10 Centimes

La Rochelle's Chamber of Commerce token issues from the early 1920s emerged from the acute small-change shortage that gripped provincial France after World War I. The Banque de France, unable to meet demand for low-denomination coin, effectively ceded that function to local commercial associations and chambers, which issued aluminium and cardboard tokens by the hundreds across French departments. The Société du Commerce de La Rochelle was among the smaller issuing bodies — not a full chambre de commerce in the formal sense — which accounts for the relative obscurity of this piece in most French notgeld surveys.