50 Centimes - Chambre de Commerce de Béthune 62

Béthune sits in the Pas-de-Calais, barely fifteen kilometers from the front lines as they stabilized in late 1914. The Chambre de Commerce issued these small-denomination notes in 1915 because the French wartime coin shortage had made transactional commerce nearly impossible — silver and copper were being hoarded or melted, and the Banque de France had no mechanism to supply emergency fractional currency to local bodies quickly enough. Chambers of commerce across northern France filled that gap by issuing their own necessity money, a practice the government formally authorized in August 1914.

The JP#26 reference covers five distinct varieties within this emission, differentiated by serial number blocks and minor typographic revisions — not always easy to distinguish without direct comparison.