20 Francs - Emile Gentil

The Institut d'Émission de l'Afrique Équatoriale Française et du Cameroun was itself a transitional institution — created in 1955 to manage currency across French Equatorial Africa and Cameroun as decolonization became politically inevitable. This note was issued just a year before the CFA franc zone began fragmenting into separate national authorities. Emile Gentil, the name on the series, was the French colonial administrator who secured French control over Chad in the 1890s and oversaw the brutal rubber concession regime that devastated the Congo basin — an uncomfortable honorific by any later standard.

Broutin and Tison were both staff engravers at the Banque de France's Établissement de fabrication des monnaies et médailles workshops in Paris.