5 Francs - Pipaix

Pipaix is a village of a few hundred people in the Walloon municipality of Leuze-en-Hainaut. That a settlement this small issued its own emergency currency in 1940 is less surprising than it sounds — the German invasion of May that year triggered a near-total collapse of payment infrastructure across Belgium, and hundreds of communes, businesses, and charitable institutions filled the gap with locally printed bons de caisse. Most were produced hastily, on whatever materials were available, with virtually no anti-counterfeiting provision.

The extreme localism of these issues meant redemption was often restricted to specific shops or municipal services, limiting circulation radius to a few streets.