20 Francs L'Union de Limoges

L'Union de Limoges was a consumer cooperative, and this note is a billet de nécessité — scrip issued to members as a substitute for state currency during the chronic coin shortages that followed the First World War. French municipalities, cooperatives, and chambers of commerce all flooded the market with such paper during the 1920s; the Limoges cooperative's extended issue window, running into the mid-1930s, suggests continued internal utility well past the point when most French emergency scrip had been withdrawn and demonetized.

A. Poméon & Cie in Oullins was a specialist in cooperative and commercial printing, not a security printer in the strict sense — which shows in the relatively modest anti-counterfeiting measures typical of the series.