5 Centimes - Ville de Lille [59]

Lille was under German military occupation from October 1914 until the armistice, and the city's municipal government was left to manage a civilian economy almost entirely cut off from the French national banking system. This note is one of the emergency issues produced locally under occupation — the printer, Delemar & Dubar, was a Lille firm operating under those same constrained conditions, which makes the watermark security feature a quietly determined gesture toward anti-counterfeiting discipline in genuinely difficult circumstances.

Small-denomination municipal scrip of this kind was produced because fractional coinage had largely vanished from circulation, hoarded or requisitioned.