1 Centime - Louis Napoléon Bonaparte pattern of bronze with a module of 1 centime

This is a pattern piece struck in 1851, the year Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was still President of the French Republic — a position he had secured through the December 1848 election before engineering the coup of 2 December 1851 that dissolved the Assembly and set the stage for the Second Empire. Pattern coinage from this transitional moment is notoriously difficult to attribute with confidence, as the Monnaie de Paris was producing trial strikes under two successive constitutional identities within a single calendar year.

Mazard 1375 places this among the documented essais of the presidential period, distinct from the imperial coinage that followed proclamation of the Empire in November 1852.