The Hôtel de Ville

Back in the city centre, the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) is situated on the Right Bank, just across from the eastern end of the Île de la Cité. It contains the official apartments of the mayor of Paris. Three city halls have stood on the site of the present building, each grander than its predecessor. The first was the House of Pillars (Maison aux Piliers), used by the municipality from 1357 to 1533. The present-day Hôtel de Ville (1874–82) replaced the Renaissance structure that was in use from the 16th century until 1871, when it was burned by the insurrectionary Communards.

The first two buildings sat on the Place de Grève (grève meaning “strand” or “bank”), which was the principal port of Paris for centuries. (The refusal of boatmen to work gave the French their phrase for going on strike: faire la grève.) The name of this square was changed in 1830 to Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. From 1310 to 1832 it was Paris’s principal place of execution.

The second Hôtel de Ville was the focus of numerous popular uprisings, including the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 and the Commune of Paris of 1871. The current building played a prominent role during the liberation of the city from German occupation in 1944.

In July 1789, already having taken the Invalides and the Bastille, the Revolutionary mob captured the Hôtel de Ville. Three days afterward Louis XVI appeared on the balcony wearing a tricolour cockade (blue, white, and red; a symbol of the Revolution) and was cheered by the crowd. The building later was taken as headquarters for the city’s Revolutionary government (the Paris Commune of 1792), which directed mob action to control the National Convention, the governing assembly of France at the time. On July 27, 1794, the Convention’s guards entered the Hôtel de Ville and seized the radical leader Maximilien de Robespierre and his followers; all were executed soon after. Following the July Revolution of 1830, the new king Louis-Philippe appeared on the Hôtel de Ville’s balcony and was acclaimed by the revolutionary crowd.

In 1871, after Napoleon III’s defeat at Sedan during the Franco-German War, a new French republic was declared from the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; however, when the national government in its turn capitulated, Parisians refused to accept defeat and in March formed the Commune of Paris. In May national troops entered the city and fought sharp engagements with the Communards, who set fire to the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace, the Palace of Justice, the Police Prefecture, the Arsenal, and other government buildings. Approximately 20,000 Parisians were killed during the fighting.

In 1944, as the city was being liberated from the Germans, the National Council of Resistance (Conseil National de la Résistance) made the Hôtel de Ville its headquarters. At the climax of the liberation, Gen. Charles de Gaulle appeared on the balcony and was acclaimed by the crowd.

The Bastille

The road off the upper end of the Île Saint-Louis leads to the Place de la Bastille on the Right Bank. From the river to the place runs a canal, the Arsenal Basin, which formerly supplied water to the moat around the Bastille fortress. At the Place de la Bastille the waterway goes underground for almost 1 mile (1.6 km) and then emerges to form the Saint-Martin Canal, which, with its bridges and locks and its barges sailing slowly down the centre of city streets, constitutes one of the least-known and most picturesque sections of Paris.

The Bastille was used as a state prison from the 17th century. Its capture by a mob on July 14, 1789, during the early years of the French Revolution, was a symbolic blow at tyranny rather than an act of liberation for tyranny’s victims. The prison had been virtually unused for years and was scheduled for demolition by the monarchy; it held on that day only four counterfeiters, two madmen, and a young aristocrat who had displeased his father. The Bastille was demolished after its capture.

The future emperor Napoleon I had the place laid out in 1803. A railway station was built there in 1859. The station was razed in 1984 to allow construction of a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille (inaugurated 1989).

The neighbourhood between the Bastille and the Place de la Nation, eastward along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, has been one of skilled craftsmen since the mid-15th century, when the self-governing royal abbey gave space within its wide domains to those cabinetmakers who refused to abide by the restrictions of Paris guilds as to styles and types of wood to be used. This neighbourhood was always among the first to revolt when revolution was in the air and was noted for the speed with which it raised barricades of impressive height. The character of the area has changed, however, as most of the small workshops have closed.

The Marais

To the west of the Bastille lies a triangular area with its base along the river up to the Hôtel de Ville and its apex just short of the Place de la République to the north. It keeps its name—le marais (“the marsh”)—from the Middle Ages, and, because it became the market garden of Paris, it gave its name to all market gardening (la culture maraîchère; also called truck farming, or the production of vegetables for the market) in France.

Extension of the city walls along the Right Bank led to diking of the shore and drainage of the soil. In 1107 the Knights Templar established Le Temple, a vast fortified enclosure, at the top of the triangle. In 1360 the future king Charles V moved into his new royal residence in the lower right-hand corner, where the rue des Lions marks the former location of the menageries.

King Charles VII preferred to live just behind the Bastille, in the Hôtel des Tournelles, which Henry II had had enlarged and beautified by Philibert Delorme in 1550. Great nobles, such as the dukes of Guise and Lorraine, followed the king and had palaces built in the vicinity. When Henry II was killed in a joust on the rue Saint-Antoine in 1559, his widow, Catherine de Médicis, had the Tournelles razed. On the site in 1607 construction began on the first residential square to be designed in Paris. Henry IV reserved a house there for himself. The three-story houses are made of red brick with white-stone quoins (solid-corner angles) and window surrounds, and the ground floors form arcades over the sidewalks. The square was named Place Royale, but since 1800 it has been called Place des Vosges. Another wave of building by the rich, eager to be close to a royal project, endowed the Marais with 200 more private palaces.

In 1792 the Hospitallers (also known as the Knights of Malta) were turned out of Le Temple, which had been given to them in 1313 when the Templar order was dissolved. The temple became state property, and in August 1792 the royal family was incarcerated in the temple’s tower keep. Louis XVI was taken off to his death on January 21, 1793, and Queen Marie-Antoinette was removed to the Conciergerie that August (and executed on October 16). The temple’s tower was leveled in 1808 to discourage rallies there by royalists.

After the 17th-century construction boom the Marais remained virtually untouched. Toward the end of the 19th century, while some of the oldest and most imposing of the palaces were being demolished by private developers, other owners managed to restore a few mansions, and the French and Parisian governments also restored a handful of fine buildings. However, as many Jewish refugees from eastern Europe settled in the district, scores of houses were subdivided into tiny apartments for the poverty-stricken newcomers, and workshops were installed on the lower floors and in courtyard sheds. The Marais gradually became one of the worst slums in Paris.

In 1969 the municipal council approved an urban renewal scheme for ending slum conditions while preserving the workaday life and animation and restoring the undeniable beauty of the quarter. The scheme was very successful, and property prices in the Marais have soared. Among the restored ancient buildings open to the public are the Museum of the History of Paris (Hôtel de Carnavalet), built in 1545 and enlarged by François Mansart in 1645; the Museum of the History of France (National Archives, Hôtel de Soubise), parts of which date from 1375, 1553, and 1704–15; the Museum of Hunting and Nature (Hôtel de Guénégaud des Brosses), built by Mansart in 1648–51; the National Bureau of Historic Monuments (Hôtel de Sully), by Jean I Androuet du Cerceau (see du Cerceau family); and the Picasso Museum (Hôtel Salé).

Closer to the Hôtel de Ville is the Gothic Hôtel de Sens, built at the end of the 15th century for the bishops of Sens, then also bishops of Paris. It was restored after 40 years of work and now serves as a city library of specialized collections. Nearby, behind facades of a much later date, two half-timbered medieval houses have been uncovered. Portions of the 13th-century city wall, including one of the watchtowers, still may be seen in the quarter as well.

On the western fringe of the Marais is the Georges Pompidou National Centre for Art and Culture, popularly called Centre Pompidou, a vast glass-and-metal structure of distinctive design inaugurated in 1977. It soon proved its popularity and remains a successful attraction for Parisians and tourists alike. The centre houses the National Museum of Modern Art, temporary exhibits, the multimedia Public Reference Library, the Industrial Design Centre, the Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research, and workshops for children.