5 Centimes

Médéa is a small administrative town in the Tell Atlas, roughly 80 kilometers south of Algiers. Notes like this one were issued by Algerian communes during the First World War when the withdrawal of metal coinage — pulled back for the war effort — left local economies without small change. The commune stepped in as an emergency issuer, a pattern repeated across dozens of Algerian towns between 1914 and 1920.

Saumon-Marcel Léon was the principal commercial printer for this type of emergency municipal paper in colonial Algeria. The watermark is an unusual security measure for such low-denomination necessity currency — most comparable French metropolitan commune notes of the period dispensed with it entirely.