Marché des Enfants Rouges: The Oldest Covered Market in Paris
Why is it significant?
Slip through the green gate at number 39 rue de Bretagne and the noise of the street gives way to the smell of cooking: narrow lanes of stalls under old wooden roofs, piles of fruit and flowers, cheese and wine, and crowded counters where people squeeze onto stools to eat dishes from half the world.
Key Facts
| Place | Marché des Enfants Rouges: The Oldest Covered Market in Paris |
|---|---|
| Address | 39 Rue de Bretagne, 75003 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86280, 2.36200 |
| Part of Walk | Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille |
| Generated | Generated |
Slip through the green gate at number 39 rue de Bretagne and the noise of the street gives way to the smell of cooking: narrow lanes of stalls under old wooden roofs, piles of fruit and flowers, cheese and wine, and crowded counters where people squeeze onto stools to eat dishes from half the world.
This is the oldest covered market in Paris, founded around 1615, in the reign of the young Louis the Thirteenth, to feed the new houses spreading over the northern Marais. Back then this was the edge of town, close to the vast walled enclosure of the Knights Templar, whose fortress gave this whole quarter the name it still carries, the Temple.
The strange name, the market of the red children, comes from an orphanage that once stood nearby. In 1534 Marguerite of Navarre, the brilliant, independent-minded sister of King Francis the First, founded a hospital here for children whose parents had died in the city's hospitals. The orphans were dressed in red, the colour of charity, so that everyone could see they were cared for by alms. The orphanage closed in the eighteenth century, but the children in red stayed in the name of the market for four hundred years.
And the market nearly vanished in our own time. It was listed as a historic monument in 1982, but it was in poor shape, and in 1994 it closed. There was talk of turning the site to other uses, and the people of the neighbourhood fought back, with petitions and a residents' association. In 2000 the restored market reopened, and it has been crowded ever since.
Take a moment to look at the mix: Moroccan, Japanese, Italian, Lebanese and French cooking side by side under one roof. That is the Marais in miniature, a district that has absorbed princes, artisans, immigrants and artists, one after another, without ever quite losing its old bones. Now wind your way south through the quiet streets of the northern Marais to rue de Thorigny, where a salt-tax collector built himself a palace.