Odd French 10 Centime On Ebay

SteveJonesy

The first of the hollow coins I ever saw was a screw top 1797 Copper Two pence. Since then I have seen hundreds and I still own a dozen or so. They are very interesting. Looks like your 5 Centimes may have been made by the same craftsman that made mine.

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing 'swamperbob'.

andyg Does your copy have traces of a suspension loop on the top - looks like there is something there.

These could easily be a form of trench art if they were done crudely - these are too nice and are machined. They may be early mechanical imitations of that art form that were made for the collectors market of WWI collectables say in the 1920's. But since trench art dates back to the mid 1800s they may have been made for a war earlier than WWI. They may even be a form from the Sudan era since the same coins are used.

Good - I have not seen a suspended version. A man's pocket piece makes much more sense especially for trench type art. A memento from home for a soldier off doing his duty.

When this was done with silver coins (very popular with 8 Reales) the purpose was silver theft and the metal removed 2/3rds of the weight paid for the labor. Bronze however even in the 1860s was not all that valuable enough to recover much more than to pay for the work needed to extract the bronze.

Cheers for that thq - got more good results by image searching Google for that and some quick Google Translating of the French sites. Much appreciated.

I have a bit of a question about this
Here at home we have a coin almost identical to the one shown here, except for a few differences. It has bees worn down a lot more and has a different picture from this one.
My family got the coin as it was passed down by my grand-father to my father, the current owner. My grand-father got the coin from his father, who collected coins as he travelled the world for his job, and who liked to collect coins. Where the coin originated from is unknown to us but there is a history that's been passed down since my great grand-father found it. Supposedly this story came from the person he got it from, but there is no way to confirm it and I would appreciate it if anyone could confirm or deny it.

The portrait in the coin is supposedly tsar Nicholas 2, the last tsar of Russia. The coin belonged to russians who fled to France the persecutions against the followers of the tsar in Russia. There they founded a secret society of those who still followed the tsar and was they needed a way to show that they belonged to the society(to show each-other so that the others would know that they were in the same society). In this need they made these coins. Inside the old Napoleonic coins they put a hidden picture of the tsar as their sign.

As intriguing as the story is I would like to know whether it´s true or not. The two main issues are that I can´t distinguish if it actually is the tsar or his cousin, Georg the fifth, who looked very much like his cousin. The second problem is that I can´t find this story anywhere on the internet, meaning that it might be false and somebody just wanted to sell a coin to my great-grandfather for a higher price.