10 Francs - Rainier III Piedfort Essai

Piéforts are test strikes produced at double or greater thickness specifically for official archives and presentation purposes — they were never intended for circulation and were struck in tiny quantities, often fewer than a dozen examples. Monaco's mid-century piedfort program served partly as a mechanism for the palace to maintain archival sets of new coinage types under Rainier III, who had assumed rule just the previous year following the death of Louis II in 1949.

The gold specification here is the rarer of the two known PE6 variants, the silver counterpart being PE6.