2 Francs - Chambre de commerce de Libourne

Libourne's chamber of commerce began issuing emergency small-change notes in 1914 when the wartime hoarding of coins created a near-total breakdown in retail transactions across provincial France. The Wetterwald Frères firm in Bordeaux handled enormous volumes of this regional nécessité paper, supplying dozens of southwestern chambers simultaneously — which occasionally makes attribution of undated or poorly stamped examples genuinely tricky.

The JP#72.20 reference places this within a well-documented Gironde series, but the 1917–1921 window is unusually wide for a single type, suggesting the plates saw multiple print runs as coin shortages persisted well past the Armistice.