25 Centimes

Bayeux issued its own small-denomination token coinage in the early 1920s as a direct response to the postwar shortage of French state-issued fractional currency — a problem that plagued hundreds of French municipalities simultaneously. The aluminium composition was chosen not for tradition but for necessity: the metal was cheap, lightweight, and available when bronze and nickel were not reliably so.

Bayeux's chamber of commerce-style issues from this period fall within a broader wave of French emergency municipal coinage that peaked between 1920 and 1924, after which Paris reasserted centralized production of small change.