5 Centimes

Boufarik's 1915 emergency cardboard notes were a purely local response to the acute small-change shortage that swept French Algeria — and much of metropolitan France — in the opening year of the war. The Banque de France's inability to keep fractional coinage in circulation forced hundreds of municipalities and commercial bodies to print their own substitutes. Boufarik, a small colonial agricultural town in the Mitidja plain, turned to a local press rather than any established security printer.

The official stamp was the only authentication barrier between a legitimate note and a forgery — a thin line for a 5-centime piece of pink cardboard.