25 Centimes

Le Vigan, a small textile town in the Gard département, issued these brass nécessité tokens during the acute small-change shortages that plagued provincial French commerce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Union Commerciale & Industrielle Viganaise was a local merchant cooperative — the kind of body that stepped in precisely because the national mint could not reliably supply low-denomination coinage to rural markets. Redeeming these tokens required physically returning to a participating member merchant, which made wider circulation self-limiting by design.