50 Centimes - Dépôt d'Alençon

During World War One, the French Ministère de l'Intérieur authorized a network of local emergency emissions to counteract the acute small-change shortage that paralyzed everyday commerce after coin hoarding stripped the market clean. The Dépôt d'Alençon — a refugee and civilian internee facility in the Orne — issued these fractional notes as internal scrip, not as general-circulation currency. They were never intended to leave the depot's economy.

That geographical confinement is precisely why surviving examples are harder to trace than comparable municipal emissions from the same period.