The years 1709–1715 were catastrophic for French royal finances. The War of the Spanish Succession had drained the treasury for over a decade, and the winter of 1709 — the coldest in living memory — destroyed harvests across France and triggered famine. Louis XIV was forced to melt his own Versailles silver plate to fund the war effort, and emergency monetary legislation repeatedly altered the official tariffing of gold coinage to force bullion into the mints. These double louis were struck partly as a result of those revaluations, designed to attract hoarded metal back into circulation.
The "sun" designation distinguishes this type from earlier louis issues by the mint mark system adopted under monetary reforms of the period.
The years 1709–1715 were catastrophic for French royal finances. The War of the Spanish Succession had drained the treasury for over a decade, and the winter of 1709 — the coldest in living memory — destroyed harvests across France and triggered famine. Louis XIV was forced to melt his own Versailles silver plate to fund the war effort, and emergency monetary legislation repeatedly altered the official tariffing of gold coinage to force bullion into the mints. These double louis were struck partly as a result of those revaluations, designed to attract hoarded metal back into circulation.
The "sun" designation distinguishes this type from earlier louis issues by the mint mark system adopted under monetary reforms of the period.