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20 Francs - Emile Gentil
| Issuer | Caisse Centrale de la France d'Outre-Mer |
|---|---|
| Year | 1947 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Brown on multicolour underprint. A vignette to the right presents a portrait of explorer Émile Gentil, while a village scene with figures occupies the left portion of the note. The note is an overprint of the French Equatorial Africa P#22 issue, with the text «LA RÉUNION» applied to the margins. |
|---|---|
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| Protection description | Continuous anchors and small boats |
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| Comments |
The Caisse Centrale de la France d'Outre-Mer was established in 1944 as a Free French institution to manage currency across reconstituted colonial territories, replacing the wartime monetary patchwork that had left different parts of the empire using incompatible instruments. This note circulated across French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon, where Émile Gentil — the administrator who forcibly opened the Chad basin to French control in the late 1890s — carried a particular resonance, his name still attached to a river port town in what is now Chad.
Broutin's intaglio work on the obverse is characteristically precise; Tison handled the reverse engraving, a division of labor routine at Banque de France but worth noting for attributing any plate wear.