500 Livres Tournois

The Intendance Générale des Colonies issued colonial currency for the French Caribbean possessions — principally Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe — under a system chronically short of specie. By 1788, the colonial financial administration was already under severe strain, and notes of this denomination circulated in an economy where plantation credit, slave-trade debt, and metropolitan merchant accounts were perpetually tangled. The livres tournois remained the official unit of account even as the French monetary system was moving toward the reforms that would produce the franc in 1795.

Pick 12 is poorly documented in terms of surviving populations, and the 1788 date places this note just one year before the revolutionary upheaval that would ultimately destroy the colonial financial order entirely.