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Maybe you’ve hung on to old French Franc banknotes thinking that with the problems in the Eurozone, their time would come.

 

France’s central bank, the Banque de France has announced that the time has indeed come for French Franc denominated notes and holders of French Franc notes have until 17th February 2012 to exchange these old notes into Euros. After that date the French Franc banknotes will cease to have value as an exchangeable currency. Sceptics amongst readers might well be wondering if the Euro will still be around come 17th February!

 

After 17th February 2012, the French Franc banknotes will only have value as collectors’ items and not as a means of exchange. Bank of France has set up a website specifically for the purpose of exchanging French Franc notes and holders of France’s former currency who wish to exchange old notes can start the process by visiting Jechangemesfrancs.com.

 

For illustrative purposes, a 500 Franc note would be worth 76.22 €, a 200 FF note, 30.49 € and 100 FF equates to 15.24 €. If you hold old notes in good condition, it may be worth checking their collectors’ value before rushing to exchange these into Euros. Some of the notes have a significant value to collectors but these collectors’ items are, sadly, the exception rather than the rule.

 

Another point to check for is printing errors. As with stamps, currency notes containing a printer’s error can have a significantly higher value than their everyday counterparts and if something looks not quite right about a particular note, it may be worth having an expert take a closer look at it. A useful site which highlights some errors can be found at Billetfaute.com.

 

 

Guide2Paysdelaloire comments: Shoppers in France cannot have failed to notice that in supermarket aisles and on till receipts, the French Franc (FF) lives on like Banquo’s ghost serving as a continual admonition of what today’s shopping basket in France would have cost had it been priced in French Francs. The conversion rate into French Francs, even for a modest grocery shop, can be quite alarming making de Gaulle’s ‘Franc Fort’ looking more like the old beleaguered Italian lira! The final call for French Franc notes may see the end of this practice but, with the countries of the Eurozone seeming to come up with more venues for summits rather than actual solutions to the Euro crisis, we may yet see a return of the Franc.

 

If the Franc does, once more, grace our pockets and wallets, with the calling in of banknotes marking the final demise of ‘le nouveau franc’ which, coincidentally, was introduced 52 years ago today on 1st January 1960, it would be our guess that initially, ‘le nouveau nouveau franc’ would have parity with the Euro, so avoiding the need to change the currency, recalculate bank accounts, prices and the whole panoply of other conversions associated with the introduction of a new currency. The Banque de France’s final call on the old French Franc notes would seem to indicate that for France, there is no way back to the Franc – at least not the 1960 model.