Charles Bremner's Paris weblog

Holiday motorists in France this summer should bone up first on a set of odd new road signs that advise on such matters as the proximity of wine and places to put a canoe in the water.

The 20 new signs from the superministry of the environment are intended to update obsolete pictograms but they also include new ones that are mystifying France.

In one case, comprising a pair of half-moons that look decidedly cleavage-like, drivers may even be driven to distraction. “A certain number of them remain perfectly impenetrable to drivers with hundreds of thousands of kilometres under their wheels,” Le Figaro said.

And once they have been learnt, some drivers may be wondering what the point of them is. The half-moons, for example, inform passing traffic that near by is “a garden that has been officially certified as a garden of note”. On inquiry, the Ministry of Culture defines this as a garden certified as having “design, plants and care of a remarkable level”. An image of a speeding train indicates the presence of “a station with traffic above 30,000 passengers a year”.

Thirsty drivers will be relieved to see a bunch of grapes signifying that “wine products” can be found near by, while those who happen to have a boat on the roof will be informed of a suitable launch point by a figure of a man apparently ramming his canoe into the bottom of a lake.

Two other incomprehensible signs indicate that you are approaching “a museum certified as a Museum of France” and “the entrance area of a sensitive natural space”.

The signs — which add to the 500 tightly regulated panneaux de signalisation already in existence — spring from a hallowed tradition. Gallic genius devised many of Europe’s standard motoring signs, starting with an international conference of horseless- carriage nations in Paris in 1908.

The first recorded sign of the motoring age was an 1894 danger warning on the Route Nationale 7 near Cannes, on the Riviera, put up before a bend by the Touring Club de France. Britain gave the world the triangle as the shape of warning signs, but the no-language pictograms adopted later by the Continent were mainly French.

Some French road-sign traditions have not been widely followed. These include the famous Toutes Directions (all directions) in towns, which sometimes leads to another sign offering Autre Directions (other directions). Worse still is Brussels: the bilingual Belgian capital bamboozles unwary motorists by alternating the same “other directions” panels in French and Dutch.

The new batch of French signs shows how official zeal to convey alerts with simple shapes has overcome common sense, critics say. “Too much information kills the information,” Jean-Pierre Lemonnier, secretary-general of the National Driving Instructors’ Union, said.

“Some of these new signs are absolutely without interest. It’s over-information to keep the sign-makers in business,” he told The Times. “They have to stop the spiral of stupidity, like the one showing the exit of a tunnel or the risk of bumping into a slower vehicle.”

Mr Lemonnier wondered what the nanny-like ministry would come up with next. “Why not a sign for French overseas territories warning of the risk of falling coconuts?”

Marina Duhamel, an artist who has written a history of road signs, noted that much of the world had copied the brown signs indicating places of interest that France devised in the 1970s. However, the new ones were baffling and superfluous, she said. “Some are so obscure, they evoke nothing.”

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