10 Centimes

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.