Shooting thaler
silver coin in thaler size minted to commemorate a Schützenfest or free shooting in Switzerland
A shooting thaler ( TAH-lər; German: Schützentaler; French: Écu de tir) is a silver coin in thaler size minted to commemorate a Schützenfest (French: Fête de tir) or free shooting (German: Freischiessen, French: Tir libre) in Switzerland.
In a narrow sense, Swiss Schützentaler are the silver coins equal in size and weight to the Swiss 5 francs coin minted on the occasion of one of the Eidgenössische Schützenfeste, or federal shooting festivals. Two such coins were issued by the cantonal mints of Graubünden (1842, denominated at 4 Swiss francs), and Glarus (1847, denominated at 40 Batzen) prior to the establishment of the Federal Mint. Sometimes included as "shooting thaler" is a double thaler (10 francs) coin minted by Geneva and donated as cash prizes to the 1851 festival.
The Federal Mint has issued fifteen such coins with the nominal value of five francs, between 1855 and 1885.
These coins were not intended as legal tender, even though they were issued by the federal mint with a nominal face value. Because they were minted to the official specifications of the 5 francs coin, they were nevertheless circulated de facto. After 1885, the federal mint was dissuaded from minting these semi-official coins on the part of the Latin Monetary Union. After the demise of the Monetary Union, the Swiss federal mint issued two further Schützentaler, in 1934 and 1939, for a total of twenty distinct Schützentaler (3 cantonal, 17 federal). Of the 22 cantons of the Swiss Confederation, 18 are represented in these coins, the exceptions being Uri, Appenzell, Aargau and Valais.
The public source identifies “Shooting thaler” as silver coin in thaler size minted to commemorate a Schützenfest or free shooting in Switzerland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shooting, thaler and silver.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q687217. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1842, 1847, 1851 and 1855.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shooting thaler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.