Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille

Aristocratic mansions, the oldest covered market in Paris, Picasso's salt-tax palace, the Jewish quarter of rue des Rosiers, a medieval wall, the royal square of Place des Vosges and the place where the Bastille fell

Paris · 12 stops · 30 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Hôtel de Ville: The Palace of the People of Paris

Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris, France

Stand in the wide square in front of the Hôtel de Ville and take in that enormous palace of pale stone, bristling with statues, turrets and dormer windows, the French flag flying above the clock. It looks like a château from the age of Francis the First. In fact almost everything you see was built in the 1870s and 1880s... a careful copy of a palace that burned.

For centuries this square was the Place de Grève, a sandy strand sloping down to the Seine, where boats unloaded wood and wheat. Men without work gathered here every morning hoping to be hired for the day, and that is where French gets its expression for going on strike: faire grève. It was also the city's place of execution. In 1610 François Ravaillac, the man who stabbed King Henry the Fourth, was torn apart by horses here in front of an enormous crowd.

The city government has sat on this spot since 1357, when the provost of the merchants, Étienne Marcel, bought a house here, the House with Pillars, and stood up to the royal heir in the name of Paris. His equestrian statue stands on the river side of the building. A grand Renaissance city hall was begun in 1533. Then, in May 1871, in the last days of the Paris Commune, the Communards set it on fire, and centuries of the city's records burned with it, among them the registers of births, marriages and deaths of generations of Parisians.

The Third Republic rebuilt it, bigger and grander, and inaugurated the new palace in 1882. Look at the façades: they are lined with more than a hundred statues of famous people connected with the city. And this building has seen the city's great moments. On 25 August 1944, as Paris rose against the German occupation, Charles de Gaulle came here and spoke the words every French schoolchild learns: Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred... but Paris liberated.

Executions, strikes, fire and liberation, all on one square. Now cross rue de Rivoli and walk north up rue des Archives, into the Marais. The name means the marsh: in the Middle Ages this was soggy ground and market gardens beyond the river bank... and it went on to become the most aristocratic address in France.
2. Archives nationales: The Hôtel de Soubise & the Clisson Gate

60 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75003 Paris, France

On rue des Archives, look for an odd survivor: a pointed Gothic gateway flanked by two round turrets with little pointed roofs, squeezed between later buildings. It was built in the 1370s for Olivier de Clisson, constable of France, and it is one of the very last pieces of a medieval Paris mansion still standing. Then walk round the corner to rue des Francs-Bourgeois and through the great gate into a courtyard framed by a horseshoe of paired columns.

This is the Hôtel de Soubise, rebuilt from 1704 for François de Rohan, prince of Soubise, and his wife Anne de Rohan-Chabot. Courtiers whispered that the money came from Louis the Fourteenth himself, who was said to have been Anne's lover, while the prince looked the other way. Nobody has ever proved it. What we do know is that the family later filled the house with some of the most exquisite rococo rooms in Paris, like the oval salon of the princess, all gilded curves, mirrors and paintings of the story of Psyche.

In 1808 Napoleon decided that the papers of France needed a home, and the Archives nationales moved in. Today kilometres of shelves fill this mansion and its neighbours. Among the treasures: the Edict of Nantes, Napoleon's will, and the diary in which Louis the Sixteenth recorded his hunts, where for 14 July 1789, the day the Bastille fell, he wrote a single word: rien, nothing. He meant there had been no game that day... but history has never let him forget it.

The archives also keep the last letter of Marie Antoinette, written to her sister-in-law in the early hours of 16 October 1793, before she was taken to the guillotine. It never reached Madame Élisabeth. It passed instead into the hands of revolutionary officials, and was only brought to light more than twenty years later.

After the Revolution the Marais of the princes slowly decayed: the great families left, and the mansions became workshops, warehouses and crowded lodgings. Only in the 1960s, thanks to the Malraux law of 1962, did the Marais become one of the first protected historic districts in France, and the long restoration began. Now walk north up rue des Archives to rue de Bretagne, turn right, and look for the green gate of a market.
3. Marché des Enfants Rouges: The Oldest Covered Market in Paris

39 Rue de Bretagne, 75003 Paris, France

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.
4. Musée Picasso: The Salt Tax Palace

5 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris, France

Step into the cobbled forecourt on rue de Thorigny and face a grand, honey-coloured mansion of the 1650s, all tall windows and carved stone, set back behind its courtyard like a country château dropped into the middle of the city.

It was built between 1656 and 1659 for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a financier who had grown rich collecting the gabelle, the hated royal tax on salt. Parisians, who paid that tax on every pinch of salt they used, nicknamed his house the Hôtel Salé, the salted mansion, and the joke has outlived him by more than three and a half centuries.

Inside is one of the most magnificent staircases of the century. Since 1985 the house has held the Musée national Picasso. When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, his heirs owed the French state an enormous inheritance tax. A law passed in 1968, championed by the culture minister André Malraux, allowed such taxes to be paid in works of art instead of money. Experts chose from everything the artist had kept for himself: paintings, sculptures, drawings, sketchbooks, the private Picasso he never sold. Together with later gifts, the result is the largest collection of his work anywhere in the world, around five thousand works.

There is a lovely irony in it. The young Spaniard who painted in a freezing Montmartre studio with one tap for the whole house ended up in a palace built by a tax collector... having paid his family's last tax with his own pictures. The museum was renovated and reopened in 2014, and its rooms move through his whole life, from the Blue Period to the last fierce paintings of his old age.

Picasso never lived in the Marais, but the district suited him: it was poor and full of workshops when he was young, and full of galleries by the time the museum arrived. Now walk a few streets south, past the little garden of Square Georges-Cain, to rue de Sévigné and the mansion where the whole history of Paris is kept.
5. Musée Carnavalet: The Memory of Paris

23 Rue de Sévigné, 75003 Paris, France

Walk into the courtyard at 23 rue de Sévigné and meet a king: a bronze Louis the Fourteenth in Roman armour and a cascading wig, by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox. Around him rises a Renaissance mansion, its walls carved with reliefs of the four seasons. This is the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris.

The statue is a rare survivor. It was made for the Hôtel de Ville in the 1680s, and it is said to be the only statue of Louis the Fourteenth in Paris that survived the Revolution. The house itself was begun in 1548 for a president of the Paris parliament, and its odd name comes from a later owner, the widow of a Breton nobleman called Kernevenoy, a name Parisian tongues could not manage and turned into Carnavalet.

From 1677 until her death in 1696, the house was rented by the most famous letter writer in French history, Madame de Sévigné. Her beloved daughter had married and moved to Provence, and for decades the mother wrote to her, often several times a week: court gossip, the latest sermon, a scandalous trial, the price of a ribbon, all with such wit that her letters became a classic of French literature. She affectionately called the house la Carnavalette.

The city bought the mansion in 1866 and opened the museum in 1880, and it has been swallowing memories of Paris ever since. There are old shop signs that once swung over the streets, painted views of the vanished medieval city, relics of the Revolution, including a model of the Bastille carved from one of its own stones, an entire jeweller's shop designed by Alphonse Mucha, and the bed in which Marcel Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost Time. After more than four years of renovation, the museum reopened in 2021.

Keep that little stone Bastille in mind; you will meet the real place at the end of this walk. Now walk west along rue des Francs-Bourgeois, turn left into rue Pavée, and you will arrive at the crossroads with the narrow, lively street that is the heart of Jewish Paris.
6. Rue des Rosiers & the Pletzl: The Jewish Heart of Paris

Rue des Rosiers, 75004 Paris, France

Turn into rue des Rosiers and the Marais changes accent. Hebrew letters over shop windows, bakeries piled with braided challah and poppy-seed cakes, queues outside falafel counters, a bookshop full of prayer shawls, and the narrow street packed with people from morning to night.

This is the Pletzl, Yiddish for the little square, the heart of Jewish Paris. The street is named after the rose bushes that grew in the gardens running along the inside of King Philip Augustus's city wall. Jews from Eastern Europe began settling here in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, many of them fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire, and opened workshops, prayer rooms and kosher butchers. After the Second World War came Jews from North Africa, with Sephardic food and music, and today the quarter speaks with both accents.

Walk a few steps down rue Pavée to number 10 and look up at the synagogue squeezed into the narrow street, its tall, rippling façade rising like a curtain of stone. It was built in 1913 by Hector Guimard, the same architect who designed the Art Nouveau entrances of the Paris metro, and it is his only religious building. Guimard's wife, the American painter Adeline Oppenheim, was Jewish, and in 1938 the couple left France for New York.

The war fell hardest on these streets. In October 1941 this very synagogue was damaged by a bomb planted by collaborators. On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested about thirteen thousand Jews across Paris in the Vel d'Hiv roundup, and many families were taken from the Marais. On the walls of the neighbourhood's schools, plaques remember the children who were deported from them. And on 9 August 1982, terrorists attacked a Jewish restaurant on this street, killing six people.

And yet the Pletzl is alive, noisy, hungry and proud, even as fashion boutiques move in beside the bakeries. From here, walk south, cross rue de Rivoli and rue François-Miron, and find rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier, a quiet street running down towards the Seine. The next stop asks for a little silence.
7. Mémorial de la Shoah: The Wall of Names

17 Rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier, 75004 Paris, France

Stand in the forecourt and let your eyes adjust to the walls of pale stone around you. They are covered, from the ground up, with names in small, close letters... about seventy-six thousand of them. In the middle of the courtyard stands a great bronze drum engraved with the names of the death camps and of the Warsaw ghetto.

These are the Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944: men, women and more than eleven thousand children. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Only about two and a half thousand came back. The names are arranged by year of deportation and then alphabetically, so that whole families stand together on the stone, parents and children side by side, exactly as they were taken.

The memorial is older than its wall. In 1943, in the middle of the war, Isaac Schneersohn founded in Grenoble, in hiding, a centre to collect evidence of the persecution, so that the crimes could one day be proved. That archive became one of the most important in Europe on the Holocaust, and in 1956 the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr was inaugurated here. In the crypt below lie ashes brought from the camps and from the Warsaw ghetto. The Wall of Names was added in 2005, when the memorial reopened as the Mémorial de la Shoah.

Walk round to the side, into the narrow lane called the Allée des Justes, the alley of the Righteous. Another wall there carries thousands of names of French men and women honoured for hiding and rescuing Jews at the risk of their own lives: farmers, priests, teachers, neighbours who opened a door. About three quarters of the Jews living in France survived the war, and many of them owed their lives to people like these.

Take as long as you need here. Then, when you are ready, walk down to rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville and follow it east. At its end, the street opens onto a garden and a building that looks as if it has stepped out of a medieval book of hours.
8. Hôtel de Sens: The Archbishops' Medieval Palace

1 Rue du Figuier, 75004 Paris, France

At the end of the street, a castle from a fairy tale: pointed turrets with slate cones, a Gothic archway, a square tower, and in front of it a formal garden of clipped hedges. The Hôtel de Sens is one of the very last medieval private mansions still standing in Paris.

It was built between about 1475 and 1519 as the Paris residence of the archbishops of Sens. That sounds strange today, but until 1622 Paris did not even have its own archbishop: the bishop of Paris answered to Sens, a small cathedral town in Burgundy, and its archbishops needed a grand house for their visits to court. The turrets and battlements were for show more than for war... though in the age of the Wars of Religion, a little show of strength did no harm.

In 1605 a famous tenant moved in: Marguerite de Valois, Queen Margot, the first wife of Henry the Fourth, whose marriage had been annulled, now over fifty and still the subject of every scandal at court. The story goes that in 1606 one of her young favourites was shot dead at the door of her carriage by a jealous rival, right in front of this house. Margot demanded the killer's head and got it... and then left the house, unable to stand the place any longer.

Search the façade above the street: a cannonball is lodged in the stone, with a date carved beneath it: 28 July 1830, a souvenir of the Three Glorious Days, the July Revolution that toppled King Charles the Tenth. Since 1961 the building has housed the Bibliothèque Forney, a library devoted to decorative arts, posters, wallpapers and crafts. A restoration a few years ago left the stone so bright and clean that some Parisians joked it looked like a theme-park castle.

Judge for yourself... then walk a few steps north along rue du Figuier, turn right into rue Charlemagne, and right again into rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. On your right, behind a school playground, a long, battered wall of rough stone will appear, older by three centuries than anything you have seen so far.
9. The Wall of Philip Augustus & Village Saint-Paul

Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, 75004 Paris, France

Along rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul, a school sports ground is fenced in by a long, grey, battered wall of rough stone, with the stumps of two round towers, and teenagers play sport in its shadow. That wall is more than eight hundred years old.

In 1190, before leaving on the Third Crusade, King Philip Augustus ordered the people of Paris to surround their city with a wall, so that it would be safe while he was away fighting in the Holy Land. The right-bank section, the one in front of you, went up first, and within a quarter of a century the wall ran right round both banks of the Seine: about five kilometres of stone, with dozens of towers and fortified gates. For the first time, Paris had a shape.

The city soon outgrew it. Houses were built against both sides, using the wall as a back wall, a cellar, a staircase, and for centuries it simply disappeared inside the buildings. Fragments still survive all over central Paris, hidden in courtyards, car parks and basements. But this is the longest stretch still standing in the open, revealed when the old houses around it were cleared in the twentieth century.

The street name remembers the gardens that once stretched here, beside the parish church of Saint-Paul and the vast royal residence of Saint-Pol, where King Charles the Fifth kept lions, aviaries and orchards in the fourteenth century. Tradition says that François Rabelais, the great comic writer of the French Renaissance, died in 1553 in a house on this street and was buried in the old cemetery of Saint-Paul, which has long since vanished.

Now cross the street and slip through one of the passageways into Village Saint-Paul: a maze of linked courtyards, restored in the 1970s, full of antique dealers, small galleries and designers' workshops. Wander through to rue Saint-Paul, follow it north to rue Saint-Antoine, turn right, and look for the grand stone gateway of number 62.
10. Hôtel de Sully: The Minister's Mansion

62 Rue Saint-Antoine, 75004 Paris, France

Pass under the arch at 62 rue Saint-Antoine into a courtyard that is pure theatre: two stone sphinxes guarding the steps, and walls carved with figures representing the seasons and the elements, framed by tall windows and steep roofs. The traffic of rue Saint-Antoine fades behind you in a few steps.

The mansion was built between 1624 and 1630 by the architect Jean Androuet du Cerceau for a financier named Mesme Gallet. Legend says Gallet lost it at the gaming table before he could enjoy it. In 1634 it was bought by Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, a man then in his seventies, long out of power since the murder of his king and friend, Henry the Fourth, in 1610.

Sully's own life reads like a novel. As a Protestant boy of twelve, he survived the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 by walking through the bloody streets of Paris with a Catholic book of hours under his arm, so the story goes. He became Henry the Fourth's closest companion in war, and then his finance minister, the man who paid off the debts of a ruined kingdom, built roads and bridges, and had trees planted along the highways of France. He never gave up his Protestant faith, even when his king converted.

Walk through to the back of the courtyard and into the garden: clipped box hedges, gravel paths and, at the far end, a second, smaller building, an orangery where the household kept its citrus trees through the winter. Today the mansion is the headquarters of the national body that cares for France's historic monuments, which feels right for a house this old.

Now look for the little door in the far corner of the garden. It is one of the best tricks in Paris: go through it, and you step out, without warning, under the arcades of the most beautiful square in the city. If the door happens to be closed, walk round by rue de Birague instead.
11. Place des Vosges & Victor Hugo's House

Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris, France

Step out from the arcades into the square and turn slowly around. Thirty-six houses, nine on each side, red brick and white stone under steep blue-grey slate roofs, all resting on a continuous arcade; in the middle, a garden of lime trees, four fountains and a marble king on horseback. It is the oldest planned square in Paris, and the model for squares all over Europe.

Before the square, there was a royal palace here, the Hôtel des Tournelles. In 1559, in a tournament on rue Saint-Antoine, King Henry the Second was struck in the eye by the lance of Gabriel de Montgomery, captain of his Scottish guard, and died ten days later in the Tournelles. His widow, Catherine de' Medici, could not bear the place, and it was pulled down. For decades the site was a horse market.

Henry the Fourth commissioned the square in 1605 but was assassinated in 1610 and never saw it finished. It was inaugurated in April 1612 with a spectacular three-day festival, the Carrousel, celebrating the engagement of the young Louis the Thirteenth to Anne of Austria. It was called Place Royale, and only in 1800 was it renamed after the Vosges, the first department of France to pay its taxes in full. And look closely: on some façades the bricks are not bricks at all, but paint on plaster, a seventeenth-century economy.

Nobles flocked here, and so did trouble. In 1627, defying Cardinal Richelieu's ban on duelling, the count of Montmorency-Bouteville fought a duel in this square in broad daylight. Richelieu had him beheaded. The year before, Madame de Sévigné, whose house you saw earlier, was born at number 1 bis.

And in the southeast corner, at number 6, Victor Hugo lived from 1832 to 1848. Here he wrote plays and poems, received half of literary Paris, and began the novel that would become Les Misérables. His apartment has been a museum since 1903. Leave the square through the arch beneath the King's Pavilion on the south side, along rue de Birague, then turn left on rue Saint-Antoine and walk to the great open space at its end.
12. Place de la Bastille & the July Column

Place de la Bastille, 75004 Paris, France

You are standing at the edge of a huge, roaring roundabout. In the middle rises a green bronze column some fifty metres tall, and on top, balanced on one foot, a gilded winged figure carrying a torch and a broken chain: the Spirit of Liberty, about to take flight over Paris.

Here is the first surprise: the column has nothing to do with 1789. It commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, the Three Glorious Days that drove out King Charles the Tenth, and the names of hundreds of people killed in that fighting are inscribed on its shaft. It was inaugurated in 1840, and the vault beneath it holds the remains of the dead of 1830, and later of the revolution of 1848.

The fortress itself stood just to the west, where rue Saint-Antoine enters the square. The Bastille was built from 1370 under King Charles the Fifth to guard the eastern gate of Paris, and became a state prison, where the king could lock up anyone with a simple sealed letter, without trial. Voltaire was held here twice. On 14 July 1789 a crowd looking for gunpowder stormed it. Inside, they found only seven prisoners. The governor was killed, and his head was paraded through the streets on a pike.

Demolition began almost at once. A building contractor named Pierre-François Palloy turned the fortress into a business: he sold its stones as souvenirs, and had little models of the Bastille carved from them and sent to every department of France... like the one you saw in the Carnavalet. Other stones went into the Pont de la Concorde. Look on the pavement at the corner of boulevard Henri-Quatre for a line of paving stones tracing the outline of the old towers. Napoleon later planned a colossal bronze elephant fountain here; only a plaster model was ever built, and Victor Hugo gave it to the street boy Gavroche as a home in Les Misérables.

And so the walk ends where modern France was born, with the opera house built for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989 watching over the traffic. You came from the strand where Parisians were hired and hanged, through palaces, archives, a market, a wall, a royal square and the memory of the deported... to the place where a crowd decided that no king could lock them up again.