1000 Francs Porto-Novo

The Banque de l'Afrique Occidentale, despite its regional name, was a private French colonial bank chartered in 1901 and operating under tight metropolitan oversight — its notes were obligations of the concession, not of the French state. This Porto-Novo issue draws on the full weight of the Banque de France's intaglio printing infrastructure, a relationship that gave BAO notes a technical quality well above most colonial paper of the period.

The Florian brothers — Frédéric and Ernest-Théophile — were among the more accomplished engravers working in Paris at the time. The 1919 date places this note squarely in the postwar moment when BAO was managing currency pressure across Dahomey and the wider AOF territories, with franc-denominated paper increasingly substituting for coin that had largely vanished from circulation during the war years.