2 Baiocchi

The Roman Republic of 1798–1799 was a French-backed revolutionary state established after Napoleon's forces expelled Pope Pius VI from Rome. It lasted barely eighteen months before Austrian and Neapolitan troops restored papal authority. This copper issue belongs to that compressed window of radical governance, during which the new republic overhauled the papal monetary system and introduced denominations tied to a decimal-adjacent structure borrowed from French revolutionary coinage principles.

Pius VI died in French captivity in August 1799, just as the republic itself was collapsing — meaning this coin outlasted neither the government that struck it nor the pope it displaced.