100 Piastres

The Banque de l'Indochine's 100 Piastres series issued across this period straddled an increasingly untenable political situation — the First Indochina War began in late 1946, and notes of this denomination were circulating through a territory actively fragmenting into what would become Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The Banque de l'Indochine itself was a private commercial institution chartered in Paris, not a government central bank, which made its continued role as currency issuer during wartime an arrangement of considerable political awkwardness.

Gaspérini's engraving work for the Banque de France was consistently fine-line, and this note reflects that — though the design credit going to Sébastien Laurent places the artistic conception separately from the intaglio execution, a division typical of Banque de France commissions.