1 Franc

Madagascar's wartime cardboard fractional notes of 1916 were a direct response to acute coin shortages that affected French colonial territories across the Indian Ocean during the First World War. Metal was being redirected toward the war effort, and small-denomination coinage effectively vanished from local circulation. The colonial administration's answer was to print provisional notes on cardboard — an unglamorous but practical stopgap that was never intended to last.

The cardboard substrate makes survivors fragile. These notes deteriorate readily at the corners and along folds, and examples without significant wear are genuinely uncommon.