20 Francs Piedfort Essai

Algeria's 1949 coinage program was administered under French authority, with essai and piéfort strikes produced at the Paris Mint for official evaluation and archive purposes — never intended for circulation. The piéfort format, struck at roughly double the standard flan thickness, was a distinctly French institutional practice applied across the franc zone to create definitive reference specimens for government files.

Lec#46 places this among the earliest documented piéfort essais for post-war French Algeria, a period when currency reform discussions were intensifying ahead of the broader CFA and overseas territory monetary restructuring of the early 1950s.