0,50 Franc

Madagascar's colonial postal administration stepping in as a currency issuer sounds like an administrative oddity, but it was entirely deliberate. The Banque de Madagascar did not yet exist in 1920 — it would only be established in 1925 — and the chronic shortage of small-denomination coinage across French colonial territories made some stopgap unavoidable. Postal authorities in several French colonies issued low-value fractional notes during and after the First World War precisely because small coins were being hoarded or had simply stopped arriving from the metropole.

P#1B is distinguished from P#1A by its serial number color. These postal fractional notes were not printed locally.