Hôtel de Ville

The story of Hôtel de Ville

The Hôtel de Ville is Paris’s city hall, and the most striking thing in front of you is that this municipal building has been rebuilt after being burned down and still keeps the look of a grand Renaissance palace on the outside.

Paris’s administration has been on this site since 1357, when Étienne Marcel, the provost of the merchants of Paris, bought the maison aux piliers, the House of Pillars, in the name of the municipality. In other words, this is not just a government office that happened to land here later; the city has been run from this spot for centuries. Before that, the administration was elsewhere, near the Châtelet.

What you are looking at now is the result of a long sequence of building campaigns. Francis I began the south wing in 1535, and the north wing was built under Henry IV and Louis XIII between 1605 and 1628. After the Paris Commune set fire to the building in May 1871, destroying the city archives as well as the old interior, the exterior was rebuilt between 1874 and 1882 following the original design, but larger, while the inside was considerably modified. Théodore Ballu is named as the architect, and the rebuilding was led by Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes. The style is Renaissance Revival architecture, which makes sense once you look at the façade: it was designed to echo the older building rather than replace it with something completely modern.

Stand back a little and take in the main front. It runs 143 metres long and 18.8 metres high, with the corner pavilions reaching 26.8 metres and the bell tower 50 metres. The centre has an avant-corps, and the ends rise into pavilions with square corbelled turrets. There are two gates pierced through these turrets leading to courtyards, closed by wrought-iron gates bearing the coat of arms of the City of Paris. The central ceremonial doors under the clock are flanked by allegorical figures of Art by Laurent Marqueste and Science by Jules Blanchard.

The façade is also crowded with sculpture. Some 230 sculptors produced 338 individual figures of famous Parisians on the building, along with lions and other decorative figures. Among the names mentioned are Ernest-Eugène Hiolle, Henri Chapu, and Auguste Rodin. Rodin’s figure here is Jean le Rond d’Alembert, finished in 1882. On the south side, the statue on the garden wall is of Étienne Marcel, the same municipal leader tied to the building’s early history. He was lynched in 1358 after trying to assert the city’s powers too energetically.

Inside, the building serves several civic functions. It houses the local government council, and since 1977 it has also housed the mayors of Paris and their cabinets. It is used as a venue for large receptions, which fits the scale of the ceremonial rooms described here: the salle des fêtes was designed as a republican replica of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the Salon d’entrée Nord includes murals by Henri-Camille Danger as well as a painting called Les Saisons by Puvis de Chavannes.

The building has a hard-won official status too. It was designated a monument historique by the French government in 1975, and the listed heritage dates given are 1975-01-15 and 1988-04-27. That protection matters because this is a working municipal headquarters as well as a historic monument.

If you want one practical thing to do here, look closely at the transition between the old Renaissance idea and the later reconstruction: the exterior was intentionally kept in the older style, but enlarged. That contrast is the whole story of the Hôtel de Ville in stone.