Rebel Hill: Buttes-Chaumont, Belleville & the Secrets of Père-Lachaise in Paris

From a clifftop temple over an old quarry to the wall of the last Communards: street art, Édith Piaf's doorstep, medieval water houses and the most famous graves in Paris

Paris · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Temple de la Sibylle: Buttes-Chaumont's Clifftop Belvedere

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, 1 Rue Botzaris, 75019 Paris, France

Catch your breath at the top of the island, beside the little round temple with its ring of slender columns, and look down. Below you a lake curls around the foot of a sheer cliff, footbridges hang over the water, and beyond the trees the rooftops of north-east Paris roll away towards Montmartre and the white domes of the Sacré-Cœur.

It all looks like a romantic mountain landscape, carefully preserved. It is nothing of the sort. Every rock, every slope and every curve of this lake was built by hand in the 1860s, on one of the ugliest pieces of land in Paris. For centuries this hill was a gypsum quarry, dug out for the plaster that coated the walls of the city, the famous plaster of Paris. When the quarry ran out, the holes became a rubbish tip, a place where dead horses were rendered down and where the city's sewage carts emptied their loads.

And a little to the west, on the slope towards the canal, stood something even darker: the gibbet of Montfaucon, the royal gallows of medieval Paris. It was a great stone structure where the bodies of the hanged were left dangling in the wind for weeks, as a warning to anyone approaching the city. For the poor of the north-east, this whole district smelled of death.

Then Napoleon the Third and his prefect Baron Haussmann decided that working-class Paris deserved a park as grand as the ones in the west. The engineer Adolphe Alphand and his team blasted, sculpted and replanted the old quarry, brought in topsoil by the cartload, and dug the lake. The park opened in 1867, just in time for that year's Universal Exhibition. The architect Gabriel Davioud crowned the rock with this temple, a copy of the ancient Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli near Rome.

To get up here you probably crossed the narrow stone bridge onto the island. Parisians long ago nicknamed it the Suicide Bridge... which tells you something about the melancholy of a cliff in the middle of a city. Now go back down the winding path towards the eastern shore of the lake, and look for a dark opening in the rock, with the sound of falling water inside.
2. The Grotto & Waterfall of Buttes-Chaumont

Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Avenue de la Cascade, 75019 Paris, France

Step into the cool shadow of the cave and let your eyes adjust. Water pours from an opening high in the vault, splashing down over the rocks into a pool, and long pointed stalactites hang from the ceiling above your head. On a hot Paris afternoon this is the coolest spot in the nineteenth arrondissement.

Now reach out and touch one of those stalactites, if you can. They are not stone at all. They are made of cement, moulded and coloured by the park's builders in the 1860s to make the visitors of the Second Empire feel like explorers in the Alps. The waterfall is fake too, in a way: it is fed by pumped water, switched on and off like a fountain. Alphand's engineers were artists of illusion, and this cave is their masterpiece.

But the cave sits on something real. This is where the entrance to the old gypsum quarry used to be. Behind and below you, the hill is still riddled with galleries where men once hacked out the white stone by candlelight. The gypsum of this hill and of Montmartre was so good, and so plentiful, that plaster made from it became known around the world simply as plaster of Paris. The quarries made the hill rich... and then made it hollow. Building on top of these galleries remains a headache for engineers to this day.

The park has darker memories as well. In May 1871, during the last days of the Paris Commune, Buttes-Chaumont was one of the final strongholds of the insurgents. Government troops took the heights after heavy fighting, and the park became a place where the dead of that week were gathered. You will meet the end of that story at the very end of this walk.

Today, of course, the park belongs to joggers, picnickers and families, and on a sunny weekend the slopes are covered with people. Leave by the southern side of the park and climb up towards the old village street of Belleville, to the neo-Gothic church that stands at its heart.
3. Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Belleville: The Village Church

139 Rue de Belleville, 75019 Paris, France

Stop on the pavement across from the church and follow its two pointed spires up into the sky. Lacy stonework, tall arched windows, a great rose above the door... it looks like a cathedral from the Middle Ages that has wandered up a working-class hill. In fact it is only about thirty years older than the Eiffel Tower.

Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Belleville was built between 1854 and 1859 by Jean-Baptiste Lassus, the architect who was restoring Notre-Dame with Viollet-le-Duc at the same time. It was one of the very first neo-Gothic churches in Paris, a deliberate return to the style of the great cathedrals. Lassus died before it was finished, and he never saw his spires rise over the village.

And yes, it was a village. Until 1860 Belleville was not part of Paris at all. The city ended at the tax wall at the bottom of this hill, and everything that came into Paris, wine above all, was taxed at the gates. So on Sundays Parisians climbed up here, outside the wall, to drink cheap untaxed wine in the open-air taverns and dance halls that covered the slopes. After the carnival, on Ash Wednesday morning, crowds of masked, exhausted, drunken revellers came stumbling back down the hill into the city in a famous procession called the Descent of the Courtille.

On the 1st of January 1860, Paris swallowed its villages and Belleville was annexed. But the city could not resist splitting it in two. Look at the street signs: the Rue de Belleville is the frontier. The side where the church stands is in the nineteenth arrondissement, the opposite pavement is in the twentieth. Belleville was cut down the middle, and it is often said that this was a deliberate way to divide a rebellious population.

It certainly was rebellious. Belleville voted red, built barricades and gave the Commune many of its fighters. Now start walking downhill along the Rue de Belleville, on the twentieth arrondissement side, and keep an eye on the doorways... one of them claims to have seen the birth of a legend.
4. 72 Rue de Belleville: Édith Piaf's Doorstep

72 Rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France

Find number seventy-two, a plain grey building with a few stone steps leading up to the door. Nothing special about it... except the marble plaque beside the entrance. It says that on these very steps, on the 19th of December 1915, in the deepest poverty, Édith Piaf was born, the woman whose voice would later overwhelm the world.

It is a wonderful story. Her mother, a young street singer, went into labour in the middle of a freezing winter night. The legend says there was no time to reach a hospital, and the baby was delivered right here, under a street lamp, with the help of two police officers... or a passing stranger's cape, depending on who tells it. Her father was a street acrobat who was away at the front, in the middle of the First World War.

And here is the twist. Her birth certificate says something much less romantic. It records that Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in the Tenon hospital, a public hospital in the twentieth arrondissement, not far from here. But Paris has never let paperwork spoil a good story, and the plaque stays exactly where it is.

Even her first name was a sign of the times. She is said to have been named Édith after Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans in October 1915, a few weeks before Piaf was born. Her childhood was hard: she was raised partly by her grandmother in a brothel in Normandy and then followed her father on the road, singing on street corners for coins. A cabaret owner heard her in 1935 and gave her a stage name from Paris slang... la môme piaf, the little sparrow, because she was tiny, thin and fearless.

From these pavements she went on to sing La Vie en rose and Non, je ne regrette rien in the greatest concert halls in the world. And she never really left this corner of Paris: she is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery at the end of this walk. Now carry on down the Rue de Belleville, and turn left into a short street where every wall is a canvas.
5. Rue Dénoyez: Belleville's Painted Street

Rue Dénoyez, 75020 Paris, France

Turn into the narrow cobbled lane and colour explodes all around you. Every wall, every metal shutter, every drainpipe and bollard is painted, tagged, stencilled or pasted over, layer upon layer. Come back in a month and half of what you see today will have vanished under something new.

Rue Dénoyez is a living gallery, and the rule here is simple: nothing lasts. Artists work openly in daylight, often with spray cans and stepladders, and the paintings change week by week. Some are polished murals, some are political slogans, some are just a name in big bubble letters. If you see someone painting, watch quietly... and ask before you take their photo.

The name of the street is a clue to what Belleville used to be. In the nineteenth century the Dénoyez family ran one of the most famous dance halls and taverns on this hillside, the kind of place where Parisians came up from the city to drink cheap wine outside the tax wall. The street just around the corner is named after Jean Ramponeau, an eighteenth-century tavern keeper whose wine was so cheap and whose cabaret was so packed that his name became a byword for a good time. This whole slope, the old Courtille, was the pleasure garden of working Paris.

Rue Ramponeau has another place in history. Tradition says that the very last barricade of the Paris Commune stood there, on the 28th of May 1871, held for a while by a single defender after all the others had fallen. Whether it was one man or several, it marked the end of the uprising.

Belleville has always been the first address of newcomers: workers from the provinces, then Armenians, Greeks, Jews from Poland and North Africa, Algerians and Tunisians, and later a large Chinese community, many from the region of Wenzhou. Walk back out to the boulevard and you will hear half a dozen languages in a minute. Now follow the Rue Ramponeau and climb the steps of the park on the slope above, all the way to the top terrace.
6. Parc de Belleville: The Balcony over Paris

Parc de Belleville, 27 Rue Piat, 75020 Paris, France

Lean on the railing of the top terrace and let the whole city spread out at your feet. Straight ahead, far away, the Eiffel Tower stands on the horizon. To the left the dome of the Panthéon, the towers of Notre-Dame, the glass of the business district beyond. Few places in Paris give you this much sky... and almost no tourists know it exists.

You are standing on one of the highest hills in the city, and the park below you is surprisingly young. It opened in 1988, on a slope that had been a patchwork of old houses, workshops and wasteland. The designers laid it out in terraces stepping down the hill, with a long chain of pools and cascades running through the middle, one of the longest artificial waterfalls in Paris. On a summer evening the steps are full of neighbours watching the sun go down behind the tower.

Look out for the rows of vines growing on the slope. They are a small salute to the past. For centuries these hillsides were covered with vineyards and orchards, and the wine of Belleville, rough and cheap, was poured in the taverns you heard about in the Rue Dénoyez. The hill also hid springs, which is why water became so precious to the people below... you will see that at the next stop.

Under your feet, the hill is hollow. Like Buttes-Chaumont, this slope was quarried for gypsum, and some of the old galleries were simply filled in when the houses above them started to crack. And in the 1790s, the inventor Claude Chappe tested his optical telegraph on these heights, with wooden arms on a mast spelling out messages from hilltop to hilltop. A street nearby is still called the Rue du Télégraphe.

Take one last look and try to spot the Panthéon, Montparnasse Tower and the Eiffel Tower in a single sweep... the whole story of Paris on one horizon. Then leave the park by the upper gate on the Rue Piat and walk east to the Rue des Cascades, a lane that remembers where Paris once got its water.
7. Rue des Cascades & the Regard Saint-Martin

42 Rue des Cascades, 75020 Paris, France

Walk slowly down the quiet, sloping lane and look for a small stone building with a little door and a steep roof, squeezed between two houses. It looks like a tiny chapel, or a hermit's hut. It is in fact a piece of plumbing... one of the oldest in Paris.

This is the Regard Saint-Martin, and the word regard means a place to look. Under the hill of Belleville, springs seep out of the rock, and from the Middle Ages the great religious houses of Paris collected that water. Monks of the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, among others, dug stone channels underground to carry it down the hill to their monastery and to the city's fountains. The little stone houses were built over the channels so that the water could be checked, cleaned and kept flowing, with steps leading down to the water itself.

For centuries the springs of Belleville and the neighbouring hills supplied a good part of the drinking water of the Right Bank. Water was everything here, which is why the lane itself is called the Rue des Cascades... the Street of Waterfalls. After rain, water once streamed down the slope in little falls, and the name stuck long after it had all disappeared underground.

There are several regards still standing in Belleville, and a short way down this same street you will find another one, the Regard des Messiers. Its name is thought to come from the messiers, the guards who watched over the crops and vineyards of the hill against thieves before the harvest. Imagine this slope as fields and vines, with a watchman leaning on his stick, and the city a smoky blur far below.

Volunteers and historians still open some of these regards on heritage days, and the underground channels can sometimes be visited with a guide. The rest of the year they stand silent, little stone sentries guarding a water supply nobody uses any more. Now follow the Rue des Cascades downhill to the Rue de Ménilmontant, and turn right towards the great church that towers over the slope.
8. Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix: The Giant of Ménilmontant

3 Place de Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris, France

Stand at the foot of the wide stone stairs and tilt your head back. The church rises above you like a cliff, with a tall bell tower pointing straight up the slope. For a neighbourhood of workshops, tenements and cheap cafés, it is almost absurdly big... and that was exactly the point.

This is Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix de Ménilmontant, built between 1863 and 1880, just after the hamlet of Ménilmontant had been swallowed by Paris along with Belleville. The population of these slopes was exploding with workers pouring in from the provinces, and the tiny old chapel could not hold them. So the city gave them one of the largest churches in Paris, a statement in stone that the new eastern districts would not be forgotten.

Not everyone here felt grateful. Ménilmontant, like Belleville, was famously anticlerical and fiercely republican. During the Commune of 1871 several churches of eastern Paris were taken over by political clubs, where workers met in the evenings under the vaults to argue about the future of the city. Few places in Paris show so clearly the tension between the Church and the people it was built to serve.

The square in front of you is named after a local boy. Maurice Chevalier was born in Ménilmontant in 1888, into a poor family, and started singing in the cafés of the quarter before he became the very image of the Parisian charmer in Hollywood films. And in 1938 Charles Trenet wrote a song simply called Ménilmontant, a love letter to the steep streets and the light of this hill, which every French grandmother can still hum.

If you have ever seen The Red Balloon, the short film of 1956 about a little boy followed everywhere by a stubborn red balloon, you have already been here. It was shot in the streets of Ménilmontant and Belleville, and many of the alleys you see in it have since been demolished. Now walk down the Rue de Ménilmontant to the boulevard, turn left, and follow it to the square by the Père-Lachaise metro station, where the cemetery wall begins.
9. Père-Lachaise: The City of the Dead

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Place Auguste-Métivier, 75020 Paris, France

Walk through the gate and the noise of the boulevard drops away behind you. Ahead, cobbled lanes climb between rows of chapels, obelisks, weeping angels and crooked old tombstones, all under a ceiling of chestnut trees and maples. It feels less like a cemetery than a small town, with its own avenues and street signs... and in a way, that is what it is.

Père-Lachaise opened in 1804, the year Napoleon made himself emperor. The old churchyards in the heart of Paris were overflowing, so new cemeteries were laid out outside the city, and this hillside was chosen for the east. It took its name from Father François de La Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV, who had lived in a Jesuit house on this very hill.

There was just one problem. Nobody wanted to be buried here. It was too far from the city, out in the countryside, on the side of a working-class hill, and in its first year only a handful of funerals took place. So the authorities tried a publicity stunt. In 1817 they moved here, with great ceremony, the supposed remains of the playwright Molière and the poet La Fontaine, and the medieval lovers Héloïse and Abélard. Whether the bones were really theirs is still debated. But it worked. Suddenly everyone who was anyone wanted a plot next to famous neighbours.

Today the cemetery covers more than forty hectares, with around seventy thousand burial plots, and it is the largest green space inside the city of Paris. Millions of visitors come every year, making it probably the most visited cemetery in the world. Writers, painters, singers, generals and revolutionaries lie here side by side, often in the same narrow lane.

Walk gently, keep your voice low, and remember that people still come here to bury and mourn their families. Now take the paths heading south-east, deeper into the old part of the cemetery, to a white marble tomb that is never without fresh flowers.
10. The Tomb of Frédéric Chopin

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Division 11, 16 Rue du Repos, 75020 Paris, France

Follow the flowers. Among the grey tombs one white marble monument is always covered in them: roses, carnations, little bunches tied with red and white ribbon, the colours of Poland. On top sits a young woman in stone, head bowed over a lyre whose strings are broken.

This is the grave of Frédéric Chopin. He was born near Warsaw in 1810 and left Poland at twenty, only weeks before an uprising against Russian rule broke out; it was crushed the following year. He never went home. Paris became his city, the salons of the aristocracy his stage, and for nearly ten years the novelist George Sand was his companion. He died of a long illness, most likely tuberculosis, in October 1849, at only thirty-nine.

The muse on top is Euterpe, the muse of music, and the sculptor was Auguste Clésinger, who happened to be George Sand's son-in-law. At the funeral, at the Madeleine church, Mozart's Requiem was sung, as Chopin had asked. And the story goes that a handful of Polish earth, which he had carried with him since leaving home, was scattered over his coffin here.

But Chopin is not entirely here. Terrified of being buried alive, he asked that his heart be removed after his death. His sister Ludwika carried it back to Warsaw, reportedly smuggling it past the border guards in a jar of alcohol under her skirts. Today it rests inside a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, where it survived the destruction of the city in the Second World War. So his body lies in France and his heart in Poland... which is perhaps the most exact description of his life.

A few paths away, in a corner hemmed in by barriers, lies a very different musician: Jim Morrison of The Doors, who died in Paris in July 1971, aged twenty-seven. His father later placed a Greek inscription on the stone, usually translated as true to his own spirit. Now head east along the avenues, and keep your eyes on the ground: you are looking for a bronze man lying flat on his back, with his hat beside him.
11. Victor Noir & Oscar Wilde: Two Strange Pilgrimages

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Division 89, 16 Rue du Repos, 75020 Paris, France

In front of you a massive block of pale stone carries a strange winged figure, half angel, half Egyptian sphinx, flying forward with closed eyes. Around it stands a sheet of glass, and on the glass... kisses. Dozens of them. This is the tomb of Oscar Wilde, and it has always attracted the wrong kind of affection.

But first, did you spot the bronze man on the way? Victor Noir was a young journalist shot dead in January 1870 by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin of the emperor, during a quarrel over a duel. Around a hundred thousand people came to his funeral, and the anger fed the opposition that would soon bring down the Second Empire. His bronze effigy shows him just fallen, his hat beside him... and the sculptor gave his trousers a rather noticeable bulge. A legend grew that touching him brings fertility or love, and certain parts of the statue are now polished to a golden shine.

Oscar Wilde's end was far less glamorous than his life. After two years of hard labour in an English prison for gross indecency, the most celebrated wit of London left for France, bankrupt and broken. He died in November 1900 in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, aged forty-six. His most famous last line, reputedly, was that either the wallpaper went or he did.

He was buried first in a modest grave outside Paris, then moved here in 1909. His friend Robert Ross commissioned this tomb from the young sculptor Jacob Epstein, and when it was unveiled the French authorities found the figure so indecent that they covered it with a tarpaulin. Decades later its private parts were knocked off by vandals. And in recent decades visitors began to cover the stone in lipstick kisses, which ate into it, until a glass barrier went up in 2011. Robert Ross's own ashes were placed inside the tomb in 1950, beside his friend.

Wilde once wrote that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Here, he is still talked about every single day. Now walk south-east to the eastern edge of the cemetery, to a plain old wall with a single plaque, where this walk ends.
12. Mur des Fédérés: The Wall of the Communards

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Division 76, 16 Rue du Repos, 75020 Paris, France

This is the end of the walk, and it is the plainest place on it. An old wall of rough stone, ivy, a few flowers on the ground, and a simple plaque that reads: to the dead of the Commune, 21 to 28 May 1871. Stand here for a moment. You will understand why people speak quietly.

In the spring of 1871, after France's defeat by Prussia, the people of Paris rose up and set up their own revolutionary government, the Commune. For two months the city ran itself. Then the army of the national government, based at Versailles, broke into Paris, and fought its way from west to east, street by street, through what became known as the Bloody Week. The east of Paris, Belleville and Ménilmontant, the streets you have walked today, was the last to fall.

On the 27th of May the fighting reached this cemetery. Communards defended themselves among the tombs, firing from behind the gravestones, until they were overwhelmed. The next morning, a hundred and forty-seven of the prisoners were lined up against this wall and shot, and their bodies thrown into a pit dug at its foot. Across the city, thousands more were killed that week, and historians still argue about how many.

The wall became a shrine almost at once. Every year since the 1880s, at the end of May, crowds have marched here with red flags and flowers to remember the Communards, and the Mur des Fédérés is still a place of pilgrimage for the French left. Around it you will see memorials to other victims of the twentieth century, among them the people deported to Nazi camps... a corner of Paris devoted to remembering.

And here is the last link of the day. A few steps away lies the girl from the steps of the Rue de Belleville, Édith Piaf, buried in 1963 in a simple family grave, still covered in flowers. You began this walk on a rock above an old quarry and a gallows, and you end at a wall that remembers. Belleville has always been the city's rebellious, singing, stubborn heart... and now you know why. The Gambetta exit and the metro are just a few minutes away to the north.