Banknote Billet France 1 franc 1920

Remarks:

Plis, salissures, perforé

The 1 franc note from the Évreux Chamber of Commerce is an emergency banknote issued in France, based on a resolution dated 28 October 1920. This type of local fiduciary currency was put into circulation to compensate for the shortage of metallic coinage that characterised the post-World War I period in France.

French chambers of commerce played a central role in issuing these emergency notes between 1914 and the 1920s. The Évreux Chamber of Commerce, an institution representing the commercial and industrial interests of the Eure department, thus exercised a temporary monetary prerogative, authorised by public authorities in response to difficulties in supplying official currency.

This note represents a face value of one franc, the monetary unit in use in France at the time. It is part of a broader series of denominations issued by the same chamber of commerce to meet the needs of local monetary circulation in the Évreux region, the prefecture of the Eure department in Normandy.

These emergency notes, also referred to as local paper money or chamber of commerce notes, are today sought-after collectibles among numismatists specialising in French notaphily. They bear witness to the improvised monetary solutions put in place in a difficult economic context, marked by the disruptions caused by the world conflict and the reconstruction of the French economy.