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48 Livres

Issuer Trésorier des Colonies (Treasury of the Colonies), Quebec
Year 1753
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Currency Livre (colonial)
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Obverse lettering 48 COLONIES 1753
Dépenses générales.
N° 9441
IL sera tenu compte par le Roi, au mois d'octobre prochain, de la somme de Quarante huit livres valeur en la soûmission du Trésorier, restée au bureau du contrôle.
A Québec, le 6 Janvier 1753
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Variants P#S116 - 1753
P#S116 - 1758
Comments

Card money — not this note, but its predecessor — had already collapsed once in New France by the time these livres were issued. The Trésorier des Colonies operated under chronic underfunding from Paris, and the 1753 emission was part of a sustained attempt to keep the colonial economy liquid while metropolitan reimbursements arrived months late, if at all. The Seven Years' War was only three years off, and French fiscal commitment to the colony was already fraying visibly.

New France paper from this period survives in tiny numbers. The colony's financial records were largely dispersed or destroyed after the 1760 British capitulation, and notes that weren't redeemed — many weren't, at full value — simply disappeared with the administration that issued them.