20th arrondissement

Highlights: Belleville · Ménilmontant · Père-Lachaise · Charonne · Gambetta · Campagne à Paris

Perched on the hills of eastern Paris, the 20th arrondissement has kept, more than any other, its soul of villages. From Belleville to Charonne, from Ménilmontant to the Père-Lachaise, it blends working-class memory, cosmopolitan mingling and artistic effervescence. Its steep lanes, its studios and its lively squares compose an authentic Paris, rebellious and creative, faithful to its faubourg origins.

Villages of vineyards and springs

Before 1860, Belleville, Ménilmontant and Charonne were rural communes, covered with vineyards, orchards and guinguettes where Parisians came up to drink and dance on Sundays. Their springs supplied the city with water, captured by ancient aqueducts of which a few inspection wells survive.

The incorporation into Paris in 1860 was not enough to erase this village identity: the eastern hills kept their winding lanes, their stairways and their low houses, a world away from the grand boulevards of the centre.

The Père-Lachaise, a garden of memories

In 1804, on the heights of Charonne, the cimetière de l'Est opened, soon called Père-Lachaise after the confessor of Louis XIV who owned these lands. Designed as a landscaped garden by the architect Brongniart, it became the most famous cemetery in the world.

Molière, Balzac, Chopin, Édith Piaf and Oscar Wilde rest here among the shaded avenues. Against its boundary wall, the Mur des Fédérés recalls the execution of the last fighters of the Commune, on 28 May 1871, making the place a great symbol of working-class memory.

The rebellious faubourg

A working-class arrondissement par excellence, the 20th took part in every struggle of the people of Paris. During the Semaine sanglante of May 1871, Belleville and Ménilmontant sheltered the last resistance of the Commune, before the final surrender at the foot of the Père-Lachaise.

This working-class and rebellious tradition long nourished the identity of the neighbourhood, a land of activists, cabaret songwriters and artists, of which the accordion of the Ménilmontant dance halls and the refrains of the young Édith Piaf, born, legend has it, on a Belleville pavement, remain the emblems.

The mosaic of peoples

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Belleville welcomed successive waves of immigration, coming from the provinces and then from central Europe, the Maghreb, Africa and Asia. The neighbourhood became one of the most cosmopolitan in Paris, where shops, cuisines and languages from all over the world stand side by side on a single street.

This diversity, long synonymous with a modest and hard-working life, today makes the richness and vitality of the 20th, between the Belleville market, artists' studios and the street-art frescoes that cover the walls of Ménilmontant.

Secret villas and the art of living

The arrondissement conceals unsuspected enclaves: the Campagne à Paris, an estate of flowered houses perched near the porte de Bagnolet, or the surroundings of the old Romanesque church of Saint-Germain-de-Charonne, one of the few in Paris to have kept its village cemetery. So many havens of tranquillity at the heart of the city.

To live in the 20th is to choose a Paris of hills and villages, working-class and creative, where the faubourg memory, the diversity of cultures and the charm of the lanes compose a warm art of living, away from the tourist trails.