50 Francs - Mines Domaniales de la Sarre type 1920

The Mines Domaniales Françaises de la Sarre was not a bank — it was the French state mining administration installed in the Saar after the Treaty of Versailles handed France control of the territory's coal fields as partial reparation for the destruction of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mines during the war. These notes were scrip, issued to function as a local payment instrument within an occupied industrial zone that had no central bank and a contested monetary identity. The Saar was neither fully French nor German between 1920 and 1935, and its currency arrangements reflected that ambiguity.

Dupuis had died in 1916; the design borrows from his earlier work, adapted posthumously by Duval and engraved by Robert at the Monnaie de Paris.