Mercier’s “Tableau de Paris” tells us of ridiculously great signs: spurs as large as a wheel, gloves big enough to house a three-year-old babe, and the like. In old Germany, too, the sight of the giant signs, as Victor Hugo describes them from Frankfurt-on-the-Main, must have been fantastic enough. “Under the titanic weight of these sign monuments caryatides are bowed down in all positions of rage, pain, and fatigue.” Some of them carry an impudent bronze negro in a gilded tin mantle; others an enormous Roman emperor—a monolith of twenty feet in height—“dans toute la pompe du costume de Louis XIV avec sa grande perruque, son ample manteau, son fauteuil, son estrade, sa crédence où est sa couronne, son dais a pentes découpées et à vastes draperies.”

Especially objectionable to the police in London were those signs that reached far out over the street and, shaken by the wind, constituted a real danger to the passer-by. So the fall of such a huge inn sign in Fleet Street, London, in 1718, caused the death of two ladies, a court jeweler, and a cobbler. Similar dangers threatening an innocent public were vividly set forth in a Parisian police ordinance in 1761, in an amusing bureaucratic French: “Les enseignes saillantes faisaient paraître les rues plus étroites et dans les rues commerçantes elles nuisaient considérablement aux vues des premiers étages, et même a la clarté des laternes, en occasionnant des ombres préjudiciables à la sureté publique; elles formaient un péril perpetuellement imminent sur la tête des passants, tant par l’inattention des propriétaires et des locataires sur la vétusté des enseignes ou des potences, qui en ont souvent abattu plusieurs et causé les accidents les plus funestes.”

THE QUEEN·IN EXETER·

If the police had contented itself in eliminating the offensive or really dangerous signs, nobody could have blamed it. Unfortunately it was much more aggressive, especially in France, the paradise of the “ronds de cuir,” and attempted to cut down every individual or artistic invention on the part of the signmakers. We are, therefore, not surprised to find so little in modern France that could remind us of the old abundance. The officials of the Revolution proved themselves just as narrow-minded as those of royal times. Both, animated by the bureaucratic instinct to confine everything to narrow rules, tried to suppress all individual poetical invention that once was the charm of the sign. A royal edict of 1763 prescribes a very uninteresting design as a binding model for all signs, giving at the same time the exact measurements of the same and warning the public not to dare to make any changes on the “dessein cy-dessus marqué.” It was a poor consolation for the owners of beautiful old signs that the same edict granted them the great privilege of giving their art-treasures in account as old iron—“quinze deniers la livre”—when paying the bill for the new sign patented by the State. Still more radically acted the men of the Revolution, who sincerely hated the signs, with their crowns and heraldry, as abominable “marques du despotisme.” They made short work, and simply ordered: “Toutes les enseignes qui portent des signes de royalisme, féodalité et de superstition seront renouvelées et remplacées par des signes républicains: les enseignes ne seront plus saillantes mais simplement peintes sur les murs des maisons.”

Another danger for the sign resulted from the attempt to number the houses of which we hear, perhaps for the first time in France, as early as 1512. This first attempt failed, but in the enlightened eighteenth century the new and certainly more reasonable method of distinguishing a house from its neighbor decidedly gained ground. In 1805 it was made obligatory by the Parisian police. A similar development we observe in England. Nobody will deny the practical progress and no business man would like to return to the old times when an English bookseller, for instance, had to give the address of his shop in the following way: “Over against the Royal Exchange at the Sugar Loaf next Temple Bar.” In Germany, where the centralization in large capitals made slower progress and a multitude of small social and political centers kept their own, the rational institution of numbering the houses, so necessary in great cities like Paris or London, was not accepted so quickly. In 1802 Dresden, for instance, had not even on the street corners signs indicating their names; “an institution that facilitates topography and topography facilitates business,” remarks a judicious contemporary. Here in Germany the cold number did not conquer so easily over the poetical warmth of the dear old sign. In the quiet, imperial towns of the south the artistic sign of the Rococo period and the Empire style, unpersecuted and unmolested, keep their place in the sun up to the present day in spite of some ill-advised landlords who thought it necessary to hide the humble oxen or lamb in the garret and call their house by some new pretentious French name like “Hotel de l’Europe” or the like.

·Stuttgart·