5 Francs Without Decree

The "Without Decree" designation is the telling detail here. Earlier issues of this series required explicit governmental authorization — a formal decree — before notes could be put into circulation. By 1924, the Banque de l'Indo-Chine had consolidated enough institutional authority that this requirement was dropped, and the absence of that text became the classification criterion rather than an afterthought.

Léveillé's intaglio work was executed at the Banque de France's printing workshops, the same facility producing metropolitan French currency at the time — an arrangement that gave Indochinese colonial notes a production quality rarely matched by other colonial issuers of the period.