10 Centimes - Union Commerciale et Industrielle - Sézanne [51] Brass

Sézanne is a small market town in the Marne department, and like dozens of French communes in the early 1920s, its local merchants' association filled a genuine void. The postwar coinage shortage — a product of metal hoarding, wartime disruption, and the slow retooling of the Paris Mint — left small transactions functionally impossible in many provincial towns. Chambers of commerce and trade unions across France issued their own brass and aluminum tokens between roughly 1920 and 1927, a phenomenon so widespread that the French state tolerated rather than suppressed it.

The Éloge Monétaire reference number remains unassigned, suggesting this piece was either documented too late for early editions or survives in too few collections to have attracted systematic cataloging.