20 Francs - Villes de Roubaix et de Tourcoing [59]

Roubaix and Tourcoing were both under German occupation when this note was issued in 1916, which makes a French municipal printer operating openly in Roubaix a detail worth pausing on. The occupied northern departments were permitted limited local economic administration, and French communes issued emergency fractional and low-denomination scrip — known as monnaie de nécessité — precisely because the occupying forces had stripped normal currency from circulation. The Debode press, based in Roubaix itself, produced several notes in this series throughout the occupation years.

The joint issuance by two municipalities was practical: the two cities are effectively contiguous, sharing labor and textile industry infrastructure since the nineteenth century.