Fontaine Saint-Michel: The Archangel at the Bottom of the Boulevard

Why is it significant?

Stand in front of the great wall of stone at the corner of the square, where water tumbles over the steps and a bronze archangel, wings spread wide, plants his foot on a devil with a very bad expression.

Key Facts

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Stand in front of the great wall of stone at the corner of the square, where water tumbles over the steps and a bronze archangel, wings spread wide, plants his foot on a devil with a very bad expression. Ask any Parisian where to meet in the Latin Quarter and there is a good chance the answer will be: at the fountain. This one. It looks as if it has stood here forever, but it is only about thirty years older than the Eiffel Tower. Gabriel Davioud built it between 1858 and 1860, while Baron Haussmann was slicing his new boulevards through the medieval maze. The Boulevard Saint-Michel ended against an ugly blank wall of houses, so Davioud simply dressed the wall up as a triumphal arch with a waterfall. He used marbles and stones of different colours, red, green, cream, and set two winged dragons spitting water at the bottom. The archangel himself is by the sculptor Francisque Duret. Now look low, near the edge of the basin, for small plaques. They carry the names of young men killed around this square in August 1944, when the Resistance rose against the German garrison in the days before the liberation of Paris. Barricades went up across these streets, and the fountain stood in the middle of the shooting. And it happened again, in a very different way, in May 1968. Students tore up the paving stones of the Boulevard Saint-Michel to hurl at the riot police, and someone wrote the most famous slogan of that spring on a wall: under the paving stones, the beach. Soon afterwards, the city covered many of these streets in asphalt, which is much harder to throw. And why the Latin Quarter? For six hundred years the students who crowded these lanes spoke Latin, in lectures, in lodgings, in taverns. A boy from Oxford, Bologna or Prague could arrive here and be understood by everyone. The language left long ago... the name stayed. Now cross the square, with the Seine on your left, and slip into the narrow Rue de la Huchette, heading east.