1 Cent Piedfort Pattern

Piedfort patterns from the Paris Mint in this period were not experimental in any engineering sense — the dies were production-ready. The doubling of planchet thickness was a deliberate practice to produce presentation-quality strikes for ministry officials, foreign dignitaries, and the Mint's own archive sets. The 1879 date places this squarely in the early years of the Third Republic's coinage reform efforts, when the administration was actively soliciting pattern submissions across multiple denominations.

Zay 61 is among the better-documented of the centimes piedfort series, though surviving population figures remain poorly consolidated across auction records.