGNI TVI DICENT, "they shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom". The mousquetaire has two back-to-back L's under a crown between three lis, and a cross with a lis in each angle and three balls at the end of each arm. The nine deniers carries SIT NOMEN DOMINI BENEDICTUM on one side and COLONIES FRANÇOISES with the date on the other. The sou marqué and its half show two crowned L's.

Denominations. In the French money of account a livre was 20 sols (or sous) and a sol was 12 deniers, so the mousquetaire of 30 deniers was worth two and a half sols and the sou marqué of 24 deniers two sols, despite its name.

• 1670 Gloriam Regni: the 15 sols and 5 sols, both Paris (A), in silver.
• Mousquetaires, 1709-1713: thirty deniers of Metz and Lyon, such as 1710-AA and 1712-D, and the fifteen deniers of Metz, such as 1712-AA. PCGS also lists a contemporary imitation of the fifteen deniers.
• Perpignan, 1717: the copper six deniers and twelve deniers, from the trials of the abandoned colonial copper coinage.
• The Law years, 1720: a copper six deniers of Paris and silver twenty sols of Paris and the provinces, such as 1720-A and 1720-BB. At Paris two different 20-sol coins were struck that year, the one-sixth écu of France and Navarre and the livre d'argent of the Compagnie des Indes; the provincial pieces are the first kind.
• Nine deniers, 1721-1722: 1721-B from Rouen, 1721-H and 1722-H from La Rochelle, and the 1722/1-H overdate.
• Sous marqués, 1738-1764: dozens of date and mint combinations, from 1738-A to 1764-A, with overdates such as 1739/8-A and the Besançon piece 1739-)(. Greysheet notes that pieces dated after 1760 were not used in North America.
• Half sous marqués: the 12-denier sol of the same reform, such as 1739-A and the Rennes piece 1740-(9).
• 1767 sou: the copper COLONIES FRANÇOISES sou of Paris and the same coin with the RF counterstamp of Guadeloupe.

The 1670 sols are silver of .917 fineness, 7.005 grams for the 15 sols and 2.335 grams for the 5 sols according to the dealer and Numista figures. The mousquetaires are billon of .208 silver, with a legal weight of 2.44 grams for the thirty deniers and 1.22 grams for the fifteen deniers. The sou marqué is billon of one part silver to three parts copper, 2.18 grams by the legal standard, finished with a silver wash; its half weighs 1.09 grams. The twenty sols of France and Navarre of 1720 is .917 silver of 4.08 grams, and the Paris livre d'argent of the same year is pure silver of 3.74 grams. The Perpignan pieces of 1717, the six deniers of 1720, the nine deniers of 1721-1722 and the sou of 1767 are copper; sources give different weights for the nine deniers, from about 5.4 to 6.1 grams.