Beautiful antique French cardboard tokens, known as billets de nécessité or tickets de rationnement, were used for bread rationing. They were used as a local currency or coupon system to manage bread distribution during wartime shortages. The tokens feature different denominations, such as "500 gr" and "2 kgs 500," indicating the weight of bread they could be exchanged for. Collectors often seek these for their historical value as evidence of past systems of necessity rationing.
These are historical documents from the era of rationing, likely from World War I (1914-1918) or World War II (1939-1945). We can verify the era with a little research. Some of these specific bread rationing tokens were printed during the 1940s, specifically during the World War II German occupation of France and the immediate post-war recovery years (1940–1945). Archival local history records from regional French departments link these exact printings from the Boulangerie Moderne (managed by D. Noret in Néré) and Boulangerie Porcheron (in Javarzay) directly to the severe food shortages of the Vichy regime and early liberation era. While France implemented bread rationing during both World Wars, the explicit use of local commune-stamped cardboard bons scaled by metric weight (e.g., "2 kgs 500") rather than official national government stamps is highly characteristic of the localized survival economics of the early 1940s.
These are being sold in assorted sets of 5.
Please email me with questions.
