20 ECU de Roanne [42]

Roanne's municipal ECU issues belong to the wave of French local authority coinages produced in the early 1990s, when hundreds of communes, départements, and chambers of commerce minted ECU-denominated pieces ahead of anticipated monetary union. The program was partly promotional, partly numismatic — cities competed for collector attention while also staking a claim to European identity before the franc disappeared.

Roanne, a textile and industrial town on the Loire in the Loire département, had no particular monetary history of its own. The bracket notation [42] references the département number, standard on French local ECU issues to distinguish the dozens of municipalities sharing similar series formats.