This assignat is from the early French revolutionary era, possibly a contemporary COUNTERFEIT. There's some writing on the back. I think it's in French. Do you know what it says?

The following response was from chinnotes (Erwin Beyer) which appeared in the Coin People Forum, June 13, 2010:

1. The language used is not French, but German! The text was written with old German script, called Sütterlin script (Sütterlin was the "inventor" of this script). In the last years of WWII when I was about 6 years old, we still had to learn this kind of writing which was used only in Germany, but immediately after WWII we had to switch to "normal" writing.

Unfortunately I am unable to read all words, one word I cannot scrutinize: "Preis 15 Francs. Diese correspond. In Collectionneur des Ed. Prévot 4 Jahrgang. No.112". "correspond." is an abbreviation of "correspondieren" which in modern German is written with "k": korrespondieren. "Collectionneur" refers to "Le journal des collectionneurs" which was a journal for collectors of, amongst others, coins and paper money. I saw some pieces of this journal, issued 1900 and a few years later.

The translation of the text is: "Price 15 francs. This (note) corresponds to (the note described )in (the journal) Collectionneur of Ed(uard) Prévot, 4th year, ... No.112". The word I cannot read may have the meaning "page", "paragraph" or something like that.

2. The note is a forgery, that is absolutely sure. There is even a typographical error on the note: "énormement" (without accent aigu) instead of "énormément".

3. Because of the certainly old text glued to the back of the note, this must be a very old counterfeit, probably a counterfeit of the time. Only by the reform of orthography which took place in 1919 the word "correspondieren" was changed to "korrespondieren".

Erwin