5 Centimes - Saint-Rambert-sur-Loire

During the First World War, France resettled tens of thousands of civilian refugees from the occupied territories of Alsace and Lorraine into interior departments. Saint-Rambert-sur-Loire, in the Loire, hosted one such depot — a semi-organized encampment for displaced civilians administered through cooperative canteen arrangements. This note is a scrip token issued by that canteen, functioning as internal purchasing currency within the depot rather than circulating in the broader economy.

The cooperative canteen model was common across these refugee installations, and small-denomination scrip in paper was the practical solution to the chronic small-change shortage that gripped France after 1914. Five centimes bought almost nothing outside the wire — inside, it was a meal component.