1 Franc Commune de Blandain

Blandain is a small village just west of Tournai, and this note belongs to the chaotic wave of emergency municipal scrip that flooded Belgium in the weeks following the German invasion of August 1914. With the national banking system in immediate paralysis and coin hoarded almost overnight, hundreds of Belgian communes — including ones with populations in the low thousands — improvised their own fractional currency to keep local commerce moving.

The Lithographie & Cartonnage de Tournai was a local commercial printer, not a security press. The official stamp was the primary — and thin — defense against counterfeiting.