abstract:The Latin Monetary Union (LMU) was a 19th-century attempt to unify several European currencies into a single currency that could be used in all the member states, at a time when most national currencies were still made out of gold and silver. It was established in 1865 and disbanded in 1927.
The logic is dubious: plenty of previous examples of a shared currency, from the LatinMonetaryUnion to the currency union between Britain and Ireland, managed without a shared government.
But history may judge that it was President Hollande who decided, in 2013, whether Europe was going to have a squidgy, Latin kind of monetaryunion - or the austere Germanic one described in the new fiscal treaty.