ATM in France

When you say you made the withdrawal "on a Thursday" do you mean yesterday or last week? Even if yesterday you would have had time today to go to the Bank of France at Place de la Bastille, which is not a far off branch in Paris but easily reached by bus or metro. I took some old French currency there once to exchange for euros. Anyway, too late now ... just keep the banknote and exchange it when you go to France again. Or maybe a friend will do it for you sometime.

Yeah...there are entire blogs, plus untold numbers of blog entries, dedicated to the Banks of France :-( If you plan on returning to Europe, hang onto it and try again (?)...so sorry.

Thanks everyone. Just an experience I guess!
It was the Bank of France at the Bastille though, and they no longer have cash there. ( difficult concept for me!)

Elvie I sent you a pm , you should ask on tripadvisor.com paris forums, there are locals and expats on that forum that know the banks better then any tourist would..

My guess is that without an account at a local bank, they are going to be very reluctant to help you. Banks in France are finnicky that way. One last-ditch effort to get some of your money back might be to go to one of the money exchanges and see if they'll exchange it into $$. You'll definitely lose some money, but it would be better than being out the full 50€.

Direct contact with the bank operator of the ATM is your only hope and a pretty slim one, particularly if you are not fluent in French. The Bastille Bank of France wasn't handling currency a few years ago when I tried for a different reason.
I once got a bum 50-euro note at an ATM in Charles de Gaulle, and the rip meant I was dead meat. Everyone looked at it like it was toxic.

This raises an interesting question. In the U.S. I can go either to an ATM machine located outside my bank (or at some branches inside a protected foyer or whatever), or I can go inside the bank to a teller and swipe my ATM card at the little terminal by the teller's window and be handed my cash by a human. If I go inside a European bank, do the tellers similarly have such little terminals and can I get cash from a human - if I wanted to wait in line? I never even thought about going inside till I read this thread. I realize it would be a time waster, but it's a trade-off I might choose if it could save me possibly getting a bad €50 bill out of a machine with little or no recourse to recover a loss. I know, I know, the odds of getting a bad bill are slim, but in some situations there could be additional benefits to going inside the bank.

If you aren't returning to Paris soon, maybe you could just leave it as a very generous tip after a nice dinner? That way you would only be out 25 or so euro instead of 50. And since the server is a French=speaking local, they probably know how to get the bill replaced with better currency and have a relationship with a bank who will help them resolve the problem.

Why would a local person have any better chance of exchanging a damaged bill than a non-local? If I brought a bad U.S. tender bill into a U.S. bank, I don't think they would ask me where I live.

Actually as long as you have 51% of a damaged piece of US currency, the bank is supposed to accept it as legal currency and replace it.

Rose I think because the local may have a relationship with a bank,, at the very least they may be able to pass it along.

Look on the bright side. Now you have an excuse to go back to Paris. :)