1000 Francs

The Caisse Centrale de la France d'Outre-Mer was established in 1944 to manage currency and credit across French overseas territories, replacing the colonial-era institutions that had issued notes before the war. By 1960, with decolonization accelerating across Africa and the Pacific, many of the territories this institution served were either newly independent or weeks away from becoming so — making late-dated issues like this one transitional objects in a very literal sense.

Pick 27 was printed at the Banque de France's own workshops in Paris, which handled sensitive colonial currency work that Bradbury Wilkinson and other commercial printers occasionally shared. The 1000-franc denomination circulated across multiple territories under different overprint regimes, complicating clean attribution of any given example to a single issuing region.