5 Centimes

Boghari — today Ksar El Boukhari — is a small town in the Médéa province of Algeria, then under French colonial administration. This 1916 municipal emergency note belongs to a well-documented category of French colonial nécessité currency: when the First World War drained metropolitan France of small coinage, the shortfall rippled into Algeria, forcing municipalities, chambers of commerce, and even private businesses to print their own fractional paper. Hundreds of similar issues appeared across French North Africa between 1914 and 1920.

The Saumon-Marcel Léon press in Algiers handled a number of these local issues, which partly explains the relatively professional appearance of what was, functionally, a desperate stopgap printed in very small quantities for purely local use.