10 Francs

The Banque de la Réunion was established in 1849 as one of the colonial banks created under the same legislative framework that reorganized French overseas banking after emancipation. By 1873, it held the note-issuing monopoly for the island, but its notes circulated in an economy still heavily dependent on sugar — and still recovering from the collapse of indentured labor schemes that had replaced slavery.

Printing locally through Imprimerie A. Roussin rather than contracting a metropolitan house in Paris made this issue unusual among French colonial notes of the period. Most comparable islands relied on Parisian or English printers. The result was more modest production quality, and surviving examples tend to show the vulnerabilities of tropical paper storage.