50 Centimes Blue text

The Chambre de Commerce d'Alger issued emergency small-change notes during and after the First World War to address a chronic shortage of fractional coinage — a problem that plagued French Algeria far more acutely than metropolitan France, given the difficulty of getting coin shipments across the Mediterranean in wartime. These chambre de commerce emissions filled a gap that the Banque de l'Algérie, focused on larger denominations, had little interest in covering.

Imprimerie Jules Carbonel was among the most active commercial printers in colonial North Africa, handling a wide range of official and semi-official work from its Algiers premises. Locally printed emergency notes of this type are considerably less common than their French metropolitan equivalents.