Belgium Commemorates Waterloo With a Coin, and France Is Not Pleased - NYTimes.com

PhotoThe newly minted Belgian 2.50 euro coin that commemorates the Battle of Waterloo.Credit Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — Perhaps befitting a battle that ended French hegemony in Europe, Paris, it seems, has been outflanked once again.

After it objected to a decision in March by Belgium to introduce a new 2 euro coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Belgians retreated, scrapping 180,000 coins they had already minted.

But victory for France is proving elusive.

This week, Belgium decided to circumvent French resistance by invoking a little-known European Union rule that allows countries to issue euro coins of their choice, provided they are in an irregular denomination.

That led to the unveiling of a €2.50 coin — a first in Belgium — and 70,000 of them have now been minted. The coins, which can only be spent inside Belgium, display a monument of a lion atop a cone-shaped hill on the site of France’s humiliation, as well as lines indicating where troops were positioned when forces led by Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon in the countryside near Brussels.

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Belgium Unveils New 2.50 Euro Coin

Johan Van Overtveldt, the Belgian finance minister, spoke on Monday about the minting — even after France’s opposition — of a new 2.50 coin that commemorates the Battle of Waterloo.

By Reuters on Publish Date June 9, 2015.Photo by Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency.

Johan Van Overtveldt, the Belgian finance minister, insisted on Monday that the new coins were not meant to provoke Gallic anger.

“The goal is not to revive old quarrels in a modern Europe — and there are more important things to sort out,” he was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “But there’s been no battle in recent history as important as Waterloo, or indeed one that captures the imagination in the same way.”

There is no doubt that the European Union has bigger struggles to wage at the moment. But in its small way, the skirmish has signaled the challenges facing European integration, and the limits of Europe’s open borders at overcoming old nationalist impulses.

Tensions among the 19 countries that use the euro have mounted as Greece teeters perilously close to defaulting on its debt.

Yet history has its own currency in Europe, which even a common currency has yet to overcome. Back in March, officials in Paris wrote a letter to the European authorities insisting that the Battle of Waterloo, which took place on June 18, 1815, and altered the shape of European history, had a deep and damaging resonance in the collective French consciousness.

France protested Belgium’s plans for its original coin by saying that basking in France’s defeat threatened to undermine European unity, troubled enough already. The €2 coin, it said, could spur an “unfavorable reaction in France.” In Belgium, the victory embodied in the €2.50 coin is being lauded as if the tiny country had itself triumphed on the battlefield.

“Belgium creativity at its best!” Jean-Yves Jault, the Brussels-based head of corporate communications for Toyota Europe, boasted on Twitter.

Nevertheless, the move has inspired no little annoyance in France. An article on the website of Bfmtv, the French broadcaster, noted that 200 years later, the defeat of Napoleon was “still hard to swallow.”

The article asked whether France was a “poor loser,” even as it stressed that the €2.50 coin would not be legal tender outside of Belgium, where it is to be sold in plastic bags at a cost of €6.

In Britain, where the 19th-century poet laureate Robert Southey called the Battle of Waterloo “the greatest deliverance that civilized society has experienced” since Charles Martel repelled an Islamic conquest of Europe in 732, the new €2.50 coin aroused similar adulation.

“Well done Belgium beat the French at their own game of finding ways around EU rules, the English should take note!!” Michael Dunn, from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote on Twitter.

Others were less impressed. On Facebook, Manuel Di Pietrantonio suggested that the value of the dispute was about €2.50.

Hannah Olivennes contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 10, 2015, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: With Guile, Belgium Finds Way to Issue Waterloo Coin .

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