10 Centimes

Mechelen was under German occupation when this note was issued, and like dozens of Belgian communes in 1917, the city resorted to printing its own fractional emergency money — the national coinage having been systematically hoarded or removed from circulation. These small municipal issues were legal within the occupation framework only to the extent that the Germans tolerated them; they filled a real transactional gap at the street level.

The engravers Poortman and Minguet were both active in Belgian small-change emergency issues during this period, their names appearing across multiple commune series. Geudens as designer is a local Mechelen connection — his involvement suggests the city commissioned the work with some civic intention rather than simply contracting it out wholesale.