2 Euros - Hyères

Hyères issued this piece in 1997 as a local emergency coinage — one of several hundred French municipalities that struck copper-nickel tokens during the 1990s to facilitate small commercial transactions at markets, fairs, and municipal events. French law technically prohibited these from functioning as currency, so issuers categorized them as "bons de nécessité" or commercial tokens, a legal fiction both sides found convenient.

Hyères, one of the oldest resort towns on the Côte d'Azur, had already lost its status as the fashionable destination to Cannes and Nice by the early twentieth century — a decline that gives these late-century civic tokens a faintly nostalgic municipal pride.