10 Centimes

Dra-El-Mizan is a small town in the Kabylie region of Algeria, roughly 80 kilometers east of Algiers. During the First World War, the acute shortage of small-denomination coinage across French-administered territories prompted hundreds of French and colonial municipalities to issue their own emergency paper fractional currency — these are known collectively as monnaie de nécessité. The Commune de Dra-El-Mizan's participation in this wave is unremarkable in type but genuinely rare in survival: municipal issues from small Algerian communes were printed in far lower quantities than their metropolitan French counterparts and saw heavy use.

JPCV cataloging places this among the rarer Algerian communal issues of the period.