10 Piastres

The Caisse Centrale de la France Libre — operating through the Délégation Générale de la France Libre au Levant — issued this note under the banner of the République Syrienne while Syria was under the Free French mandate authority. The 1942 dating places it squarely in the period when Vichy French forces had been expelled from the Levant following the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of 1941, and the Free French scrambled to establish functional currency arrangements for both Syria and Lebanon.

Printing was contracted to the Survey of Egypt in Cairo, the same institution that handled cartographic and security printing for British administration across the region. The political fiction of a sovereign République Syrienne issuing its own notes was useful; the practical infrastructure behind those notes was entirely Anglo-French.