50 Centimes - Chambre de Commerce de Libourne 33

Libourne's Chamber of Commerce, like hundreds of provincial French bodies, stepped in to fill a genuine vacuum — the wartime hoarding of metal coinage had never fully resolved itself by 1920, and small denominations remained stubbornly absent from everyday commerce in the Gironde. These emergency fractional notes were a local fix for a national failure, issued under authorization ultimately traced to the law of 30 June 1916.

Wetterwald Frères in Bordeaux handled a considerable volume of similar necessity issues across the southwest, making regional attribution of the printing relatively straightforward for this series. The watermark is the sole security provision — modest, but consistent with the tier.