10 Centimes

Royan's merchant association issued these aluminium tokens in the early 1920s to address a chronic shortage of small change that plagued provincial French commerce following the First World War. The Banque de France had suspended bronze centime coinage during the war years and was slow to restore adequate small denomination supply, pushing hundreds of local chambers of commerce and merchant groups across France to issue their own emergency subsidiary currency — a phenomenon that produced thousands of distinct token types between roughly 1914 and 1924.

The Société des Commerçants de Royan-sur-l'Océan was one of the smaller issuing bodies in the Charente-Inférieure, and surviving examples tend to surface in above-average condition given their limited circulation radius.