Tokens come in a wide variety of shapes, styles and denominations (values). Tokens also give you a small insight into an area or business that you don’t necessarily get from coins. This piece is a great example of all of that.

The shape of the token is interesting. I describe it as square with rounded corners and concave sides. You could perhaps also describe it as octagonal alternating convex and concave sides. In any case, the shape might be the easy part! What was it for? The text is in French, but even I know the word Café. The image in the center depicts crossed billiard cues and balls.

“Bon Pour” is common on French tokens, it literally translates as “Good for”, “En Consommation” is “For consumption” (I gather that basically means “in goods and services”, ie, you can’t redeem it for cash). So it is a token, worth 12 1/2 Centimes from this cafe. 12 1/2 Centimes is an interesting value. There are no coins of this denomination, however 2 times 12 1/2 is 25, so a 12 1/2 Centimes token, would be useful if say a game of billiards, or a drink was 12 1/2 centimes, as you could readily give change in the form of tokens from higher denomination coins.

Thinking back to what this token was worth, makes you picture the scene of a café in early 20th century France, where you could sit for a drink, or have a game of billiards. There is a famous painting of such a cafe, Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe”:

Is that what the cafe looked like? Hard to say, Van Gogh painted that in 1888 while staying in Arles. So the cafe when this token was used, probably looked more like the painting than walking into a modern cafe. Arles is a town in the triangle between Montpellier, Marseille and Avignon in southern France. So, now the tricky question, where is the cafe?

Helpfully, Numista has an entry, which gets us closer. That page lists it as being from Saint-Étienne. Looking back at the token, we have Café Copin, Forezien and “Place des Ursules”. Google Maps offers Pl. des Ursules in Saint-Étienne. This undoubtably looks different now to even 50 years ago, but, you can still almost picture what it might have looked like. If it helps, Saint-Étienne is only about 100km / 60 Miles north of Arles, where The Night Cafe was painted. There are still cafe’s in the area of course, but none named Café Copin.

And the last piece of the puzzle, “Forezien”. Wikipedia tells me Forezien refers to the people of “Forez”, a former province roughly in the center of the modern Loire département. Saint-Étienne is in this area. France has four levels of government, the National government overseeing the entire country. Under that are eighteen regions, which contain 101 “Departments” and “Communes” are the most local level, of which there are nearly 35,000. Until the late 1700s France was divided into Provinces. Although this token was likely issued over a hundred years after the change, residents of the area still presumably identified with the moniker.