The Marais in Paris is without a doubt my favorite neighborhood in the City of Light, and there are quite a few reasons for that. I’ll give you just two.
The first reason is its fascinating history, and the fact that Napoleon III never touched it while he was rebuilding all of Paris during the 19th century. As a result, a huge share of the grand mansions and romantic little streets stayed exactly as they were, instead of being replaced by wide boulevards. So if you’re a history lover like me, wandering through this neighborhood is pure pleasure, and if you keep your eyes and ears open, you might even run into a few friendly ghosts.
Since not everyone knows the fascinating history of the Marais, and not everyone has time to read all the books I’ve read about this neighborhood, I decided to give you a summary of the history of this magical place. It will make your visit so much richer, because you won’t just see the beautiful buildings, you’ll also know the stories behind them, some of which are quite juicy.
From Jerusalem to Paris: how the Templars created the Marais
The neighborhood is named after the marshes (marais in French) that formed when the Seine overflowed its banks during the Middle Ages. Religious orders drained the marshes, and if you thought only our pioneers knew how to do that kind of work, think again. As you walk around the Marais, you’ll notice that several of its main streets include the word Temple (Rue du Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, and others), and there’s a good reason for that: it was the members of the Knights Templar who turned the Marais into an important neighborhood of Paris.
The Templars were an order of poor knights, created after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. The order was so poor that its emblem showed two knights riding a single horse, since they didn’t have the money to give each knight his own mount.
But as you’ll see, the Templars’ financial situation improved dramatically once they settled in Jerusalem. The reason behind this order’s extremely fast enrichment remains shrouded in mystery, but it has kept generations of writers well fed, including Dan Brown, who wrote “The Da Vinci Code.” Whether the Templars really did find the Holy Grail while digging under Solomon’s stables (according to Dan Brown and more than a few others) or whether they simply learned how to balance a budget, the order began growing rich during the 12th century. Around that time, they built the Temple fortress in Paris, on the spot where the city hall of the 3rd arrondissement stands today, named after the Temple in Jerusalem, of course.
When the Templars were expelled from the Holy Land by the Muslims, they transformed from an order of warriors into an order of bankers, lending money to almost every royal house in Europe. But as their wealth grew, so did the envy and hatred directed at the order. In 1305, Philip IV of France, whom you can read about in my article on the affair of the Tour de Nesle, had to hide inside the Temple fortress to escape the citizens of Paris, who were furious over a new tax he had imposed. While the king waited for the people’s anger to cool down, he walked around the fortress and saw the immense wealth stored there. By the time he came out, he had decided that this wealth should be his.
On Friday, October 13, 1307, the king’s soldiers stormed the fortress and arrested the Templars in a complete surprise (this, by the way, is why Friday the 13th is considered an unlucky day in Christian tradition). Philip IV, working together with Pope Clement V to seize the Templars’ wealth, accused them in a show trial of sodomy, devil worship, and similar offenses. In 1314, Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar, was burned at the stake not far from where the Pont Neuf stands today.
The Marais becomes a royal neighborhood
Once the Knights Templar were dissolved, their properties in the Marais passed to rival orders of knights and monks, chief among them the Hospitallers. In 1357, the future King Charles V decided to move into the Marais. The reason was a trauma he had just experienced: Étienne Marcel, the provost of the merchants of Paris, had broken into his palace on the Île de la Cité and murdered two of his senior aides right in front of him. Realizing that his palace wasn’t secure enough, the king decided to move to the Hôtel Saint-Pol in the southern part of the Marais, and the nobility moved along with him. Nothing remains of that palace today, sadly, but in its place you’ll find the Village Saint-Paul, home to quite a few small antique shops.
The name Saint-Paul, which stuck to this part of the neighborhood, comes from the old Église Saint-Paul, demolished in 1797. Its congregation then moved to the nearby Jesuit church, which is how the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis got its double name.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Marais kept growing, and the first private mansions, known in French as hôtels particuliers, began to appear. One of the few mansions that survived from that era is the Hôtel de Sens, built at the end of the 15th century and considered today the third-oldest building in Paris. At the start of the 17th century, King Henri IV built the Place Royale, which after the French Revolution became Place des Vosges. This beautiful square drew in all the high nobility of the period, and anyone who couldn’t afford to live right on the square built themselves a mansion nearby instead.
There’s no question the 17th century was the Marais’s golden age. Beyond all the gorgeous mansions built there, which I’ll get to later, the Marais also became a leading intellectual center in France. Here you’d find the most important literary salons of the period, such as the salon of Madame de Scudéry, where the earliest seeds of feminism took root (you can read about this in my article The Headless Woman). And you can’t talk about the Marais without mentioning some of the most famous nobles and noblewomen who lived there, chief among them Madame de Sévigné, thanks to whose letters we know exactly what went on at the court of Louis XIV.
The Marais’s golden age started coming to an end in the late 1680s, when the royal court moved from Paris to the Palace of Versailles. As a result, many of the nobles who lived in the Marais, located on the eastern edge of Paris, moved to the western neighborhoods to stay closer to the king. The decline wasn’t sudden but gradual, as nobles slowly left the neighborhood and their mansions were abandoned or rented out. Then, in the 1790s, the guillotine came down on the Marais and wiped out the nobles who were still living there and hadn’t managed to flee in time.
As a result, the mansions started to crumble. Some were turned into small workshops, others were split into tiny apartments and rented out to people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. The Marais became a poor neighborhood.
Paris’s Jewish quarter
During the 19th century, as persecution of Jews intensified in Eastern Europe and Russia, a wave of Jewish refugees arrived in France. Since these refugees were very poor, they settled in the Marais, which by then had long since become a neglected, impoverished neighborhood. The Jewish quarter of Paris was centered mainly around Rue des Rosiers, Rue du Roi de Sicile, Rue Vieille du Temple, and Rue des Écouffes, where Jews lived crowded together in great poverty. But little by little, the community there grew and established itself, even building a number of synagogues, the largest and grandest of which is the synagogue on Rue Pavée (Tournelle), whose second facade opens right onto Place des Vosges.
But the Jewish renaissance didn’t last long. In 1940, France was occupied by the Nazis, and before long, Germany’s race laws were being applied to Jews there as well. In 1942, the Germans, working in full cooperation with the Paris police, began arresting the Jews who lived in the Marais and across the rest of the City of Light. They were first taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium, and held there in horrific conditions. Some of the Jews held there took their own lives or died of disease, while the rest were sent to the transit camp at Drancy, and from there to Auschwitz.
By the end of the war, around 78,000 Jews had been murdered, roughly a quarter of the entire Jewish population of France. Today, as you walk through the Marais, you’ll see black plaques noting how many Jewish students attended a particular school, and how many of them were deported to the camps. Don’t assume this is an initiative of the city of Paris. It isn’t. Jacques Chirac did acknowledge France’s role in 1995 (about 50 years after the end of World War II), but on the whole, the French have tended to distance themselves from responsibility for the killings and prefer to place the blame on the Germans. So it wasn’t the city of Paris that put up these plaques, but one of the Jewish organizations, and they remind us, day after day, of the horrors of the past, even as we enjoy strolling through the Marais of the present.
The Marais’s second golden age
By the end of World War II, the Marais was considered unfit for human habitation. In the 1950s, the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) even proposed tearing the neighborhood down and putting up housing blocks in its place. If you don’t believe me, listen to this podcast:
Fortunately, André Malraux, who served as France’s minister of culture in the 1960s, decided the Marais was part of the heritage of Paris and that it must not be destroyed. Instead, he chose to invest billions of francs in restoring the Marais and ordered property owners to tear down ugly additions and restore the facades of their buildings.
As a result, the sparkle and beauty returned to the Marais, and it became once again one of the liveliest neighborhoods in Paris, thanks to its mansions, boutiques, galleries, and restaurants. Also, since the second half of the 20th century, the Marais has been the most important center of the gay community in Paris. That’s why you’ll find quite a few gay clubs and cafés there, and even a special bakery you can read about in my article Is the Baguette Really French?.
Practical information for visiting the Marais
Now that you’ve done your “homework,” you’re ready to explore the Marais (and maybe even to live there). That’s exactly why I created the Marais travel guide page on the site, where you’ll find all the practical information you need to plan your trip: recommended hotels and apartments, restaurants, walking routes, articles about attractions, and more.
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