Banknote Billet France 1 franc

This 1 franc note was issued by the Chambre de Commerce de Tarare, dated 1st January 1920 and belonging to series S. It is part of the context of local monetary issues that proliferated in France during and after the First World War, a period during which the shortage of metallic coinage led many chambers of commerce to issue their own emergency notes.

The town of Tarare, located in the Rhône department, was at the time an important industrial centre, particularly renowned for its textile industry. The local Chamber of Commerce thus exercised its right of issue in order to compensate for the lack of circulating liquidity in the region, a phenomenon very widespread in France between 1914 and the early 1920s.

This type of emergency note, commonly known as a chamber of commerce note, represents a category in its own right within French numismatics. These local issues helped to maintain commercial exchanges in a disrupted economic context, their value being recognised and accepted at a regional level.

The series S identified on this note constitutes a classification element allowing the various successive or parallel issues made by this same chamber of commerce to be distinguished. The date of 1st January 1920 places this issue in the economic transition period that characterises the immediate post-war era in France, when the gradual return to a normalised national monetary circulation was still under way.