Welcome! This website is to provide a resource for a set of coinage that is uncommonly known even in the coin-collecting community. Coinage according to the Latin Monetary Union (“LMU”) was used in over 60 countries in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Venezuela to Finland. The only other coinage types with such a broad geographical reach are the coins of the British or Spanish Empires, and those were minted in fewer countries.

The LMU existed from 1865 to 1914 (though it technically continued until 1927), but it only codified denominations which had been circulating in France and its neighbors since Napoleon I. Some of that coinage survived the LMU and was used until the 1960s — until silver left circulation. This website refers to Napoleonic and LMU denominations as one larger group: LMU coinage, setting aside the small difference in fineness of subsidiary silver coins (under the Napoleonic standard, all silver coins were 0.9 fine; under the post-1865 LMU standard, coins smaller than 25 grams were 0.835 fine).