6 Gros - Honore II

Honoré II struck these billon gros in 1640, just three years after he had formally extracted Monaco from Spanish suzerainty and secured recognition of the principality's independence through the Treaty of Péronne with France. The coinage was a direct assertion of sovereign minting rights — the French protectorate had just been established, and producing a recognizably Monégasque currency was politically inseparable from that diplomatic realignment.

Billon issues of this type circulated in a principality of fewer than a thousand inhabitants, which explains why survivors in any grade are genuinely scarce rather than artificially so.