10 Centimes - Union Commerciale et Industrielle - Frévent [62] Brass

Frévent, a small market town in the Pas-de-Calais, was among hundreds of French communes whose commercial life was effectively paralyzed after the First World War stripped the country of small-denomination coinage. Merchant associations across northern France issued chamber of commerce tokens throughout the early 1920s to fill the gap — the Banque de France had suspended convertibility and fractional coin production had never recovered from wartime metal requisitions. This piece is one of the more localized examples, issued not by a departmental chamber but by a single town's combined commercial and industrial union, suggesting a degree of monetary improvisation even by the standards of the period.