10 Livres Tournois

The colonial livres tournois notes issued by the Intendance Générale des Colonies were a French metropolitan solution to chronic specie shortages across the Caribbean possessions — Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue all suffered from coin draining back toward France. Paper instruments like this one were meant to stabilize colonial commerce, though colonial populations remained persistently skeptical of them.

1788 puts this note one year before the convening of the Estates-General and just ahead of the Caribbean upheavals that would culminate in the Haitian Revolution of 1791. Notes of this series rarely survived the decade in any condition.