50 Centimes - Town of Mulhouse [68]

Mulhouse — ceded to the German Empire in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War and recovered by France only in November 1918 — issued these municipal notes during the final year of occupation and transition. The town had been "Mülhausen im Elsass" for nearly five decades, and the reversion to French civic administration created an immediate practical problem: a severe shortage of small-denomination coinage that national banking networks were in no position to solve quickly.

The watermarked paper was a modest security measure, typical of the French municipal emergency issues coordinated under the JP (Jerger-Pirot) cataloguing framework. Most Mulhouse bons survived in relatively unhandled condition simply because the currency chaos resolved faster than expected.