Description
The Hôtel de Ville is the city hall of Paris, a palace in French Renaissance style on its own large square in the 4th arrondissement, on the Right Bank. The city has been governed from this spot since 1357, and the building has been a stage of Parisian history ever since.
The main façade, 143 meters long, is crowded with statues: more than 230 sculptors carved 338 figures of famous Parisians, plus lions and allegories. Among them is the mathematician d'Alembert, the work of Auguste Rodin, finished in 1882.
On the garden wall to the south stands Étienne Marcel, the medieval provost of the merchants, a forerunner of the mayors, who bought the first city hall on this site.
Inside, the ceremonial rooms are lavishly decorated in the taste of the 1880s. The highlight is the Salle des Fêtes, the ballroom, conceived as a republican answer to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with frescoes of sixteen French provinces on its arches.
What looks like a Renaissance palace is in fact a 19th-century copy. The original, begun under Francis I in 1535 and finished in 1628, was set on fire by the Communards in May 1871, and almost all the city's older archives burned with it.
It was rebuilt between 1873 and 1892, larger than before, with a façade that reproduces the old one and entirely new interiors.
The square in front was once the Place de Grève, a river beach where boats unloaded wheat and wood and where public executions were held. In 1794 Robespierre was arrested inside the building after trying to take his own life.
In October 1870, when revolutionaries broke in and seized some of its members, the government escaped through a tunnel built in 1807, which still links the building to a nearby barracks. On 25 August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, General de Gaulle spoke from one of its windows: "Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!"
The main façade, 143 meters long, is crowded with statues: more than 230 sculptors carved 338 figures of famous Parisians, plus lions and allegories. Among them is the mathematician d'Alembert, the work of Auguste Rodin, finished in 1882.
On the garden wall to the south stands Étienne Marcel, the medieval provost of the merchants, a forerunner of the mayors, who bought the first city hall on this site.
Inside, the ceremonial rooms are lavishly decorated in the taste of the 1880s. The highlight is the Salle des Fêtes, the ballroom, conceived as a republican answer to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with frescoes of sixteen French provinces on its arches.
What looks like a Renaissance palace is in fact a 19th-century copy. The original, begun under Francis I in 1535 and finished in 1628, was set on fire by the Communards in May 1871, and almost all the city's older archives burned with it.
It was rebuilt between 1873 and 1892, larger than before, with a façade that reproduces the old one and entirely new interiors.
The square in front was once the Place de Grève, a river beach where boats unloaded wheat and wood and where public executions were held. In 1794 Robespierre was arrested inside the building after trying to take his own life.
In October 1870, when revolutionaries broke in and seized some of its members, the government escaped through a tunnel built in 1807, which still links the building to a nearby barracks. On 25 August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, General de Gaulle spoke from one of its windows: "Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!"