100 Francs Gérard Philipe

Gérard Philipe died in 1959 at thirty-six, and the French public's grief was immediate and outsized — he was the closest thing postwar French cinema had to a romantic ideal. This coin was struck as part of the Monnaie de Paris's ongoing commemorative program marking figures of French cultural history, issued thirty-six years after his death.

The .900 silver specification places it in the same series architecture used for several French cultural commemoratives of the mid-1990s, produced primarily for collector sale rather than circulation.