Paris Le Marais from the Hôtel de Ville through Place des Vosges

The façade in front of you belongs to the city hall of Paris. It looks like a Renaissance palace, with a long sculpted front, a central tower, and statues in the niches. What you are seeing is a nineteenth-century rebuild. The municipal seat has stood on this ground since 1357, when Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants, bought a house here called the Maison aux Piliers, on the old Place de Grève, the river strand. A new Hôtel de Ville was begun in 1533, to plans by Pierre de Chambiges and the Italian architect Dominique de Cortone, known as Boccador; his statue is on this façade. The first stone was laid on 15 July 1533, and the building was finished in 1628. On 24 May 1871, during the fighting in Paris that was later called the Semaine sanglante, Communards set fire to the Hôtel de Ville. The historic library and the civil-status records of Parisians were lost in the fire. In 1873 the municipal council, then sitting at the Palais du Luxembourg, launched a competition to rebuild it. Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes won, with a design that restored a Renaissance façade in the spirit of the original. The work was finished in 1882. This is the building you are looking at. On 25 August 1944, the day Paris was liberated, General de Gaulle came here in the evening and spoke from the Town Hall. The square still carries, in its official name, the Esplanade de la Libération. The square itself is public. Interiors are sometimes shown on booked visits; this walk stays outside. When you are ready, walk east across the square, about 170 metres, to the small Place Saint-Gervais. Stop by the elm tree on the parvis, in front of the church façade.

An elm stands in the middle of this small square, in front of a tall classical façade. The church is Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, one of the older parish churches of Paris, long a little hidden behind the Town Hall. The first stone of the present building was laid in 1494, in a Flamboyant Gothic style. The façade in front of you was begun only in 1616, in a Greco-Latin style, and the work on the church was far enough along by 1644 for Madame de Sévigné to be married here. Victor Baltard restored the building between 1827 and 1844. Since 1975 it has been the home of the Fraternités monastiques de Jérusalem. You can go in if it is open; this narration is from the parvis. The elm on this parvis continues a very old custom. A tree has stood in this place since the Middle Ages, and people once settled debts and held meetings under it. The tree you see is a successor, planted in the first half of the twentieth century; sources disagree on the exact year. The garden laid out on this parvis is a memorial to the victims of the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris. On Good Friday, 29 March 1918, during the office, a shell from a German long-range gun, fired from about 140 kilometres away, struck the church. Part of the vault fell on the congregation. The City of Paris gives an official toll of 91 dead and about sixty wounded. A commemorative chapel in the south aisle is dedicated to the victims. When you are ready, walk east along rue François-Miron, about 230 metres, and stop in front of the two half-timbered houses at numbers 11 and 13, on the north side of the street.

These two narrow houses, with their exposed timber frames and plaster panels, are a rare sight in Paris. Number 11, on the left, is the house known as à l'enseigne du Faucheur, the Sign of the Reaper. Number 13, with the reconstructed gable, is à l'enseigne du Mouton, the Sign of the Sheep. Before streets were numbered, houses were known by hanging signs like these. The city's own plaque on the wall says the two houses are attested at the beginning of the sixteenth century and may, in their earliest form, go back to the fourteenth. Their present look, with the timber uncovered, dates from a restoration in 1967. The city also records that a royal edict of 1607 required timber frames to be covered in plaster, to reduce the risk of fire, and that the gable of number 13 was cut down in the seventeenth century and rebuilt in that 1967 campaign. The jettying — each floor stepping out over the street — was not put back. The houses are private and are not open to visitors. A few minutes' walk south of here, on rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier and the Allée des Justes parmi les Nations, is the Mémorial de la Shoah, the memorial and museum of the Holocaust in France. If you want to visit the exhibition, you can do that now and rejoin the walk, or come back later. This tour stays on the street and does not narrate inside the memorial. Continue north from these houses, about 350 metres, along rue Cloche-Perce and into rue des Rosiers. Stop in the street around number 16.

Rue des Rosiers is a short, dense street of shops, bakeries and restaurants. You are in the part of the Marais still called the Pletzl, “little place” in Yiddish, around this street and Place Saint-Paul. The Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, a short walk north-west of here in the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, sets out the history of the Jewish community in this quarter. A community was already living in the Marais in the thirteenth century, and it remained until the expulsion of Jews from the kingdom of France in the following century. After emancipation in 1791, a community formed again, first with Jewish arrivals from Alsace from the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, from the 1880s, with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fleeing poverty and persecution. They built synagogues and opened shops around this street. Just south of this street, on rue Pavée, there is a synagogue with an Art Nouveau façade; look at it from the street if you wish, and do not go in during services unless you are invited. In the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish arrivals from North Africa gave the quarter a further lease of life, which you can still see in the shops and restaurants. During the Second World War, the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme writes, the Marais was ravaged by the Shoah, and more than half of its Jewish residents were murdered in the camps. The place to learn more, with archives, a wall of names and a museum, is the Mémorial de la Shoah, a few minutes' walk south, on the Allée des Justes parmi les Nations. This walk does not go inside. When you are ready, walk west along rue des Rosiers, then turn north on rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, about 460 metres in all, to the gateway of the Hôtel de Soubise at 60 rue des Francs-Bourgeois. On the way you pass the school at number 10, rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais. The parvis in front of it was named by the City of Paris the Parvis des 260 Enfants, for 260 children from this school who were deported and murdered because they were Jewish. A plaque on the school records this. Then continue to the Archives.

The long, low façade and the colonnaded courtyard behind this gateway belong to the Hôtel de Soubise, the Paris home of the Archives nationales. In March 1700, François de Rohan-Soubise and his wife, Anne Chabot de Rohan, bought the old Hôtel de Guise, which itself had succeeded a medieval Hôtel de Clisson. They asked the architect Pierre Alexis Delamair to remake it. Between 1705 and 1708 he built this cour d'honneur, with its peristyle of paired columns and a monumental classical façade. The entrance you are looking at, at number 60, is still the way in. In the 1730s the next generation called in Germain Boffrand. From 1735 he built an oval pavilion and, from 1736, decorated the state rooms in the rocaille style, with work by François Boucher, Charles Natoire and others. Those interiors are among the finest surviving rooms of the Louis XV period, and they are part of the museum visit. The State bought the house by an imperial decree of 6 March 1808 and assigned it to the Archives of the Empire. The Musée des Archives nationales opened in the state rooms in 1867. Official hours, checked in November 2026, were 10:00 to 17:30 on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and 14:00 to 17:30 on Saturday and Sunday, with later Sunday and Saturday hours during major exhibitions. The museum is closed on Tuesdays and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Entry to the museum is free. You reach it by crossing this courtyard; bags are checked at the gate. This walk stays on the street if you prefer. Walk east along rue des Francs-Bourgeois, then north toward rue de Thorigny, about 560 metres, and stop on the sidewalk in front of the Hôtel Salé, now the Musée national Picasso-Paris, at number 5.

The large hôtel behind this gateway is the Hôtel Salé, now the Musée national Picasso-Paris. It was built for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a financier who farmed the salt tax, which is how the house got its nickname: salé, salty. He bought a plot of about 3,700 square metres north of rue de la Perle and chose a young architect, Jean Boullier de Bourges, of whom little else is known. The work was finished in the last days of 1659. The sculpted decoration, including the main staircase, was entrusted to the brothers Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy and to Martin Desjardins. The house is a mid-seventeenth-century town mansion on a grand scale, with a courtyard façade of seven bays and a lot of sculpture. Pierre Aubert did not enjoy it for long. In 1663 he fell in the same financial scandal that brought down Nicolas Fouquet, and the house passed through a long chain of occupants. The museum's own history notes a Venetian embassy, a boarding school where Balzac was a pupil, and later workshops and a municipal school of art trades. The City of Paris acquired the building in 1964, and it was listed as a historic monument on 29 October 1968. None of the original contents survive. It now holds the national Picasso museum. The visit is ticketed. Official hours, checked in November 2026, were 9:30 to 18:00, Tuesday to Sunday, with last entry at 17:15; the museum is closed on Mondays and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December, and it is free on the first Sunday of the month. This walk stays on the street. Walk south, about 440 metres, to the visitor entrance of the Musée Carnavalet at 23 rue Madame de Sévigné. Stop on the sidewalk there.

The entrance at 23 rue Madame de Sévigné leads into the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, the City of Paris museum of the history of the city. It occupies historic hôtels on this street, in the middle of the quarter you have just been walking. If you want a single indoor visit on this route, this is the most direct one: the permanent collections are free, with no reservation, and they take you from the Roman city on the island through the streets, rooms and revolutions of later Paris. Official hours, checked in November 2026, were 10:00 to 18:00, Tuesday to Sunday. Last entry to the permanent collections is at 17:15; the rooms begin to close at 17:45. The museum is closed on Mondays and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Temporary exhibitions are ticketed. Bags are checked, and large luggage is not admitted. This walk does not require you to go in. If you do, come back out to this street to pick up the walk. Continue south-east, about 350 metres, into Place des Vosges. If the garden gates are open, walk in and stop near the statue in the middle. If they are closed, stand under the arcades and look in.

Thirty-six pavilions of red brick and pale stone stand in a regular square, with a continuous arcade at ground level and slate roofs above. This is Place des Vosges, laid out as the Place Royale for Henri IV. The City of Paris dates the project to 1605 and its completion to 1612, under Louis XIII. The Bibliothèque nationale de France also gives the span 1605 to 1612, and describes the three bands you can see: stone arcades at the bottom, brick and stone on the two main floors, and blue-grey slate roofs with dormers and tall chimneys. The first floor, with the taller windows, was the étage noble, for reception rooms. The limestone of the arcades, the BnF notes, came from the quarries of Saint-Leu, north of Paris. The King's and Queen's pavilions rise higher on the south and north sides. Under the arches you can walk the square under cover; musicians still use the vaults. In the garden stands an equestrian statue of Louis XIII. The city dates the first statue to 1639. The bronze was melted down during the Revolution and replaced, in 1819, by a marble copy. The garden, Square Louis XIII, has its own opening hours, which change with the season; in late autumn 2026 the city listed 8:00 to 17:45 on weekdays and 9:00 to 17:45 at weekends. The arcades remain the public way around the square if the gates are shut. At number 6, the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée at the south-east corner, is the Maison de Victor Hugo, a city museum in the house where, the city's garden page says, he wrote Ruy Blas among other works. You can visit it separately if you wish; look for the tricolour over the door. The city also notes that Madame de Sévigné was born at number 1 bis. The square took the name Place des Vosges at the end of the eighteenth century. The City of Paris dates the renaming to 1799, after the département of the Vosges, which it says was the first in France to have paid the land tax. Leave the square at the south-west corner, about 270 metres, for the Hôtel de Sully. If the garden of the hôtel is open, you can go through the orangerie door straight into it. Otherwise walk around to the street façade at 62 rue Saint-Antoine.

The carved gateway at 62 rue Saint-Antoine opens into the Hôtel de Sully, now the headquarters of the Centre des monuments nationaux. The house was begun in 1624, when Mesme Gallet, a controller of finances, decided to build a town mansion in the Marais, then a fashionable quarter, with a garden and an orangerie, and a way through to the Place Royale, today's Place des Vosges. In 1634 Maximilien de Béthune, first duke of Sully, the former finance minister and superintendent of buildings to Henri IV, bought the house. He finished the decoration and spent his last years here. His grandson, the second duke, added a wing on the garden side in 1660. The family name has stayed on the building. The hôtel was listed as a historic monument in 1862. The State acquired it in 1944, and a long restoration followed, completed with the orangerie in 1973. Since 1967 it has housed what is now the Centre des monuments nationaux. The interiors are closed except on booked guided visits. The courtyard, with its sculpted decoration, and the garden, restored in early 2023, are free and, according to the monument's own page checked in November 2026, open every day from 9:00 to 19:00, with annual closures on 1 January, 1 May, 1 and 11 November, and 25 December. You can walk through the garden and the orangerie to Place des Vosges, or arrive from the square the other way, as this walk does. Push the door of the right-hand pavilion if you have come from the square. Walk west from here, about 280 metres, to rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. Stop on the public street, looking at the long stretch of medieval wall that runs beside the sports ground. The courtyards known as Village Saint-Paul open off the streets around it.

A high stone wall runs along the far side of the sports ground, with the remains of towers in its length. This is a surviving stretch of the enceinte of Philippe Auguste, the wall King Philip II had built around Paris at the end of the twelfth century, before he left on crusade, to protect the city, the City of Paris says, from the Anglo-Norman threat. The same city page dates the work to the years 1190 to 1209, and describes a wall about 5.1 kilometres long and 9 metres high, with a tower every 60 metres. From this street you can also see what the city names as remains of the Tour Montgomery and the Poterne Saint-Paul, in the sports ground of the Jardins-Saint-Paul. The vestiges at numbers 17, 19 and 21 were listed as a historic monument in 1889. Stay on the public street; the playground itself is not the path. The wall is best read from here, as a long, plain defensive line that once closed the city on this side, a few hundred metres north of the river. Around you, between rue Saint-Paul, rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul and the streets toward Saint-Antoine, a set of courtyards and passages is signed as Village Saint-Paul. They are worth a slow walk: antique shops and quiet yards behind the street fronts. The name is a modern one for this cluster of courtyards. The older fact on this corner is the wall. When you are ready, continue west, about 220 metres, to the Hôtel de Sens, at the corner of rue du Figuier and rue de l'Hôtel de Ville. Stop on the street, looking at the turrets and the pointed doorway.

The house in front of you, with its corner turrets, steep roofs and a great pointed doorway, is the Hôtel de Sens, one of the rare surviving pieces of medieval domestic architecture in Paris. It was built between 1475 and 1519 for Tristan de Salazar, archbishop of Sens, at a time when the bishop of Paris came under the archbishopric of Sens, which is why a Sens palace stands here rather than in its own city. The City of Paris, and the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, both date the building to those years and call it a rare civil medieval survival. Later archbishops used it little. Queen Margot, the first wife of Henri IV, stayed here for some months in 1606. The archbishops left in 1622. The house was later let, then sold as national property at the Revolution, and through the nineteenth century it was put to hard uses — among them, the city lists, a haulage firm, a laundry and a jam factory — and badly damaged. The City of Paris bought it in 1911, in an extreme state of decay. Restoration began in 1929 and was not finished until 1961, when the Bibliothèque Forney moved in. The library, which specialises in the decorative arts and the crafts, is still here, at 1 rue du Figuier. Official hours, checked in November 2026, were 11:00 to 19:00 Tuesday to Friday, and 12:00 to 19:00 on Saturday; it is closed on Sunday and Monday. You can look at the courtyard and, when it is open, the small public garden beside the house. This walk ends on the street. You have walked about 3.3 kilometres, from the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, through the old Marais and Place des Vosges, to this mansion by the river. Métro Pont Marie, on line 7, is a short walk south; Saint-Paul, on line 1, is back to the north. Pont Marie and Île Saint-Louis lie just across the water, and the parvis of Notre-Dame, where the Île de la Cité and Latin Quarter walk begins, is a few minutes west along the quay if you want to join the two routes. End of the walk.