10 Euros Napoléon III

Part of the Monnaie de Paris "Trésors de Paris" commemorative series, this 2014 issue honors Napoléon III, under whose Second Empire the city of Paris was systematically rebuilt by Baron Haussmann between 1853 and 1870 — a project that demolished roughly 20,000 buildings and displaced hundreds of thousands of working-class Parisians to create the boulevard system still intact today. The financing relied heavily on controversial municipal debt instruments that nearly bankrupted the city by the time the Franco-Prussian War ended the regime.