10 Centimes - Syndicat du commerce et de l'industrie - Saint-Gaudens [31] Scalloped Pattern

Saint-Gaudens, a market town in the Haute-Garonne, issued aluminum nécessité tokens like this one during the severe coin shortage that gripped France in the years immediately following World War I. The Banque de France had suspended specie payments in 1914 and never fully restored small-denomination coinage to circulation by 1920, leaving chambers of commerce and trade syndicates across the country to fill the gap with locally issued aluminum and cardboard substitutes. Hundreds of such bodies did exactly that.

The scalloped flan was a deliberate anti-counterfeiting measure — plain round blanks were too easy to replicate clandestinely.