1500 Francs CFA Albert Einstein

This piece belongs to the wave of small-format gold issues produced by the Monnaie de Paris under licensing arrangements with Francophone African states in the early 2000s — a commercially driven program that had little to do with the issuing country and everything to do with the European collector market. Togo had no particular connection to Einstein. The 2005 date places it in the centennial year of Einstein's "Annus Mirabilis," when he published four papers that reshaped physics, including the special theory of relativity and the photoelectric effect paper that would eventually earn him the 1921 Nobel Prize.