Twenty Sols

About This Coin

Equivalent to one livre — the fundamental unit of account in the French monetary system — the twenty sols coin represented the primary silver denomination circulating in France's American colonies. In the French colonial monetary hierarchy, one livre equaled twenty sols, and each sol equaled twelve deniers, creating a pounds-shillings-pence structure that paralleled the British system. The twenty sols piece thus functioned as the workhorse silver coin for significant daily transactions in colonial settlements stretching from Quebec and Montreal through the Great Lakes fur trading posts to the Louisiana Territory and Caribbean sugar islands. These coins were struck at French royal mints, primarily in Paris (marked with the "A" mintmark), and shipped across the Atlantic to supply colonial economies that were chronically short of circulating money. The designs follow standard French royal coinage conventions, featuring the reigning monarch's portrait or monogram on the obverse and the royal arms or denominational marking on the reverse. Within the French Colonies (1670-1767) series, the twenty sols denomination provides collectors with access to the central coin in the French colonial monetary system — a piece that moved through the hands of fur traders, merchants, soldiers, and farmers across the vast territorial expanse of New France, leaving a numismatic trail that documents the economic life of France's ambitious but ultimately doomed American colonial enterprise.