€2 commemorative coins - France 2013, The 150th anniversary of the birth of Pierre de Coubertin, initiator of the revival of the Olympic Games, founder and first president of the International Olympic Committee.
Commemorative 2 euro coins from France
Description of the design: The inner part of the coin depicts the face of Pierre de Coubertin still young. Stylised Olympic rings form the background. They provide the framework for silhouettes symbolising the Olympic sports. At the left, the indication of the issuing country ‘RF’ and the year ‘2013’. At the top, the inscription ‘PIERRE DE COUBERTIN’ in semi-circle. The coin’s outer ring depicts the 12 stars of the European flag.
Reverse: left from the coin centre face value: 2, on the right inscription: EURO; in the background of the inscription a map of Europe; in the background of the map vertically six parallel lines ending on both sides with five-pointed stars (the reverse is common for all euro coins)
Issuing volume: 1,020,000 coins
Date of issue: 3 June 2013
Face value: 2 euro
Diameter: 25.75 mm
Thickness: 2.2 mm
Weight: 8.5 gr
Composition: BiAlloy (Nk/Ng), ring Cupronickel (75% copper - 25% nickel clad on nickel core), center Nickel brass (75% copper - 20% zinc - 5% nickel)
€2 Edge Inscription: The French €2 coin edge inscription is 2, followed by two stars, repeated six times alternately upright and inverted.
Mint Location: Monnaie de Paris (Paris Mint), in Pessac, France.
Mint Marks: Mintmark of the Paris Mint: a cornucopia. Located at the bottom center left, inner circle.
Mint Master Mark - Yves Sampo, the new head of the engraving workshop. Staying true to tradition, his “different” illustrates the teamwork spirit of the engraving workshop. So this signature depicts a pentagon with the letters AG, which stand for “Atelier de Gravure” (engraving workshop) and MP standing for “Monnaie de Paris et Pessac” inside it. The motif is completed by Yves Sampo’s own initials on either side of it. Located at the bottom center right, inner circle.
National Identification: Letters: 'RF'; République française (Republic of France).
Pierre de Coubertin
Pierre de Frédy, baron de Coubertin (born January 1, 1863, Paris, France—died September 2, 1937, Geneva, Switzerland), French educator who played a central role in the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, after nearly 1,500 years of abeyance. He was a founding member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and served as its president from 1896 to 1925.
As a republican born to the French aristocracy, a patriot with an internationalist outlook, and a child of the French defeats of 1871 yet a committed progressive and optimist, Coubertin struggled in his 20s to find a satisfying vocation. Inspired by study tours of British public schools and American colleges, he resolved "to attach his name to a great educational reform," embarking upon lifelong campaigns for secondary-school improvement, workers universities, and the popular study of world political history. These efforts attained little success and are largely forgotten today. In 1890 Coubertin met English educator William Penny Brookes, who had organized British Olympic Games as early as 1866. Brookes introduced Coubertin to the efforts that he and others had made to resurrect the Olympic Games. Brookes’s passion for an international Olympic festival inspired Coubertin to take up the cause and gave a new direction to his life. As Le Rénovateur ("The Reviver") of the Olympic Games, Coubertin managed to alter modern cultural history on a global scale.
The idea of a new Olympic Games, which in Coubertin’s case emerged from a focus on the liberal democratic and character-building properties of school sport, was hardly original. Whenever Europe renewed its fascination with ancient Greece, the charismatic phrase "Olympic Games" came to the fore. Historians have discovered dozens of fanciful evocations of the Olympics from the Renaissance through early modern times, and in the 18th and 19th centuries sporting, gymnastic, and folkloric festivals bearing this name are known from Canada, Greece, France, Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain. These local or national expressions often asserted the superiority of indigenous physical culture over that of rival peoples. By contrast, Brookes, Coubertin, and their colleagues were committed from the beginning to a quadrennial festival of strictly international character and featuring many kinds of modern athletic contests.
Coubertin’s extraordinary energies, his taste for cultural symbolism, his social and political connections, and his willingness to exhaust his fortune in pursuit of his ambitions were critical to launching the Olympic movement. At the 1889 Universal Exhibition Paris, Coubertin launched a series of congresses on physical education and international sport that coincided with inspiring new archaeological finds from Olympia. His public call for an Olympic revival at one of these congresses in 1892 fell on deaf ears, but he persevered, and in 1894 a second Sorbonne congress resolved to hold an international Olympic Games in Athens.
The success of Athens 1896 was followed by embarrassments in Paris and St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., where the Olympics were swallowed by world’s fairs and control was all but lost by the young IOC and its president, Coubertin. Stockholm 1912 put the Games back on track, and during the World War I era Coubertin reconsolidated the Olympic movement by moving its headquarters to Lausanne, Switzerland, and by articulating its ideology of "neo-Olympism," the pursuit of peace and intercultural communication through international sport.