Some interesting 3 coins

[drewg]

3 coins I came across today, there's the New Zealand one with King George the sixth. A Papua New Guinea one with the hole in the middle, and 50 francs, which is quite dull.

Pics:


Front:


Hope you like them.

I'll make a post about how I cleaned them.
Here's the post: http://www.treasurequestxlt.com/comm...html#post94594

obviously the light of the scanner brings up the scratches and such, but they look much better in real life.

[l38ranger]

Cool coins...did you find them mding....

[JCWhite]

Good finds... Really like the Paupau coin.

[cjoej]

I find it interesting how beautiful foreign coins are compared to modern U.S. coinage. Australia has some of the most beautiful designs for their coinage, and makes changes from time to time. The paper currency is the same.

So what does our mint offer us? The Angry George dollar!

Joe

[Figleaf]

Couple of comments. If you found them close together, the PNG Kina is the odd coin out, as it was struck a quarter century later. If you found the other two close together there's an interesting story. I'm not sure if, when you say the French coin is quite dull, you were commenting on its colour or its relative interest. I'll assume nothing and nevertheless make the case that it's by far the most interesting of the three.

As you can see, the coin dates from just after the second world war. At the time, Europe had sorta finished up cleaning the mess of the second world war and it was starting to rebuild. Three countries were key in this period. Greece, Czechoslovakia and France. In July 1947, George Marshall offered aid to all European countries (except Spain) for rebuilding their economies. The Soviet Union immediately rejected the Marshall Plan, but Czechoslovakia accepted. Stalin interfered and the richest, most developed Eastern European country never got another choice.

Greece was isolated when Yugoslavia and Albania followed the Soviet Union. A communist power grab became a bloody civil war (1944-1949) that ultimately landed Greece in the Western camp, where it entered a phase of prosperity, stoked by the Marhall plan. These two examples showed how the new order was shaping up.

France was in the middle. It could not be commanded by Stalin and it wasn't geographically isolated. The French communist party, a leader of the resistance against the Nazis, was determined to land France in the Russian camp and lobbied against accepting Marshall aid. The lobby became a struggle, there were tanks in the street, people were killed and with every new round of chaos, the communists gained credibility. In May 1947, Socialist leader Paul Ramadier (an unsung hero) forced the communists out of the government and organized a vote to accept the Marshall plan.

If it hadn't been for the political experience of Ramadier and the farsightedness of Marshall, France would have become a Soviet ally and it is likely that Italy would then have followed, shaping the continent in a largely Soviet bloc, with Germany and some small Northern European states as the remaining US allies on the European continent.

We know now that Marshall aid was a great success and communism an abject failure, but this coin celebrates it. The series is the first issue after the second world war that doesn't use cheap metals such as aluminium or zinc, while communist countries would one by one re-introduce cheap metal coins. Its symbolism is fiercely nationalistic. There's the Gallic coq, Marianne with her freedom cap and the motto of the French revolution: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, not a cogwheel, hammer or sickle in sight. Best of all, the Franc may not yet be fully convertible, it was well on its way to convertibility, signalling a resumption of trade.

The coin's message is clear: France doesn't take orders from anyone. At the time, this was widely interpreted in the US as at best ungratefulness, at worst disloyalty. It took Eleanor Roosevelt to point out that if the US wanted France as an ally, it should accept that France arranged things its own way.

Peter

[Bryan Jon]

Cool coins!

[Lt1stone]

Nice coins!

[ERnurse]

Nice finds!!