11th arrondissement

Highlights: Faubourg Saint-Antoine · Bastille · Oberkampf · Charonne · Nation · Roquette · Popincourt

Between République and Nation, the 11th arrondissement preserves the memory of a Paris at once hard-working and insurgent. Born of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where generations of woodworkers shaped the furniture of kings and later that of the bourgeoisie, this territory witnessed some of the greatest pages of revolutionary history, before becoming, street by street, one of the densest and most vibrant neighbourhoods in Paris. Its cobbled courtyards, its converted workshops and its history-laden squares tell today a story of ingenuity and character.

The privilege of wood, at the gates of the Bastille

It all begins in the Middle Ages, near the abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs, founded in the 12th century on the lands that would become the faubourg. A tradition, going back to letters attributed to Louis XI in 1471, holds that the craftsmen settled on the abbey's estate escaped the authority of the Parisian guilds. This privilege, contested and finally confirmed by Louis XIV in 1657 at the request of the abbess, opened the way to a freedom of work rare under the Ancien Régime, a stone's throw from the ramparts of the Bastille.

Joiners, cabinetmakers, turners, sculptors and gilders flocked to this faubourg where one could practise one's craft without belonging to a sworn guild. Wood became the material of the place: here, century after century, was shaped the furniture of royal palaces as well as that of bourgeois interiors, making the faubourg Saint-Antoine the foremost centre of furniture-making in France, a reputation its craftsmen would carry right into our contemporary workshops.

Working-class courtyards and grand Haussmannian avenues

The organisation of work shaped a singular urban form: along the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, dozens of courtyards and passages — the Cour Damoye, the passage du Chantier, the Cour de l'Étoile d'Or or the Cour de la Bonne Graine — sheltered workshops, timber stores and stacked dwellings. Each courtyard brought together the complementary trades of a single chain of manufacture, from sawing to gilding. This architecture of artisanal production, unique to Paris, still structures the urban fabric of the arrondissement today.

In the 19th century, Baron Haussmann cut through the boulevard Voltaire and the avenue de la République, opening broad perspectives across the old medieval and faubourg fabric. These new arteries linked the Bastille to the place de la Nation and to the place de la République, modernising traffic and housing without entirely erasing the artisanal grid inherited from earlier centuries.

"This old faubourg, peopled like an ant-hill, industrious, courageous and choleric as a beehive, quivered in expectation and in longing for an upheaval."Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

The faubourg in arms: from the Bastille to the Commune

On 14 July 1789, it was largely the inhabitants of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, angry workers and craftsmen, who marched on the Bastille and seized the royal fortress. Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables, would describe this neighbourhood as that old faubourg, peopled like an ant-hill, industrious, courageous and choleric as a beehive, which quivered in expectation and in longing for an upheaval. Throughout the 19th century, the faubourg remained a hotbed of insurrection: on the place de la Bastille, the July Column, raised between 1835 and 1840 and inaugurated on 28 July 1840, honours the memory of the fighters who fell during the Trois Glorieuses of July 1830.

In 1848, new barricades rose in these same streets. Then, during the Paris Commune, in May 1871, it was in the 11th arrondissement, on the rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, that one of the very last barricades of the Semaine sanglante fell, on 28 May 1871, the tragic and symbolic full stop to a century of popular insurrections born within these walls.

Oberkampf, the rue de Lappe and the nights of the people

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the faubourg kept its working-class soul while growing more diverse. The rue Oberkampf, which bears the name of the manufacturer Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, creator of the famous printed toiles de Jouy, became a lively popular thoroughfare. Nearby, the rue de Lappe filled with bals musette where the Auvergnat community, come to seek their fortune in Paris, set the whole capital dancing to the sound of the accordion during the interwar years.

In the second half of the 20th century, the joinery workshops gradually closed, replaced by galleries, cafés and lofts installed in former factories. This movement of conversion, begun in the 1980s and then amplified in the following decades around Oberkampf and Ménilmontant, profoundly transformed the face of the neighbourhood without ever erasing the traces of its artisanal past, still visible in the courtyards and workshop façades.

A dense, vibrant neighbourhood, true to itself

Today, the 11th arrondissement is the most densely populated in Paris, an intensity of life that translates into a constant effervescence: lively markets, such as the one on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir at the gates of the Bastille, historic venues such as the Cirque d'Hiver, built in 1852, and a scene of designers, makers and art craftsmen who perpetuate, in other forms, the manual vocation of the faubourg. Around Charonne, Roquette or Popincourt, each street keeps its own, almost village-like scale, at the heart of a resolutely urban arrondissement.

To live in the 11th is to choose a Paris on a human scale, where the cobbled courtyards of the 18th century sit alongside lively terraces and contemporary interiors. It is to find, behind each carriage door, the memory of an exceptional craftsmanship, and to make one's own an art of living where the character of the place is matched, avenue after avenue, by the quiet elegance of things well made.