ABSTRACT
On 1 March 1768, King Louis XV declared that all cities and towns in the kingdom of France-with the exception of Paris-were required to afx numbers to houses in their jurisdiction, largely for military purposes. It was a common, yet unpopular, practice during this period for soldiers to be housed in civilian quarters with individual families in France. The chief aim of the 1768 house numbering decree was to make it easier to keep track of troops when they were dispersed throughout a given city or town. Being the centre of royal power, Paris was exempt from this rule because soldiers lived in ofcial barracks rather than among civilians. Interestingly, evidence suggests that one of the earliest recorded cases of the numbering of houses actually occurred in Paris on the Pont Notre Dame in 1463. It was not until 1779, however, that a concerted effort was made to number the houses of Paris when the publisher of a city guide and directory, Marin Kreenfelt, hired a team of men to inscribe numbers upon houses along the Parisian streets. Kreenfelt’s plan was met with considerable resistance from one of the magistrates of the Paris Parlement, François-Louis Joly de Fleury, who swiftly ordered the Lieutenant General of Police to put an end to Kreenfelt’s scheme. Yet, by the end of the eighteenth century, the city authorities relied extensively on house numbers as the geographic foundation of taxing, governing, and policing the population (Pronteau 1966; Miles 1972; Garrioch 1994, 2002; Hunt 1995).
