10 Centimes

La Rochelle's chamber of commerce issued iron tokens like this one to address the acute small-change shortage that paralyzed French retail commerce during the First World War. The Banque de France had effectively hoarded copper and bronze coinage for the war effort, leaving merchants across provincial France to organize their own emergency fiduciary systems. The Société du Commerce stepped into that vacuum, issuing locally redeemable tokens that circulated by mutual trust among participating traders.

Iron was an unglamorous substitute — prone to rust, difficult to strike cleanly — chosen purely because copper was unavailable.