France's franc was born to pay a captured king's ransom
The first franc was a gold coin struck in 1360 to buy King John II out of English captivity. It showed him riding a finely dressed horse, earning it the nickname franc à cheval, and the name survived six centuries of debasement until the euro replaced it in 2002.
Its roots go back to Charlemagne, whose system of 781 AD split a pound of silver, the livre, into 20 sous of 12 deniers each. For roughly 500 years only the denier existed as a coin; the larger units were bookkeeping. Under Louis IX the silver gros tournois, worth one sol in the Touraine region, won people over with its reliability, and the livre tournois became France's preferred unit of account.
War kept eating its value. The Hundred Years' War, which began in 1337, pushed the crown to debase repeatedly, and a 1343 attempt to restore strong money wrecked borrowers who had to repay in dearer coin. John II's ransom coin of 1360 was worth one livre tournois, and its Latin legend calling him king of the Franks gave the franc a second reason for its name. His son Charles V, pursuing stable coinage, issued a similar gold piece in 1365 showing the king standing under a canopy.
Silver from the Americas later drove inflation across Europe. Henry III leaned on the franc's reputation for soundness in 1577, issuing a silver franc worth one livre tournois, but French coins lost out to the one-ounce pieces from Spain and the Netherlands. In 1641 Louis XIII scrapped francs and écus for Spanish-style coins such as the Louis d'or and Louis d'argent.
A decimal franc came back in 1795. Two hundred years of rising prices later, a new franc worth 100 old ones arrived in 1960, yet many people kept quoting big prices in old francs right up to the euro. Through the 19th and 20th centuries the franc was widely held as an international reserve currency, and between 1998 and 2002 it was converted at 6.55957 francs to one euro.
Source: French franc
