Paris street markers
If you 've ever had even the smallest glimmer of interest in Paris, you probably know Parisian street markers, blue-and-white plaques marking the street and arrondissement.Via Cabinet Magazine online, I found a link to a history of Parisian street markers. Until 1728, streets didn't necessarily have marked names, and the first practical markers were stone tablets.
The website has some examples. You can still see a lot of these old street signs in central Paris. The site also gives the rules established for naming streets. The outer arrondissements of Paris are particularly interesting for the "pantheon" of modern public figures-- French and non-, Nobel prizewinners, writers, artists, scientists, politicians-- who have gained the immortal fame of having a Parisian street named after them. No "Oak" and "Elm" and "Broad" and "Chestnut" for Paris!
When helping a friend with a dissertation on street numbering systems, I learned that there were no street numbers till the 18th century, either. Here's a site that explains that houses had numbers, but they were based on tax registries, so they didn't proceed in order and probably weren't all that useful for locating an address! A page from the Postal Service website explains that large houses outside of the Farmers General Wall were required to be numbered beginning in 1726. Another system, established in 1775, numbered each house on a street sequentially but the numbering started at an arbitrary point, continued up one side of the street and down the other to return to the starting point. Yet another system was "sectionary" which suggests to me a system like that in Venice- numbering goes sequentially up and down streets in a whole neighborhood.
A certain Choderlos de Laclos, best known for having written the epistolary novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (that's "Dangerous Liaisons," like the Glenn Close/John Malkovich movie), wrote up a proposal for street numbering that was essentially the one eventually adopted. This site includes a decree from the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1793 to get rid of all the old street numbering systems and adopt a new one, but it does not explain how the new numbers would be assigned. It wasn't until the Empire (1805) that the current street numbering system was put into place.
The website has some examples. You can still see a lot of these old street signs in central Paris. The site also gives the rules established for naming streets. The outer arrondissements of Paris are particularly interesting for the "pantheon" of modern public figures-- French and non-, Nobel prizewinners, writers, artists, scientists, politicians-- who have gained the immortal fame of having a Parisian street named after them. No "Oak" and "Elm" and "Broad" and "Chestnut" for Paris!
When helping a friend with a dissertation on street numbering systems, I learned that there were no street numbers till the 18th century, either. Here's a site that explains that houses had numbers, but they were based on tax registries, so they didn't proceed in order and probably weren't all that useful for locating an address! A page from the Postal Service website explains that large houses outside of the Farmers General Wall were required to be numbered beginning in 1726. Another system, established in 1775, numbered each house on a street sequentially but the numbering started at an arbitrary point, continued up one side of the street and down the other to return to the starting point. Yet another system was "sectionary" which suggests to me a system like that in Venice- numbering goes sequentially up and down streets in a whole neighborhood.
A certain Choderlos de Laclos, best known for having written the epistolary novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (that's "Dangerous Liaisons," like the Glenn Close/John Malkovich movie), wrote up a proposal for street numbering that was essentially the one eventually adopted. This site includes a decree from the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1793 to get rid of all the old street numbering systems and adopt a new one, but it does not explain how the new numbers would be assigned. It wasn't until the Empire (1805) that the current street numbering system was put into place.
posted by Françoise Villon at 3:58 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home