Belgian Coins

Belgian coins speak two languages — and sometimes three. Since independence, Belgium has struck its coinage with legends in French, Dutch, or both, and the language on the rim has always been more than a practical choice. It is a political statement, a reflection of which community holds the denomination, and a reminder that the country has spent its entire existence negotiating the relationship between its linguistic halves.
 
The Belgian Lion rampant has appeared on the country's coinage from the kingdom's founding, surviving occupations, abdications, and the kind of constitutional crises that would have dissolved a less stubborn state. Kings have come and gone — some beloved, some controversial, some deposed by the very question of what they did during wartime — but the lion has stayed, its raised paw and open jaw unchanged through every transition from nickel to zinc to copper-nickel and back again.
 
Belgian coins also carry the fingerprints of the wars that crossed the country's territory. Belgium was occupied twice in the twentieth century, and both times the coinage shifted to wartime metals as the country's copper and nickel were requisitioned by the occupying power. The zinc coins of the Second World War are among the most historically concentrated objects in the collection — denominations that circulated under foreign authority, carrying a captive king's monogram and a bilingual legend through years when the country's unity was under deliberate attack.