5000 Francs Bougainville

The Institut d'Émission d'Outre-Mer was never a central bank in the conventional sense — it functioned as the sole currency authority for France's Pacific territories, issuing CFP francs across New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna simultaneously. A single note design therefore had to carry legal tender status across three jurisdictions separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean, with no monetary policy differences between them.

The series ran for over two decades without a major redesign, which is unusual for a high-denomination note. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the eighteenth-century navigator who circumnavigated the globe and charted much of the Pacific for France, lends his name to this denomination — a reasonable choice given his direct geographical connection to the issuing territories.

Printing was handled by the Banque de France's own facilities, a detail that reflects the IEOM's structural dependency on metropolitan France rather than any local printing capacity in the territories themselves.