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10 Livres Tournois
| Issuer | Intendance Générale des Colonies |
|---|---|
| Year | 1788 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Plain typeset note printed in black on cream handmade paper, enclosed within a simple ruled rectangular border. The heading "ISLES DE FRANCE ET DE BOURBON" appears at top in spaced capitals, followed by a manuscript serial number field "N.°"; the body text, set in a mixture of roman and italic typefaces, authorises the note as a billet of ten livres tournois per the Royal Edict of 10 June 1788. The denomination "DIX LIVRES" is rendered in bold white letters on a solid black panel at centre-lower, with the two signatories — Percheron and De Morigny, both styled Commissaire des Colonies — printed in small capitals at the lower left and right respectively. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Blank, unprinted reverse of plain cream handmade paper, showing the natural laid texture of the stock with visible horizontal chain lines across the surface. |
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| Comments |
The colonial livres tournois notes issued by the Intendance Générale des Colonies were a French metropolitan solution to chronic specie shortages across the Caribbean possessions — Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue all suffered from coin draining back toward France. Paper instruments like this one were meant to stabilize colonial commerce, though colonial populations remained persistently skeptical of them.
1788 puts this note one year before the convening of the Estates-General and just ahead of the Caribbean upheavals that would culminate in the Haitian Revolution of 1791. Notes of this series rarely survived the decade in any condition.