10 Francs Leon Gambetta

Gambetta died in January 1883, just months after leaving the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, from a gunshot wound whose origins were never conclusively established — accident, suicide, and the jealousy of his companion Léonie Léon have all been proposed. The centennial of his death prompted this issue, one of several French commemorative circulation pieces of the early 1980s that used the copper-aluminium-nickel alloy introduced with the 1974 coinage reform.

He founded La République Française in 1871 and spent the following decade as the dominant organizer of French republican politics — less celebrated abroad than at home, but central to why the Third Republic survived its turbulent first years.