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This article analyses controversies and litigation cases surrounding the regulation of trade marks in mid-19th century France. It examines the development of a discourse on trademark regulation by examining pamphlets, treatises, and court reports during a period of general reorientation. At this time the reference to older concepts like the bonne police as well as the anticipation of market-oriented formats of trademark law which was going to dominate discussion towards the end of the 19th century, went hand in hand. Within this constellation, expectations about the efficacy of trademarks increasingly oscillated between referential reliability and arbitrary attribution. The article demonstrates how this conceptual ambiguity resonated and produced shifts on a normative, operational, and communicational basis. It argues that these should to be considered central aspects of an emerging modern notion of trademarks and of an institutional dynamic that led up to international regulation in the wake of the French trademark law of 1857. Against the backdrop of Maxine Berg's thesis concerning prolific effects of product imitation, on the one hand, and of the role of trademarks within processes of vertical integration (Paul Duguid), on the other, the article highlights the changing conditions for commercial imitation. In particular, imitation was no longer strictly bound by individual perceptions of material products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]