50 Centimes

Bougie-Sétif was a joint Chamber of Commerce serving two distinct Algerian towns — the coastal port of Bougie (now Béjaïa) and the inland market city of Sétif — an unusual administrative pairing that produced equally unusual emergency currency. These chambre de commerce notes appeared across French Algeria in 1915 because the outbreak of war triggered immediate hoarding of coin, draining small change from everyday commerce almost overnight.

Imprimerie Adolphe Jourdan, the Algiers press responsible for this note, closed permanently in 1916 — the year after this issue — making its printed output a finite corpus.