Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter

South of the city centre are the quintessential Left Bank neighbourhoods known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter (Quartier Latin). The boulevard Saint-Germain itself begins at the National Assembly building, curving eastward to join the river again at the Sully Bridge. A little less than halfway along the boulevard is the pre-Gothic church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The old church, which belonged to a Benedictine abbey founded in the 8th century, was sacked four times by Vikings and was rebuilt between 990 and 1201. Parts of the present church date from that time.

This portion of the Left Bank has long been a gathering place for practitioners of the arts. The dramatist Jean Racine died there in 1699; the painter Eugène Delacroix had his studio in the Place Fürstemberg; publishing houses moved in during the 19th century; and the principal cafés have been meeting places for artists, writers, and publishers ever since. From 1945 to about 1955 it was the hub of the Existentialist movement and an associated revival of bohemianism. It is still a lively centre for literature, food, and conversation.

Straight north from the crossroads at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church is the National School of Fine Arts (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts), the state school of painting and sculpture, on the Quai Malaquais. Two streets south of the crossroads is the church of Saint-Sulpice (1646–1780), the work of six successive architects. The street alongside the church is sprinkled with shops specializing in devotional statuary, much of it on the aesthetic level of tourist souvenirs and known in France as “Saint Sulpicerie.” Eastward to the boulevard Saint-Michel, the area toward the river from the boulevard Saint-Germain is a tangle of narrow, animated streets, which typify the tourist’s idea of a vivacious and noisy Paris.

East of the boulevard Saint-Michel is the university precinct, self-governing under the kings, where, in class and out, students and teachers spoke Latin until 1789 (hence the name Quartier Latin). At the junction of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel are the remains of one of the three baths of the Roman city. These are in the grounds of the National Museum of the Middle Ages (Musée National du Moyen Âge), housed in the Hôtel de Cluny, a Gothic mansion (1485–1500) that holds a collection of medieval works of art, including the renowned six-panel tapestry La Dame à la licorne (“The Lady and the Unicorn”).

The wide straight boulevard Saint-Michel is the main street of the student quarter. It is lined with bookshops, cafés, cafeterias, and movie houses. The buildings of the university are found on smaller streets. The university was built up of colleges, each founded and supported by a donor, often a prelate or a religious order. In about 1257 Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX, established a college, known as the Sorbonne, that eventually became the centre of theological study in France. The oldest part of the Sorbonne is the chapel (1635–42), the gift of Cardinal de Richelieu, who is buried there. It was designed by Jacques Lemercier and was one of a number of new domed Jesuit-style churches of the period.

The Sorbonne served for centuries as the administrative seat of the University of Paris. Following mass student protests in 1968, the university was divided into a number of entirely separate universities, and the Sorbonne building proper continues to serve as the premises for some of these. Other faculties, schools, and institutes have moved to more-spacious sites in the city and suburbs in an effort to ease the overcrowding of the Paris student milieu.

The independent College of France (Collège de France) was set up a few steps from the university by King Francis I in 1529 to offer a more liberal, modern curriculum than the narrow theology and Latin of the Sorbonne. Bestowing no degrees, it always has had a superb faculty of well-known specialists, especially in philosophy, literature, and the sciences.

At the top of the hill rising from the river, the boulevard Saint-Michel skirts the Luxembourg Gardens, the remains of the park of Marie de Médicis’ Luxembourg Palace (1616–21), which now houses the French Senate. The gardens are planted with chestnuts and are enhanced with a pond for toy sailboats, a marionette theatre, and statuary.

East of the gardens at the end of the rue Soufflot stands the 18th-century Panthéon building, designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. It was commissioned by King Louis XV, after his recovery from an illness, as a votive offering to St. Geneviève and was to replace the mouldering 5th-century abbey in her name. Though intended as the principal church in Paris, it was renamed the Panthéon by the Revolutionary authorities, who made it the last resting place for heroes of the French Revolution. The walling up of a number of its windows and the removal of much interior decoration replaced the intended effect of a light interior space with a gloomy dignity. Among those buried under the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante” (“To great men, [from] their grateful homeland”) are the authors Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola, as well as Jean Moulin, chief of the Resistance in World War II.

Northwest of the Panthéon is a steep street named the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It was the paved road to Italy in Roman times. The hill leads down to the lively market square of Place Maubert and a tangle of ancient, picturesque riverside streets. The best known of these is the medieval rue de la Huchette, from which the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche (“Street of the Fishing Cat”) leads to the Quai Saint-Michel. Two churches in this area—Saint-Séverin (1489–94), Gothic and humble, and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre (1165–1220), which belongs to the transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic—are notable. The square in front of the latter church offers one of the finest views of Notre-Dame de Paris.

The Rue de Rivoli and Right Bank environs

North of the city centre, a few streets away from the Seine and running roughly parallel to the river, is the rue de Rivoli. At its eastern end the street fronts the Hôtel de Ville and the Saint-Jacques bell tower (Tour Saint-Jacques), all that remains of a church in the Flamboyant Gothic style that was torn down in 1797. Farther west, the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens occupy a long stretch of land between the street and the river. On the north side of the street is an arcade more than 1 mile (1.6 km) long.

Opposite the middle of the Louvre, the Place du Palais-Royal leads to the palace of Cardinal de Richelieu, which he willed to the royal family. Louis XIV lived there as a child, and during the minority of Louis XV the kingdom was ruled from there by the debauched regent Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, from 1715 to 1723. Late in the 18th century Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans, who was popularly renamed Philippe-Egalité during the French Revolution for his radical opinions, undertook extensive building around the palace garden. It was a commercial operation, and the prince hoped to pay his debts from the property rents. Around the garden he built a beautiful oblong of colonnaded galleries and at each end of the gallery farthest from his residence a theatre. The larger playhouse has been the home of the Comédie-Française, the state theatre company, since Napoleon I’s reign. The princely apartments now shelter high state bodies such as the Conseil d’État (Council of State).

The Parisian city planner Baron Haussmann greatly enlarged the Place du Palais-Royal in 1852, and he was careful to preserve the palace when he laid out the avenue de l’Opéra. At the top of this avenue, a grand opera house was built from 1825 to 1898. The Paris Opera House (l’Opéra, or Palais Garnier), a splendid monument to the Second Empire, was designed in the neo-Baroque style by Charles Garnier. It is known especially for its decorative embellishments, chief among them the Grand Staircase. Just behind the Opera House are various large department stores.

The next place along the rue de Rivoli is the Place des Pyramides. The gilded equestrian statue of Joan of Arc stands not far from where she was wounded at the Saint-Honoré Gate (Porte Saint-Honoré) in her unsuccessful attack on Paris (at that time held by the English), on September 8, 1429.

Farther west, toward the Place de la Concorde, the rue de Castiglione leads from the rue de Rivoli to the Place Vendôme, an elegant octagonal place, little changed from the 1698 designs of Jules Hardouin-Mansart. In the centre, the Vendôme Column bears a statue of Napoleon I. It was pulled down during the Commune of 1871 and put back up under the Third Republic (1871–1940). The Place Vendôme and the adjacent rue de la Paix, which enters the place opposite the rue de Castiglione, have lost none of their discreet distinction, nor have their shops.

The rue de Rivoli ends at the Place de la Concorde. Between the twin buildings on the northeastern side of the place, the broad rue Royale mounts to the Madeleine, consecrated in 1842. This church is a stern oblong, fenced with columns approximately 65 feet (20 metres) high. Its design, supposedly that of a Greek temple, is actually closer to the Roman notion of Greek architecture. To the west off the rue Royale runs the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In addition to the British embassy and the Élysée Palace (residence of the French president), it has on its shop windows some of the most prestigious names in the Paris fashion trade.

At the Place de la Madeleine begin the Grands Boulevards, which arch eastward through the Right Bank to the Place de la République. The glittering chic of these contiguous boulevards—Madeleine, Capucines, Italiens, Montmartre, Poissonnière, Bonne Nouvelle, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Martin—flavoured Paris life from the 1750s to the 1880s. Many of this epoch’s theatres and other entertainments survive. The Opéra Comique stands fast just off the boulevard des Italiens; the Grévin wax museum survives on the boulevard Montmartre; and, a few doors away, the Théâtre des Variétés, founded under the Second Empire by the composer Jacques Offenbach, still operates. The Théâtre de la Renaissance, where the actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin created the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897, remains on the boulevard Saint-Martin. The Théâtre de l’Ambigu, where Frédéric Lemaître, the celebrated actor in boulevard melodrama, thrilled all Paris in the mid-19th century, was demolished in the 1960s.