50 Centimes Brown

Alger's Chamber of Commerce began issuing small-denomination emergency notes in 1915 because the war had sucked hard coin out of circulation across French Algeria almost immediately — soldiers, supply chains, and metal requisitions conspired to produce an acute shortage of fractional currency that the colonial banking system was not equipped to address quickly. Chambers of commerce across France and its territories filled that gap as a matter of administrative necessity, not banking ambition.

Adolphe Jourdan's press had been the dominant commercial printer in Algiers for decades before this note was produced, which made them the obvious local choice. The firm closed in 1916, the year after this issue.