5 Centimes

The Union Fumeloise was a workers' cooperative based in Fumel, a small industrial town on the Lot river in the Lot-et-Garonne department. Like dozens of French industrial enterprises during the First World War, it issued its own token coinage to address a genuine crisis: the wartime requisition of copper and nickel for munitions production had gutted the national supply of small change, leaving local commerce effectively paralyzed. Iron, being plentiful and militarily useless in coin quantities, became the default substitute across French factory towns in 1917.