Heraldry

The twenty-sixth entry is les armoiries communales, and the adjective is the one place on this page where an English reader is almost certain to land somewhere else. La commune is the township, the body that elects a maire and meets in a mairie, and communal is simply its adjective: it means municipal, of the town council — les élections communales, la piscine communale, le budget communal. The English adjective has walked the other way. « Communal » means shared, held in common, and it turns up in a communal garden, a communal bathroom, communal living; « a commune » is either a group of people who have chosen to live together or the Paris rising of 1871. Neither has anything to do with a town hall. Read les armoiries communales as communal arms and the shield belongs to everybody and to nobody; read it as municipal arms and it belongs to the one place whose mairie it hangs on.