10 Years of Economic and Monetary Union

At the centre, a stylised human figure on an ancient coin, its left arm extended into the euro symbol. The artist's initials appear beneath the euro symbol. The issuing country's name in the national language(s) appears along the upper edge of the design, while the dates 1999–2009 and the acronym UEM (the French rendering of EMU) appear along the lower edge.

Second European Union joint issue. All 16 eurozone states issued a coin with the same design on the anniversary date of 1 January 2009. The coins differ only in their inscriptions, which appear in the respective national language.

On 1 January 1999, the Economic and Monetary Union entered its third and decisive phase: eleven EU member states, including France, irrevocably fixed their exchange rates, the European Central Bank took over monetary policy, and the euro became the common currency for cashless payments. For France, this step meant the end of the franc as an independent currency after more than two centuries — a monetary watershed that was, domestically, quite controversial. The foundation had been laid by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which set out convergence criteria for inflation, interest rates, public debt and budgetary discipline. France met these criteria as one of the founding states and was thus part of the Eurosystem from the very beginning.

The euro's first ten years revealed both the strength and the complexity of the common currency area. The euro quickly established itself as the world's second most important reserve currency and stabilised foreign trade within the eurozone. As an export-oriented economy, France benefited from the elimination of exchange-rate risk against its most important trading partners. At the same time, the financial crisis from 2008 onward exposed structural weaknesses in the monetary union, triggering intensive reforms in the following years. All eurozone states jointly marked the 1999–2009 anniversary with a European joint issue, in which France took part in 2009 with a 2-euro commemorative coin.