1.5 Euro - Fayence

Fayence is a hill village in the Var département of Provence, and this piece belongs to a wave of French municipal emergency coinage produced in the 1990s — not from economic collapse, but from a deliberate regionalist cultural politics. Several dozen French communes issued local brass tokens under the guise of "bons de visite" or festival currency, exploiting a legal grey area that tolerated limited-circulation scrip tied to tourism or local commerce. Most were produced in small runs by specialist medal manufacturers in Paris or Lyon, never intended to function as serious monetary instruments.