50 Livres Tournois

The Intendance Générale des Colonies issued this note for circulation in the French Caribbean colonies — almost certainly Saint-Domingue, Martinique, or Guadeloupe — where chronic coin shortages made paper instruments a practical necessity rather than a policy preference. Colonial administrators had been issuing paper money in the Antilles since the late seventeenth century, and by 1788 the system was well-entrenched if perennially distrusted by merchants who had seen earlier colonial bills depreciate badly.

De Vaivre served as Intendant of Saint-Domingue during this period, which makes his signature here more than administrative formality — it places this note squarely within the last years of French colonial order in that island, just before the revolution that would end it permanently in 1791.