Conservators at the Carnavalet museum.

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Lewis Joly / JDD / SIPA

"Will the X-Men be renamed the 10-Men?"

“Several Internet users mocked and mocked, this Thursday, the decision of the Carnavalet Museum in Paris to replace Roman numerals by Arabic numerals in order to facilitate the understanding of visitors.

While the Louvre renounced Roman numbering a few years ago to designate the centuries, believing that its millions of visitors, often foreigners, were unaware of them, the Carnavalet Museum, devoted to the history of Paris, has removed certain Roman numerals. of its spaces, those which designate the centuries.

This decision, misinterpreted by part of the press, which believed that all the Roman numerals were going to be thrown away, in any case inspired Internet users.

“The stranger of line VIII was handsome, curvy, cultivated and fashioned: the ideal man in short!

», Tweeted the author and trainer Aurore Ponsonnet.

“We are not serious when we are seventeenth years old”,… the journalist Frédéric Pommier had fun.

"Cultural disaster"?

The Italian press had been the first to laugh at it, if not to really get annoyed.

"The controversy: Louis XIV will become Louis 14", headlined for example

Il Messaggero

, the newspaper of the Italian capital, while the

Corriere della Sera

, main daily of the peninsula, also writes on the front page a commentary as brief as eloquent: "Louis 14".

Its vice-director, Massimo Gramellini, fulminated in the inside pages of the newspaper: “This history of Roman numerals represents a perfect synthesis of the current cultural catastrophe: first things are not taught, then they are eliminated so that those who ignore them do not feel uncomfortable, ”he writes on the front page, recalling that“ obstacles are used to learn to jump ”.

170 texts out of 3,000 contents

May Internet users and the Italian press be reassured: all the Roman numerals will not disappear, but only a small part, as Noémie Giard, the manager of the Carnavalet museum, explains on the France Inter website: “I confirm that all visitors who come to the Carnavalet museum at the time of the reopening, will be able to read Louis XIV, XV, or Henri IV in Roman numerals, on all the cartels and even for children, and it is only, on 170 texts, on a set of 3,000 contents, which have been produced for the new route in the museum, that we have chosen to apply this measure of universal accessibility.

It is a European regulation, for easy to read and understand information.

"

This is M times clearer, we will look at it II time next time.

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