Development and Decay under the Bourbons

With the accession of Henry IV, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty, France entered two centuries of great expansion and glory and Paris once again became the greatest metropolis in Europe.

His builders extended the Louvre west along the Seine and joined it to the Palace of the Tuileries.

He built a new stone bridge, the Pont Neuf, which became the city’s central artery, and the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), the city’s first public square.

Henry also provided a second hospital for Paris, Hôpital Saint-Louis, which was built outside the city walls in order to quarantine plague-ridden patients.

Henry’s assassination in 1610 forced the cancellation of the king’s most spectacular urban project, the Place de France.

As planned, the square would have been the city’s new eastern gateway, complete with radiating wide arteries and a canal. Some of the present-day streets in the Marais are remnants of this aborted project.

Henry’s son Louis XIII (1610-1643) undertook a significant expansion of Paris and extended the walls farther to the northwest.

During his reign, the Queen Mother Marie de Médicis, Henry IV’s widow, built the Palais du Luxembourg on the Left Bank and opened the Cours-la-Reine promenade along the Right Bank of the Seine, west of the Palace of the Tuileries.

Louis XIII laid out the Jardin des Plantes, east of the Latin Quarter, as a garden for medicinal herbs. Louis XIII’s influential minister, Cardinal Richelieu, built the Palais-Cardinal (now the Palais-Royal) north of the Louvre, which triggered the full-scale development of the neighborhood.

In the mid-17th century the two islets east of the Île de la Cité were joined to form the Île Saint-Louis, and the new island was quickly built up.

~~~ Construction and Expansion ~~~
Louis XIV was four years old when he came to the throne in 1643. While he was a minor, the government was largely in the hands of the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, whose palace, the Hôtel Mazarin, was located north of the Palais-Royal.

From 1648 to 1653, during the early years of Louis XIV’s rule, the French nobility led a series of revolts against the monarchy.

The rebellion, known as the Fronde, took place in the streets of Paris and drove the royal family out of the city to its residence in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris.

During Louis XIV’s long reign (1643-1715) he constructed many new buildings and monuments, and made several significant improvements to the city’s infrastructure.

When the Fronde revolt was quashed, Louis XIV settled in the Louvre, which he embellished further during his residence.

A notable addition was the massive colonnade (designed by architect Claude Perrault) along the east facade of the structure.

At the same time, Louis XIV undertook the construction of the extravagant Palace of Versailles west of Paris, where he moved in 1682.

French landscape architect André Le Nôtre designed the Jardins des Tuileries (Tuileries Gardens) for Louis XIV, and also laid out the lower part of the Champs-Élysées.

In 1670 Louis XIV decided to demolish the city walls and make Paris an open city for the first time in its history.

The Grands Boulevards, a semicircular tree-lined promenade between the present-day Place de la Madeleine and Place de la République, replaced the walls on the Right Bank.

Two triumphal arches, commemorating Louis XIV’s military victories, were erected along the Grands Boulevards: Porte Saint-Denis and Porte Saint-Martin.

Louis XIV also built two colossal institutions on the Left Bank. West of the old city walls, the Hôtel des Invalides, a hospice for war veterans, was designed by French architect Libéral Bruant and completed by French architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart.

To the east, the Salpêtrière, designed by Louis Le Vau (and with a chapel by Bruant), was built as a general hospital for the poor and a shelter for the homeless.

Homelessness was a major social concern at the time, affecting an estimated 40,000 Parisians—a full 10 percent of the population.

The construction of the Pont Royal in 1689 linked the Palace of the Tuileries to the Left Bank and boosted the development of the Faubourg Saint-Germain neighborhood.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, by the Tuileries, became fashionable aristocratic residential areas in the 18th century.

The expansion of the city continued during the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774).
On the Right Bank, he built Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) and extended the Champs-Élysées.
On the Left Bank, the École Militaire and its training grounds, the Champ de Mars, were constructed.

Louis XV also constructed the Panthéon and laid out the semicircular Boulevards du Midi on the Left Bank to mirror the Right Bank’s Grands Boulevards.

During the reign of Louis XVI (1774-1792), a new wall marked the boundaries of the growing city. The wall was built between 1784 and 1787, in order to ease the collection of taxes on goods imported into the city.

~~~ Revolutionary Paris ~~~
Most of the events of the French Revolution, in which the French monarchy was overthrown in favor of a French republic, took place in Paris, and the event catapulted Paris into the modern age.

The revolution officially began with the storming of the Bastille fortress on July 14, 1789. Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antoinette, were guillotined at Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde) on January 21 and October 23, 1793, respectively.

A representative assembly known as the National Convention met in the Palace of the Tuileries from 1792 to 1795 to work on building a French republic.

Early on the convention’s agenda was the need to rebuild decrepit neighborhoods of Paris and to improve the city’s infrastructure and public sanitation. However, it would be decades before the modernization of Paris was accomplished.

The demolition of the medieval Bastille fortress was a first step in this direction, and supplied the stones for the building of the Pont de la Concorde.

In 1795 the city was divided into arrondissements. Otherwise, much of Paris was in shambles, its mansions having been deserted by the nobility, its churches confiscated by the state, and its streets delivered to the lower classes.