Quai des Grands Augustins — Paris's Oldest Quay

The Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris is the city's oldest quay, commissioned by King Philippe IV in 1312 and completed in 1389 to protect the Left Bank from flooding. Named after a 1293 monastery, the area hosted notable historical figures, including Pablo Picasso, who painted Guernica at nearby number 7 Rue des Grands Augustins in 1937.

Paris · from the walk “From the Cathedral to the Iron Lady” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris

Who commissioned the Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris in 1312?

You are standing on the oldest quay in all of Pari... the Quai des Grands Augustins. Look at the stone beneath your feet. These embankments were commissioned in thirteen twelve by King Philippe the Fourth, known as Philippe le Bel... the Fair. Before his orders, this stretch of the Left Bank was nothing more than a marshy field of willow trees, prone to constant flooding. The merchants of Paris Begged the king for protection from the Seine, and he obliged. But the project took decades... the quay wasn't actually finished until thirteen eighty-nine, long after Philippe himself was dead.......... The name comes from the Augustinian monastery that stood here from twelve ninety-three until the Revolution, when it was seized and demolished. But what replaced the monks is far more fascinating.......... Did you know that the very word "socialism" has roots on this quay? At number thirty-five, in a bar run by his parents, Pierre Leroux was born on April seventh, seventeen ninety-seven. He would go on to publish an essay in eighteen thirty-four called "Individualism and Socialism"... the first serious analysis of the concept in French political thought.......... Just steps away, at number twenty-one, a young woman named George Sand moved into a fifth-floor apartment when she first arrived in Paris in eighteen thirty-one... penniless, ambitious, and ready to scandalize the literary world.......... But the most extraordinary story here belongs to Picasso. Just around the corner, at seven Rue des Grands Augustins, he occupied a studio in a fifteenth-century building called the Hôtel de Savoie... from the end of nineteen thirty-six until nineteen fifty-five. It was Dora Maar, his lover and a brilliant photographer, who found this space for him through her connections in the left-wing community. And it was Here, in nineteen thirty-seven, that he painted Guernica... that enormous cry of anguish against the bombing of a Basque town.......... And there's more. The building itself was the very place where Balzac had set his story "The Unknown Masterpiece" back in eighteen thirty-one... a tale about a painter obsessed with perfection. Picasso knew this. He had even illustrated that story years before moving in. Life imitating art... imitating life.......... Then, on March nineteenth, nineteen forty-four, with the Nazis Still occupying Paris, something astonishing happened just meters from here, at fifty-three bis on this very quay. Picasso's surrealist play, "Desire Caught by the Tail"... a farce he'd scribbled in three days while ill... was performed as a secret reading. The cast? Jean-Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir. Raymond Queneau. Picasso himself. And the Director? Albert Camu! All crammed into one apartment, performing absurdist theater as an act of quiet resistance against the Occupation.......... Stand here a moment. Let the river pass. This quay has witnessed seven hundred years of floods, revolutions, and genius... and it is Still watching.