1 Franc - Chambre de Commerce de Belfort 90

During the First World War, the French Treasury's inability to keep small-denomination coinage in circulation forced chambers of commerce across the country to issue their own emergency paper. Belfort's chamber — operating in the Territoire de Belfort, a department that had existed solely because its garrison refused to surrender in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 — was among those authorized under the decrees of 1914–1916 to fill that gap. The political identity of the territory made its locally issued scrip a matter of some civic pride.

Printed by B. Arnaud in Villeurbanne, a working-class commune immediately east of Lyon, the note carries a watermark as its sole security measure — modest, but consistent with wartime austerity across the entire French emergency series. The JP#23 reference covers at least four distinct varieties within this denomination, differentiated by serial number series and minor typographic details.