10 Centimes

Aumale — now Sour El-Ghozlane — was a small colonial town in the Titteri mountains south of Algiers. Like dozens of Algerian communes during the First World War, it faced an acute small-change shortage once bronze and copper coinage disappeared into wartime metal requisitions. The response was purely local: cardboard emergency tokens issued under municipal authority, typically stamped by the mayor's office to lend them official standing.

The JP (Jérôme Prieur) catalogue documents these Algerian commune issues systematically, but surviving examples are frequently found with damaged or faint official stamps — the cardboard substrate absorbed ink unevenly and deteriorated faster than equivalent French metropolitan issues on thicker stock.