Catalog
50 Livres Tournois
| Issuer | Isles de France et de Bourbon |
|---|---|
| Year | 1780 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Printed entirely in black letterpress on plain paper within a decorative floral and scrollwork border. The text body carries the denomination and issuing authority in a combination of roman and italic typefaces, with a small crowned royal arms vignette bearing fleurs-de-lis at lower left alongside the word VU. Multiple manuscript signatures and a handwritten serial number appear across the face, and diagonal cancellation lines are drawn in ink. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Isles de France & de Bourbon BON pour CINQUANTE LIVRES Tournois, valeur reçue en Ordonnance. VU (Translation: Islands of France and Bourbon. Good for fifty Livres Tournois, value received on order. Seen.) |
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| Comments |
The Isles de France et de Bourbon — present-day Mauritius and Réunion — operated under a chronic cash shortage throughout the eighteenth century. Coin drained steadily toward trade with India and the East, leaving colonial administrators reliant on locally issued paper to keep commerce moving. These livres tournois notes were authorized under royal ordinance and circulated within the island system rather than as instruments redeemable in metropolitan France.
The tournois denomination itself was already an anachronism by 1780, formally supplanted in France by the livre de compte decades earlier, though colonial administrations continued using the old unit well past its metropolitan obsolescence. French Revolutionary currency reforms in the 1790s rendered this entire series void.