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The Banque de Syrie et du Grand-Liban was a French concessionary institution — a private bank granted the right of issue under the French Mandate, not a state central bank. Its notes circulated across a territory whose political geography was itself unstable, with Greater Lebanon only formally delimited in 1920 and the Syrian Federation still being reorganized through the late 1920s.

Printing by the Banque de France's own press gave the series a level of technical security well beyond what most colonial-era mandated territories received. Derveau's engraving work for the BdF was prolific in this period, though his name appears more often in the margins of French overseas issues than in numismatic literature.