FRANCE, Third Republic, 5 Francs 1873 A, Paris, ex-jewelry

3rd Republic (1870-1940)

FRANCE, Third Republic, 5 Francs 1873 A, Paris, ex-jewelry

Name: FRANCE, Third Republic, 5 Francs 1873 A, Paris, ex-jewelry
SKU: G170
Price: 57 EUR
Availability: InStock

Availability:

In stock

Obverse: Hercules group, exergue below, legend around

Lettering (French): LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ; Dupré

Engraver: Augustin Dupré

Reverse: Denomination and date within wreath

Lettering (French): RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE; 5 FRANCS; 1873; A

Engraver: Augustin Dupré

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

The pictures provided are of the actual coin for sale.

Guaranteed genuine.

€ 57

In stock

Country	France
Face Value	5 Francs
Year of issue	1873
Metal	Silver
Fineness	900
Catalogue #	KM# 820.1; Gadoury 745a; Le Franc 334/9
Weight, g.	24,95
Diameter, mm.	37,48
Our code	G170
Die Axis	↑↓
Additional info	ex-jewelry

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22 August 2025:

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.

We will resume shipping to the USA as soon as the service becomes available again. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

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History

In May 1873, France changed presidents – and in doing so, revealed just how fragile its young republic truly was.

Adolphe Thiers, the architect of France’s extraordinary recovery from the Franco-Prussian War, was forced from office by the royalist majority in the National Assembly. In two extraordinary years he had negotiated peace with Bismarck, suppressed the Paris Commune, and – with what contemporaries called almost miraculous speed – raised and paid the entire five-billion-franc war indemnity, prompting the last German occupation troops to leave French soil months ahead of schedule. France had humiliated itself at Sedan in 1870. By 1873 it had paid its debt and stood on its own feet again. Then it removed the man who had made it possible.

In his place the Assembly installed Marshal Patrice de MacMahon – a royalist, a Catholic conservative, a soldier of the old school who had been wounded at Sedan, suppressed the Commune with methodical brutality, and held not the faintest instinct for democratic politics. He was elected, it was understood by everyone, as a placeholder – a man to keep the republic warm while the monarchists settled their internal quarrels and agreed on which pretender to crown. The Bourbon claimant, the Comte de Chambord, was old, childless, and catastrophically stubborn – insisting on the white Bourbon flag rather than the tricolor that France had carried through revolution and empire. The negotiation collapsed. The monarchy, once again, was defeated not by republicans but by its own candidate’s intransigence.

The 5 Francs of 1873 circulated through all of this uncertainty. On the obverse stands the civic Hercules – flanked by Liberté and Égalité, that ancient republican image first designed during the Revolution and revived by every French republic as its most trusted declaration of values. The choice was pointed. In a year when the National Assembly was still debating whether France should have a king, the coin in everyday circulation carried the image of the republic as if the question had already been answered.

It was not yet answered. The constitution that finally settled the matter – by a single vote – would not be passed until 1875. The republic that year survived by inertia, by the monarchists’ inability to agree, by the stubbornness of one aging Bourbon who preferred principle to power.

This coin is silver from the eye of that particular storm – a republic that existed almost by accident, stamping its image onto metal as if stating, quietly but firmly, that it intended to remain.