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50 Centimes - Ville et Chambre de Commerce d'Abbeville [80]
| Issuer | Ville d'Abbeville et Chambre de Commerce de l'Arrondissement d'Abbeville |
|---|---|
| Year | 1920 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Green letterpress note with a decorative guilloche border incorporating acanthus leaf and laurel branch motifs at the corners, with the denomination '50 C.' repeated in each corner panel. The centre carries the issuing authority in two lines above the large-numeral denomination '0,50 CENTIMES', followed by a serial number line and two manuscript signature fields captioned 'Le Président' and 'Un Adjoint'. The Abbeville municipal coat of arms appears as a small vignette between the signature areas, with the designer and printer credits 'L. LECLERC - FEC.' and 'CHAIX - IMP.' in the lower margin. |
|---|---|
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| Protection description | Without watermark |
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| Comments |
The Chambres de Commerce of northern France were authorized to issue emergency small-denomination notes following the wartime coin shortage that began in 1914, and many continued printing well into the 1920s as silver and bronze coinage remained scarce in daily commerce. Abbeville's chamber was among the smaller provincial issuers, serving a market town in the Somme — a department that had been gutted by the Western Front and was still rebuilding its economic infrastructure when this note was printed.
Imprimerie Chaix was the prestige Paris trade printer behind much of France's commercial and railway ephemera; their involvement here signals that even minor chambers weren't cutting corners on production quality. Leclerc's design work for provincial emergency notes of this period is consistent but rarely documented in depth.