5 Francs Essai

The New Hebrides was an Anglo-French condominium — one of the stranger colonial arrangements of the twentieth century, governed jointly by Britain and France with parallel administrations, parallel legal systems, and parallel currencies. French Pacific francs circulated alongside the pound, and the coinage issued under the condominium had to satisfy two metropolitan governments simultaneously. The 1970 essai series was produced at the Paris Mint as trial strikes ahead of a planned circulation coinage, part of a broader push to regularize the territory's monetary situation before independence.

The condominium dissolved in 1980 when Vanuatu was proclaimed independent. Circulation versions of this denomination were never widely distributed.