5 Centimes

Isserville is a small commune in the Blida Province of Algeria, and this 5 centimes emergency note dates from the acute small-change shortage that gripped French Algeria during the First World War. With metropolitan France unable to supply adequate coinage to its colonial territories, hundreds of Algerian communes issued their own low-denomination papier-monnaie de nécessité — a phenomenon that produced an extraordinary variety of purely local scrip, most of it printed in very small quantities.

Mauguin's Blida press handled a number of these communal issues across the region. The presence of a watermark on a note of this denomination and origin is worth noting — many comparable commune issues dispensed with security features entirely.