1 Franc - Chambre de Commerce de Bar-le-Duc 55

Bar-le-Duc sits in the Meuse department, which bore the full weight of the Western Front. By 1920, French small change remained so scarce — hoarded, melted, or simply destroyed during four years of war — that chambers of commerce across France had been issuing emergency fractional notes since 1914, and many were still in circulation well into the early 1920s. This note is part of that prolonged necessity, not a wartime stopgap but a postwar admission that the crisis had not resolved cleanly.

Berger-Levrault in Nancy was a natural choice for Meuse-region issuers — a major printing house with deep administrative and military publishing roots, accustomed to producing documents under pressure.