1873, France (3rd Republic). Bronze 10 Centimes Coin
Mint Year: 1873 Mint Place: Paris (A) References: KM-815.1. Denomination: 10 Centimes Material: Bronze Diameter: 30mm Weight: 10gm
The French Third Republic (French: La Troisième République, sometimes written as La IIIe République) was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France and the Vichy France puppet government.
Maurice Larkin (2002) argued that political France of the Third Republic was sharply polarized. On the left marched democratic France, heir to the French Revolution and fully assured of the power of reason and knowledge to create a better future for all Frenchmen and all mankind. On the right stood conservative France, rooted in the peasantry, the Church and the army, and skeptical about “progress” unless guided by traditional elites. Adolphe Thiers called republicanism in the 1870s “the form of government that divides France least”. The Third Republic endured seventy years, making it the longest lasting government in France since the collapse of the Ancien Régime in the French Revolution of 1789, and the longest ever since.