Banque de France runs the largest banknote manufacturing complex in the euro area: a printing works at Chamalières and, a few kilometres away at Vic-le-Comte, the paper mill that supplies it. Together they form the industrial core of what the Eurosystem calls its public pillar of banknote production.
| Country | France |
|---|---|
| Printing site | Chamalières, with the paper mill at Vic-le-Comte |
| First-series printer letter | L |
| Europa-series printer letter | U |
| Europa-series control number | 5 |
| Status | Active |
The Banque de France in Paris. Banknotes are printed at Chamalières, in the Puy-de-Dôme, beside the paper mill at Vic-le-Comte.
Paper and print in the same valley
The two sites in the Puy-de-Dôme have been making French banknotes for around a century. Vic-le-Comte produces the cotton-fibre substrate, complete with watermark and security thread; Chamalières performs the offset, intaglio and letterpress work and cuts the finished sheets. Holding both halves of the process in one place is unusual even among central banks, and it is the reason the French plant can absorb a large share of Eurosystem orders.
The Banque de France has decided to move printing from its historic Chamalières site to a new building beside the paper mill at Vic-le-Comte, concentrating the whole chain on a single campus. The transfer has been planned for the second half of the 2020s.
Letters L and U
The Chamalières works carried the printer letter L throughout the first series. In the Europa series it became U, with control number 5. Both letters appear on notes issued by several different national central banks, because production is allocated by denomination across the Eurosystem rather than by country of issue.
Since Joh. Enschedé stopped printing banknotes, part of the Dutch allocation has also been produced in France, which is a good illustration of how loosely the printer letter maps onto any national identity.
Reading the code on a note
On a Europa-series note the production code begins with U when the sheet came off the French presses. The letter is followed by the plate number and the sheet position; the full structure is explained in printing offices and printer codes.
