Place du Tertre & Saint-Pierre de Montmartre

Why is it significant?

Walk into the square and you are in the middle of a forest of easels: painters squinting at their canvases, portraitists offering to sketch you in ten minutes, café tables pushed under the trees.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk into the square and you are in the middle of a forest of easels: painters squinting at their canvases, portraitists offering to sketch you in ten minutes, café tables pushed under the trees. It can feel like a stage set... but this was once the real heart of the village of Montmartre, where the villagers gathered, argued and voted.

Tertre simply means a small mound, the top of the hill. When Montmartre became a commune during the Revolution, its first town hall stood on this square. The village was only absorbed into Paris in 1860, and after the First World War local artists and pranksters founded the Free Commune of Montmartre, a playful republic that still exists. There is also a famous tale that the word bistro was born here in 1814, when Russian Cossacks occupying Paris shouted bystro, quickly, at the waiters. It is a lovely story but most linguists do not believe a word of it.

Now walk to the corner of the square, to the modest stone church with the little bell tower: Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. It is far older than the white basilica looming behind it. It was the church of the royal abbey, consecrated in 1147 by Pope Eugene the Third, and Queen Adelaide, who founded the abbey, is buried inside. Look for the old marble columns near the entrance and in the choir: they are said to come from a Roman temple that once stood on the hilltop.

The name of the hill itself is a riddle. One theory says Mons Martis, the mount of Mars, after that temple. The other says Mons Martyrum, the mount of the martyrs, after Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, beheaded on this hill in the third century. Legend says he picked up his own head, washed it in a spring, and walked north for several kilometres, until he fell where the basilica of Saint-Denis now stands.

In 1794 the church tower carried something entirely new: a relay of Claude Chappe's optical telegraph, wooden arms signalling across the sky on the line to Lille, which could bring news from the northern front to Paris in about an hour.Leave the square by rue Norvins, heading west, and turn right into rue des Saules, which drops steeply down the north side of the hill.