50 Centimes - Léopold II French text

Belgium's bilingual coinage problem came to a head in the 1880s and 1890s, when Flemish political pressure forced the government to mint parallel French- and Dutch-legend versions of nearly every denomination. This piece is the French-text variant of that compromise — the two versions circulated simultaneously and were legally interchangeable, though in practice each tended to stay within its own linguistic region.

The series ran only through 1909, the year Léopold II died after a reign marked by the Congo atrocities that had by then drawn international condemnation.