10 Centimes

Boghari was a small administrative center in the Tell Atlas foothills, roughly 150 kilometers south of Algiers. This note belongs to the wave of emergency municipal small change issued across French Algeria during the First World War, when the hoarding of metal coins — copper, nickel, and eventually silver — stripped towns of the fractional currency needed for daily commerce. The metropolitan French government's slow response to the coin shortage pushed local communes to act unilaterally, and dozens did.

Saumon-Marcel Léon's Algiers print shop handled many of these small communal issues, which kept production costs low and turnaround fast. The Boghari pieces circulated within commune boundaries only — legally worthless fifty kilometers away.