1 Franc - Chambres de Commerce du Havre

When the French banking system effectively seized up in August 1914, towns and chambers of commerce across the country scrambled to plug the coin vacuum left by wartime hoarding and the suspension of specie payments. Le Havre, as a major Atlantic port, felt this immediately — commerce couldn't wait for Paris to sort itself out. These locally-issued emergency fractional notes were a practical municipal fix, not a monetary experiment.

The JP#68 series spans several discrete signature and date variants across 1914–15, which accounts for the range of Pick references. Collectors working this series need to distinguish them carefully; the differences are minor but the relative scarcities are not uniform across variants.