10 Centimes - Muhammad VIII Essai

Essai pieces from the French Protectorate's Tunisian issues of 1945 were produced at Paris as pattern strikes for administrative approval, not for general circulation. The zinc composition reflects wartime and immediate postwar metal constraints that had already forced France itself off bronze for subsidiary coinage. Muhammad VIII al-Amin had been installed as Bey of Tunis by the French in 1943, just months after the Allied liberation of Tunisia from Axis occupation — a political calculation that would eventually backfire when he sided with the independence movement in the 1950s.