PARIS, Oct 30: With the changeover from the franc to the Euro last January, the French government ordered so many euro coins that it now has a problem deciding what to do with the 8 to 10 billion pieces that are lying around in French bank vaults and look to remain there for months to come.

It seems that the French don’t care much for the coins - some of which are so small they’re unreadable to most middle-aged French consumers, especially the one-centime piece which is even smaller than a US penny - that thirty percent of the available coins can’t find users.

The French Government had estimated that only a maximum of ten percent would be out of circulation at a given moment.

The resistance to the Euro coins is such that there is a growing demand within the French government and among consumers that more paper currency be made available, for example, that a one-Euro bill be manufactured, to replace the existing one-Euro coin, which could become as popular, they think, as its US equivalent bearing the effigy of George Washington.

Several years ago, the US Mint in Washington experienced a problem akin to that being faced by French authorities when they attempted to replace the US greenback with a coin bearing the profile of Susan B Anthony. There were few takers, and the coin’s lack of popularity simply boosted the attractiveness of the US one-dollar bill.

The factory in Pessac, near Bordeaux, that is charged with striking the coins has been ordered to slow down its minting of new pieces - which exist in eight different values - effectively bringing down production to a minimum of 1.7 million pieces per day from the ten million coins per day that it had been striking until now.

The French government is understandably embarrassed as already it had forecast such a huge demand for the coins, that it decided late last year to import large quantities of Euro pieces from Spain - to the point that the Spanish Euros now account for 20 percent of all coins in circulation with France, with many French under the impression that Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quijote whose image appears on some of the Spanish coins, is as much a French author as Victor Hugo or Emile Zola.

And then, the problem doesn’t stop there. So many pieces were struck during the first months of production that the infrastructure established in collaboration with the private sector to produce the coins has suddenly been told to stop production, with the principal result being that many of the subcontracting companies are being forced to lay off personnel, with others saying they are close to bankruptcy.