10 Centimes

Orleansville — now Chlef — was a mid-sized Algerian colonial town, and like dozens of similar municipalities during the First World War, its local merchants' union issued small-denomination emergency scrip to plug the acute shortage of fractional coinage. The French government had suspended the melting and minting of small coins under wartime metal restrictions, and by 1915–1916 the gap in everyday commerce was severe enough that chambres de commerce and commerçants' unions across Algeria and metropolitan France were printing their own substitutes.

The Union des Commerçants issues from Orleansville are among the more obscure provincial Algerian pieces from this period. Orange-tinted card stock was a common shorthand for the 10-centime denomination across multiple issuing bodies, helping illiterate users sort values by color.