5 Centimes Ville de Dison

Dison is a small industrial municipality in the Verviers arrondissement, and like hundreds of Belgian communes it issued its own emergency paper during the German occupation of the First World War. The occupying authorities had systematically drained metallic currency from circulation, forcing local governments to fill the gap themselves. These communal notes — known collectively as monnaies de nécessité — were produced under improvised conditions, often on whatever printing equipment the local administration happened to have on hand.

The fact that this note was printed in Dison itself rather than contracted to an established security printer is visible in the typography of most surviving examples.