1000 Francs Grand-Bassam

The Banque de l'Afrique Occidentale operated as the sole note-issuing authority across French West Africa, and this 1000 Francs piece — the highest denomination in the series — was printed by the Banque de France itself, an arrangement that gave the colonial currency an unusual degree of metropolitan oversight and physical quality. The Florian brothers, Frédéric and Ernest-Théophile, handled the engraving, a pairing also found on several Banque de France issues of the same period.

Grand-Bassam, the place of payment named on the note, was the former colonial capital of Côte d'Ivoire, already superseded by Bingerville by 1900 and later by Abidjan — making its continued appearance on currency well into the 1920s a bureaucratic holdover rather than a reflection of the town's actual commercial importance.