50 Francs - Belain d'Esnambuc

Caisse Centrale de la France d'Outre-Mer was established in 1944 specifically to manage currency in France's overseas territories, separating colonial circulation from metropolitan francs — a deliberate policy response to wartime monetary disruption and postwar reconstruction priorities. This note belongs to the series that served Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion simultaneously, a single issue doing work across four distinct territories.

Belain d'Esnambuc, the 17th-century Norman adventurer who established the first permanent French settlement on Martinique in 1635, was a recurring honorific figure in French Caribbean iconography of this period. Hourriez and Régnier were both accomplished intaglio engravers working within the Banque de France's in-house atelier — a rare case of separate hands assigned to obverse and reverse within the same note.