25 Centimes

French Guinea's 1920 emergency cardboard issues were a direct consequence of the chronic small-change shortage that plagued French West African territories during and immediately after the First World War. Metal coinage had effectively vanished from circulation — hoarded, melted, or simply never shipped in sufficient quantity — forcing individual colonial administrations to produce their own fractional substitutes. Guinea's series was among the more locally distinct: Joseph de La Nézière, an artist and long-term resident of French West Africa, designed the set, giving it a character that metropolitan emergency notes of the same period entirely lack.

Puyplat's engraving work appears across numerous French colonial issues of this era. Cardboard examples that have survived without delamination or moisture warping are genuinely uncommon.