5 Centimes

Ténès is a small coastal town in western Algeria — not an obvious candidate for a private currency issuer. But during the First World War, the acute shortage of small change across French Algeria prompted dozens of local commercial associations, municipalities, and private bodies to print their own emergency fractional notes. The Union Commerciale de Ténès was one of these stopgap arrangements, filling the gap left by the hoarding of metal coin that gripped the whole of the French empire from 1914 onward.

These hyperlocal Algerian emergency issues are poorly documented. Survival rates are low simply because they were printed in small quantities, used hard, and never formally redeemed through any centralized system.