5 Francs - Commune de Cornimont [88]

Cornimont is a small textile-manufacturing commune in the Vosges, and this note belongs to the enormous wave of emergency municipal and commercial scrip that flooded France in the autumn of 1914 when the government suspended specie payments and small-denomination coinage effectively vanished from circulation. Chagué & Cie was a local industrial firm, not a bank — its signature on a circulating note is a direct measure of how completely the normal monetary infrastructure had collapsed within weeks of mobilization.

The watermark is the only security concession. For a note backed by a textile company in a village of a few thousand people, it was probably enough.