10 Centimes

Médéa is an inland Algerian town roughly 80 kilometers south of Algiers, and like dozens of other Algerian municipalities during the First World War, it resorted to issuing its own small-denomination emergency scrip when the hoarding of metal coinage created an acute shortage of change. These municipal bons de nécessité filled the gap left by the near-total disappearance of bronze and nickel from everyday commerce — a problem that hit smaller inland towns harder than the ports, which had more flexible commercial networks.

Saumon-Marcel Léon was a mid-tier Algiers printer, not one of the major metropolitan French firms. That the municipality sourced locally rather than ordering from Paris or Lyon is itself telling.