50 New Francs Overprint on P#36 - 5000 Francs

The overprint series was a stopgap measure tied directly to France's 1960 monetary reform, which revalued the franc at 100 old francs to 1 new franc. Rather than commission entirely new plates for its overseas territories, the Caisse Centrale simply overprinted existing stock of the 5000 Francs note — a practical economy that created one of the more visually jarring transitional issues in the French colonial monetary record.

The Banque de France handled the overprinting in Paris on the same presses that produced the underlying note, which means the parent plate and the conversion stamp share the same institutional origin — an unusual case of a single printer effectively issuing two generations of the same piece.