1000 Francs CFA Sauvons le pays

The "Sauvons le pays" — "Save the country" — series was issued roughly eighteen months before the CFA franc's catastrophic January 1994 devaluation, in which France and the IMF jointly halved the currency's value overnight. That devaluation, the first in the CFA franc's entire postwar history, wiped out savings across eight West African nations simultaneously. Whether the title was prescient or coincidental is an open question, but the timing is difficult to ignore.

Struck for the collector market rather than circulation, these were never intended to function as monetary instruments in the countries whose central bank issued them.