5 Centimes - Union des Commerçants - La Réole [33] Brass

La Réole, a small market town on the Garonne in the Gironde, saw a wave of locally issued commercial tokens in the early 1920s as postwar metal shortages left France chronically short of small change. The Union des Commerçants — a merchants' cooperative — issued these brass pieces to keep retail transactions moving when the state could not supply sufficient fractional coinage. Hundreds of similar syndicats and chambres de commerce across provincial France did the same between roughly 1916 and 1927, producing a class of nécessité coinage that national catalogues have never fully enumerated.