In this article, we consider the historical nature of the use of signs. To do so we develop the notion of semiotic regime which primarily aims to underline the fact that the semiotic is not to be conceptualized solely in the framework of psychological and cognitive synchronicity. On the contrary, signs are realized in specific historical contexts which define the conditions of their use. A semiotic regime conceptualizes a historicized sign, belonging to social practices confined in time and in the sign’s materialities. After having reviewed the etymological horizon of the term “regime”, we have taken in account its occurrences in contemporary critical discourse in philosophy and history. Thus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have put forward the notion of a regime of signs in order to draw the contours of a semiotics that avoids Saussurian semiology, focused on the signifier. Jacques Rancière has used the concept of aesthetic regimes with the aim of demonstrating how the sensible is appropriated by subjects whose relations to space and time are modified according to politics in the most radical sense. And, finally, François Hartog has developed the notion of regimes of historicity to account for the joint action of temporalities coming from the present as well as from memorialization. Such uses of the term “regime” allow us to show similitudes and differences with our own notion of semiotic regime. In order to concretely illustrate the notion, the article closes on a peculiar case, which is based on the intervention of police in regulating the circulation of books in Paris at the end of the 17th Century. We show how the introduction of a small object, namely a cloth patch that was henceforth required on the coats of peddlers, belongs to the emergence of a new semiotic regime that gives the signs (in clothing, religion, language and policing) an essential function of social classification deemed necessary for the absolutist politics of the Bourbon dynasty, while also facilitating the flux of classical urbanity.