50 Centimes - Chambre de Commerce de Toulouse 31

French chambers of commerce were authorized to issue emergency small-denomination notes during and after the First World War to compensate for the near-total disappearance of metallic coinage from circulation. Toulouse's chamber was among dozens that exercised this right, with issues running well into the early 1920s as the coin shortage proved far more persistent than anticipated.

PhotoArt was a local Toulouse printer — not a specialized security printing house — and the production quality reflects that. The watermark is the primary security measure, which tells you something about the threat environment: these were genuinely utilitarian substitutes, not instruments anyone expected to forge.