50 Centimes

When the outbreak of war in August 1914 triggered a run on the Banque de France and caused small coinage to vanish almost overnight into hoarding, chambers of commerce across southern France scrambled to fill the vacuum with locally printed emergency paper. Montauban's chamber was among the earliest to respond, commissioning L. Cassan Ainé in Toulouse to produce this fractional note before the end of that first chaotic summer.

The JP#83 reference covers five distinct varieties — differences in signature combinations and serial number formats — making the series more complex than its humble denomination suggests.