1 Franc - Chambre de Commerce d'Aurillac [15]

The Chambre de Commerce d'Aurillac issued its own small-denomination scrip during the severe postwar coinage shortage that gripped France between 1920 and 1923 — a period when centimes and small francs vanished from circulation almost entirely, hoarded by a public still rattled by wartime economics. Hundreds of French chambres de commerce did the same, producing a vast and taxonomically bewildering family of emergency issues that philatelists and notaphilists have been sorting ever since.

What distinguishes this particular note is its thoroughly local production: Delostal & Germa, a printing firm based in Aurillac itself, handled the job, with design credited to Félix Tourdes. Few chamber issues were printed in-house at this scale — most chambers contracted with larger Parisian or Lyon-based printers.