5 Centimes

Affreville — today's Khemis Miliana — was a small French colonial settlement in the Mitidja foothills, and like dozens of Algerian communes during the First World War, it found itself without adequate small change as coin metal was diverted to the war effort. The French metropolitan emergency note program did not extend reliably to Algeria, leaving individual communes to organize their own fiduciary issues. These hyper-local notes were authorized under wartime emergency provisions but operated largely on the trust of the immediate community — functionally worthless ten kilometers away.

Five-centime denominations from commune issues this small rarely survived in any quantity; they were disposable by design.