50 Centimes - Chambre de Commerce de Gray and Vesoul 70

Emergency local currency issued by the joint chamber of commerce covering Gray and Vesoul in the Haute-Saône department, this note belongs to the vast wave of bons de nécessité that flooded provincial France after the August 1914 mobilization drained metal coinage from circulation almost overnight. The Banque de France could not fill the gap fast enough, and chambers of commerce across the country filled it instead.

X. Perroux & Fils was a Mâcon commercial printer, not a specialist security firm — the watermark is the primary concession to forgery prevention, and a modest one at that.