5 Centimes

Palestro was a small French colonial commune roughly 80 kilometers east of Algiers, and like dozens of similar municipalities across Algeria during the First World War, it faced an acute shortage of small change as coin metal was diverted to the war effort. These local emergency issues — known as monnaie de nécessité — were a widespread improvised response, authorized at the municipal level rather than by any central banking authority.

The handstamp was the authentication mechanism: without a central printing infrastructure, the commune simply stamped paper to validate it. Survivorship is partly a function of how long the local shortage lasted before central supplies normalized.