5 Centimes

Orleansville — now Chlef — was a small colonial town in Algeria's Cheliff valley, and by 1916 the wartime drain on small coinage had become acute enough that local merchants banded together to issue their own emergency scrip. The Union des Commerçants, a merchants' cooperative rather than any banking authority, produced these cardboard tokens to fill the gap left by hoarded bronze. Similar chambers of commerce issues were proliferating across French Algeria and metropolitan France simultaneously, authorized under wartime emergency provisions.

The handstamp and signature are the only authentication measures — thin guarantees, but typical of the urgency under which these were produced.