I was looking at these bookends in my Quimper collection and noticed that on the base it says
'39F pour le deux ' - I was wondering roughly how much average wages were in France the 1930s
Don't know about wages in the '30s but if this label is original to the '30s with the figurines then that 39F would have been in 'anciens francs' which my Gran so many time rejoiced in telling me that they were far more valuable !!
39F in the '30s would have been 3F90 by the '50s/'60s and possibly worth not more than 0.39centimes by 2000.
French money was devalued soon after the war. Often elder generations would/could not get their minds round that devaluation and quoted money amounts in 'ancien francs' so to my generation it made them 'très riches!' A car to them would be bought for 50,000F (anciens) which was actually 5,000F to me.... I remember (back in the late '60s) when my parents bought a plot of land on which to build their house, the whole package was around 300,000F but to explain to their parents (my grandparents) the figure suddenly jumped up to a heady 3million francs!! I really thought that my parents had won the lottery!
....Just as well that none of my grandparents were still alive by the arrival of the Euro! Imagine the mental arithmetic to give them the value of things!!
Actually, Missy, I think the change in 1960 was a division by 100 rather than by 10. i.e. 1,000 francs became 10 nouveaux francs (I can still visualise that Richelieu banknote, overprinted, and the 500F/5NF one with V Hugo on it).
So does that mean that the two Quimper figures would be 0.39 new francs ? Er, 4p. Gosh, sounds cheap doesn't it, even for the 1930s...
Angela
Its written lightly in pencil on the underside of the pottery, but it might say FN rather than just F, was FN the a sign of old francs ? (I'm sure I should know this, its ringing a bell but I just can't remember)
Thanks for the table Cjlaws.
Sadly, Quimper Pottery has never been especially cheap www.hb-henriot.com The bookends are by Jean Haffen, a student of Mathurin Mehuet ( http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathurin_Méheut )and I should imagine her work was quite desirable.
"FN" would have been the new "heavy" francs = "francs nouveaux", I seem to recall.
So price is going up to about 40p in UKP now!
[EDIT: Going a bit mad here, I think. I should have said £4, shouldn't I?!]
PS I can't get the table
PPS Found another one So if one reckons the price marked is in nouveaux francs, in 1960, it makes about 55 euros at 2006 prices.
People around here always talk about and compare property prices in Francs, it confuses me no end but I think it is due to the fact that most people paid Francs (new) for their house.
I have also been doubly confused when they have used old Francs (the giveaway was that it was in the millions) I think that there was an very old person present, talking about their house.
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