50 Centimes Chamber of Commerce

When the First World War drained metropolitan France of small coinage, chambers of commerce across Algeria were authorized to fill the gap with locally printed emergency paper. Alger's chamber was among the most active, turning to Jules Carbonel — the dominant commercial printer in the city — rather than waiting on shipments from Paris. The result was a note conceived, printed, and circulated entirely within Algeria, a rare instance of the colonial economy functioning independently of the metropole by sheer necessity.

The long issue window, 1915 to 1919, reflects how stubbornly the coin shortage persisted even after the Armistice.