5 Centimes

Bougie — now Béjaïa, Algeria — produced a wave of small-denomination emergency paper during the First World War as coinage vanished from circulation across France and its territories. The Union des Commerçants, a local merchants' association, stepped in where the colonial banking system could not, issuing fractional notes backed by nothing more formal than collective commercial reputation. These chamber-of-commerce-style nécessités were a common workaround across French Algeria between 1914 and 1918, but the Bougie series remains among the more obscure provincial issues from the Constantine department.

Survival rate is low — small-denomination wartime paper of purely local utility was rarely preserved.