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| Issuer | Nouveau Comptoir d'Escompte de Batna (Union des Commerçants de la Ville de Batna) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1915 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | NOUVEAU COMPTOIR D'ESCOMPTE DE BATNA Union des Commerçants DE LA VILLE DE BATNA Ticket de 0,10 ESCOMPTE (Translation: New Discount Office of Batna. Merchants Union of the City of Batna.) |
| Reverse description | Plain light-blue paper with black letterpress text centred on an otherwise unadorned surface. The denomination "Ticket de 0,10" is set in a large italic script at the top, followed by four lines of smaller roman text stating the redemption conditions. The absence of any vignette or border gives the reverse a purely typographic character typical of wartime emergency small-change tickets. |
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| Comments |
The Nouveau Comptoir d'Escompte de Batna was one of dozens of local commercial associations across French Algeria that improvised small-denomination emergency scrip during the acute coin shortage of 1914–1915. When the war drained metallic currency from circulation almost overnight, merchants' unions in provincial towns like Batna stepped in because the official banking network couldn't respond quickly enough at the local level. These issues were strictly informal — tolerated rather than authorized — and typically redeemable only at the issuing merchants.
Batna's scrip series is among the less-documented Algerian emergency issues of the period, and surviving examples are genuinely uncommon.