25 Centimes Gournay-en-Bray

Gournay-en-Bray, a market town in Normandy long known for its dairy trade, issued local emergency coinage during the First World War when the hoarding of metal coins created acute shortages across provincial France. These aluminum pieces circulated as necessity money — monnaie de nécessité — filling the gap left by the near-total disappearance of bronze and nickel from daily commerce after 1914. Hundreds of French communes did the same, making attribution and variety tracking the primary challenge for collectors of this material.