1 ECU - Valreas

Valréas is a peculiar case in French administrative geography: a commune belonging to the Vaucluse department entirely surrounded by the Drôme, a landlocked enclave created when the papacy purchased the town in 1317 and never corrected by subsequent boundary reforms. The 1994 ECU issues produced by French communes and regional entities exploited a deliberate ambiguity in EU treaty language — local authorities issued them as trade tokens or souvenirs timed to the Maastricht Treaty's momentum, with no legal tender status but wide local merchant acceptance.

Valréas leaned into its papal history as the obvious framing device for the series, a marketing hook the town has never entirely abandoned since de Gaulle granted it the ceremonial title "Enclave des Papes" in 1963.