FRANCE, Napoleon III, 5 Francs 1868 BB, Strasbourg, aXF

Napoleon III (1852-70)

FRANCE, Napoleon III, 5 Francs 1868 BB, Strasbourg, aXF

Availability:

In stock

Obverse: Laureate head of Napoleon III facing left, legend around.

Legend (French): NAPOLEON III EMPEREUR; BB; BARRE

Engraver: Désiré-Albert Barre

Reverse: Crowned and mantled arms divide denomination, date below

Legend (French): EMPIRE FRANÇAIS; 5 F.; 1868

Engraver: Désiré-Albert Barre

Edge (text in French): DIEU * PROTEGE * LA * FRANCE *****

The pictures provided are of the actual coin for sale.

Guaranteed genuine.

83 €

In stock

Country	France
Ruler	Napoleon III (1852-70)
Face Value	5 Francs
Year of issue	1868
Metal	Silver
Fineness	900
Catalogue #	KM# 799.2; Gadoury 739; Le Franc 331/13
Weight, g.	24,91
Diameter, mm.	37,28
Our code	C742
Die Axis	↑↓
Additional info	Strasbourg Mint

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22 August 2025 (updated 08 July 2026):

Important Notice for USA Customers
Please note that, due to the new U.S. customs tariffs, Post of Slovenia has temporarily suspended shipments to the United States. Unfortunately, this means we are unable to send orders to the USA at this time.

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History

There is a particular irony in the fact that this coin was struck in Strasbourg. Thirty-two years earlier, a young Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had galloped into this same city calling on a garrison to join him in restoring the Bonapartist empire. The soldiers arrested him instead. He was exiled to the United States, laughed at across Europe, written off as a dreamer and a crank. In 1868, the mint of that same city was striking silver coins bearing his portrait as Emperor of the French.

On the obverse is the laureate portrait of Napoleon III – a face that had by 1868 become one of the most recognizable in Europe. Shown in profile, the laurel wreath a deliberate echo of Roman imperial coinage, the legend NAPOLEON III EMPEREUR completing the claim. It was a portrait of a man who had spent his entire life pursuing a destiny others found absurd, and who had – against every reasonable expectation – actually achieved it.

Napoleon III in 1868 was sixty years old, and the empire he had built from ambition and audacity was beginning to show its age. The authoritarian years of the 1850s had given way to a more liberal phase – press restrictions were lifted that very year, and within weeks 140 new newspapers appeared in Paris alone, many of them immediately critical of the regime. It was a characteristic Bonapartist paradox: an emperor liberalizing his own empire, attempting to modernize his authority precisely as it was being questioned. His great urban project, the transformation of Paris under Baron Haussmann, had produced the most magnificent capital in Europe – wide boulevards, grand parks, gleaming stations – but had also displaced hundreds of thousands of Parisians into the suburbs, creating a restless, politically volatile working class. The Mexico catastrophe, in which Napoleon had installed an Austrian archduke as emperor only to abandon him to a firing squad, had shocked French opinion. Bismarck was watching from Berlin with calculating patience.

The reverse carried the imperial eagle beneath the denomination, framed by a wreath – austere, authoritative, the heraldry of an empire that believed, still, in its own permanence.

Two years after this coin was minted, it was all over. Bismarck maneuvered France into a war it was not ready to fight. At Sedan in September 1870, the Emperor himself was captured – the first French head of state taken prisoner in battle since Francis I at Pavia in 1525. Two days later, the empire was dissolved and the Third Republic proclaimed in Paris.

The Strasbourg mint that struck this coin would fall into German hands six months later and remain there for forty-seven years.