@Elcerezo: thanks for the link, I shall make sure to look at it carefully.

@Brian Maloney: I hear what you say about Typo-Upright but Civilité has some distinctive features or am I wrong? (NB. You can still see a lot of handwritten Civilité/Typo-Upright/Linus/French Script in Paris, on windows of Cafés.

Thanks everyone for their answer to my questions.

First, I wouldn’t say that I subscribe to any single specific method of typeface classification. I think that reporting what kind of style a typeface takes requires more than just the date of when it was used, and more than certain formal characteristics. For instance, you write the Civilité is a 16th century letterform. But Fraktur is also a 16th century letterform, its birth being commonly attributed to the Emperor Maximilian’s court in Nuremberg, around 1517 (although Gerrit Noordzij argues for even earlier, Burgundian conception). But for me, Fraktur is not just a 16th century script. Fraktur evloved and changed over time. I’d argue even that Fraktur is also a 20th century script. Fraktur continued to develop and see massive use long after Civilité fell out of fashion. Sure Civilité saw 20th and 21st century revivals, but nothing on the scale of the use of Blackletter in Germany during the first half of the 20th century (e.g., if Rudolf Koch didn’t reinvent Fraktur is the first years of the 20th century, he certainly reinvigorated it).

I think that classification is bigger than a single letter… i.e., the lowercase o. I have seen some sources that list Civilité as an extension of the Notula or notary hand branch of letters. For me, the earlier notary hands are definitely broken scripts. Their letters are dark, their strokes end pointedly, and many of their curves are broken. The same is true, in my eye, for Civilité’s letters.