70 Years of Peace in Europe

The national side is adorned with a modern peace dove motif. The dove holds an olive branch in its beak, whose leaves take the form of the twelve stars of the European flag. The 28 European Union member states are referenced by their ISO country codes. The symbol RF appears at the bottom, with the two mint marks to the left and the year 2015 to the right.

Seventy years without war among European states is historically no small feat. Before 1945, the continent had endured two world wars in less than a century, together claiming tens of millions of lives and devastating entire regions. The peace that took hold in Western Europe after 1945 was no accident, but the result of deliberate political design: the Marshall Plan, Franco-German reconciliation, and the gradual economic and political integration that eventually led to the European Union. France was a driving force in this process from the outset — from the Coal and Steel Community in 1951, through the Élysée Treaty of 1963, to its role in shaping the Maastricht Treaty.

The European unification process was never free of tensions, yet its core idea — prosperity and stability through interconnection rather than division — proved its worth over decades. In 2015, France marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, placing its national day of remembrance within a continental framework. The dove of peace, a universal symbol in Western iconography at least since Pablo Picasso's poster for the 1949 Paris World Peace Congress, links French commemorative culture in this context to a wider, pan-European aspiration.