The Sun King's Ecu 1704 - Needs Your Help!

It is being used as a personal symbol, but not as the mintmark. The mintmark is "A" for Monnaie de Paris.

~jack

MY first thought was
'overstruck', not
double struck.

Overstriking was a VERY common practice during this period of French coinage. Inflation and counterfeiting were problems that drove that practice.

Ref. 'Coinage in France' from the Dark Ages to Napoleon', by Nicholas Mayhew.

SeriousCERES, thank you your input. I will certainly read more about K. Louis XIV later. In your opinion, do you think the nickname "Apollo or Sun King" was added by historians for the monarch's absolute power or Louis XIV called himself "Sun King". There are many adjectives like Louis VI, the Fat, Frederick II, the Great, Richard, the Lion..., all the nicknames were added later.

I realize that actually I was confusing two separate questions: 1) why is Louis XIV called the 'Sun King' and 2) where does the expression come from?

For the purposes of clarity I'll treat them in order!

1) It is well-known that the king made appearances dressed as the Sun/ Apollo at parties in the mid- to late-1650s. (There exist engravings depicting this.) By 1662 he had definitively chosen the sun as an emblem for himself (some say as early as 1656)--well in advance of the decoration of the new construction at Versailles. Playwright and official court historian Racine compares Louis to the Sun in a text from 1663. So by the 1660s the court is well aware of the symbolism that the king has himself chosen, but why would anyone living at the time have called him anything other than "Sire mon Roi"?. Nor would the king himself have any reason to call himself anything other than "Nous" (!). The historians living in his day had a role, certainly, in spreading the king's (approved) historiography throughout the learned culture of Europe, but none of them coined the exact expression "Roi Soleil" and you won't find it in that form anywhere.

Look, though, at his blason, NEC PLURIBUS IMPAR (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roi_So...s_Impar.jpg) and you'll see why the expression is just, well, a no-brainer waiting to happen (!). It is said (by Voltaire) that Louis' advisers came up with this sun motif because of the king of Spain it was commonly said that "the sun never set" on his empire; so it would have been one-upmanship toward the Spanish king. Curiously, Voltaire reports that Louis never liked this particular image (and never wore it or used it elsewhere) but kept it to please those who'd come up with it.


BTW, historians also often note that later on, as Versailles is well advanced (i.e. the sun motifs are already too firmly implanted to change direction), Louis backed off of the sun a bit and turned instead to Hercules and a couple other greco-roman figures. Hence a few different modes of kingly figuration appear in the ceilings and on the walls.

2) as for the expression itself, "Roi Soleil"--I've seen it asserted that the term doesn't come into existence until the reign of Louis-Philippe I, the July Monarchy, a king also popularly referred to as the bourgeois king because of the peculiar way in which he came to power. In other words, the expression comes into existence the way we use it now almost 200 years later. Was it historians? Was it the regime of Louis-Philippe itself, that wanted so badly to convince the French to accept him as a legitimate chink in the eternal chain of great French kings that it invested a great deal of time, money and effort into glorifying the popular kings of France's history? In any case, the likelihood is that the expression became a popular way of referring back to the kind of absolute power Louis XIV crafted for himself and exerted like no other before or since. (The bourgeois king had far less power, for instance.) It also expresses a great deal of nostalgia (on the part of many, in the 1830s and 1840s) for a time that could only have seemed so much like a Golden Age to them: in retrospect, one could see how French power, wealth, and glory had hit an apogee (expressed in the grandeur of Versailles, and the apparently blunt arrogance of a king who figured himself as a celestial being) and would thereafter stagnate through the next two kings on a collision course with the disasters of 1789, the terror, 1814, 1815, and the dreary and severe eras of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Many in the 1830s-40s were equally nostalgic for the much more recent glory days of Napoleon's empire (and had dreamed of his return). (Indeed, Louis-Philippe is the one who has Napoleon's body brought back from St. Helene and interred in the Invalides, another grand gesture meant to draw Bonapartists to him.) The only difference was that you were ALLOWED to be nostalgic for the bygone era of the French monarchs of yesteryear, but you weren't supposed to be running around seditiously advocating for the return to power of a Bonaparte (fast forward to 1848, if you like...).

All that is just to say that there's good reason to suggest that, with the rise of literacy in the first half of the 19th century (your historians and their ideologically charged versions of histories), the power of nostalgia within a disillusioned and beaten population (this is the period of French Romanticism, after all), and the efforts of the bourgeois king to suggest he's full-on part of that glorious past, it's quite reasonable to understand how the expression "Roi Soleil" became a popular one for retelling a colorful and lengthy piece of "glorious" French political history.

swamperbob, I assume you mean the premium to modern collectors and not that an overstruck écu of the same series would have a lower value in contemporary French livre than a "new" one.

Here's my finest écu and it doesn't seem to have been struck over an older coin. And, yes it came to me with a hefty premium. Right now it's in for conservation so I hope to post a nicer picture when we get to the year 1698 in the "How far back can we go? Second Edition!" thread. https://goccf.com/t/161525
~jack

To answer this question, which has yet to be addressed.

Early French coins bear not only a date and mintmark (in this case, 1704-A) but also bear up to three "privy marks"; these are little tiny images, personal marks assigned to particular individuals - there are three of them for the three officials responsible for producing that coin: the Engraver-General (for the entire country), the Mint Director (for that particular mint) and the Engraver (for that particular die, though most mints only had one Engraver at any one time). You can see all three privy marks on your coin: the little flower before the date is the Engraver's mark; the sea-scallop shell after "REX" is the Director's mark, and the sun above the king's head is the Engraver-General's mark.

A sun was used as the Engraver-General's mark from 1682 to 1715. For any French coin (from any mint) between those two dates, if there are three privy marks visible, a sun will be one of them.