France
The City Below
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39 min audio
On the night of October 17, 1961, Paris police under Maurice Papon attacked a peaceful Algerian protest, beat the marchers unconscious, and threw their bodies off this bridge into the Seine. The official death count was three. Bodies floated downstream for a week. The plaque went up forty years later, and most tourists still walk past it on the way to Notre-Dame.
Boulevard Saint-Michel & Place Saint-Michel
Two bridges downstream from Pont Saint-Michel, the Pont au Change carried the second wave of bodies into the Seine on the night of October 17, 1961. There is no plaque here. There has never been a plaque here. The bridge sits directly under the windows of the Préfecture de Police where Maurice Papon was at his desk while his officers worked.
Pont au Change
In 1850 the Île de la Cité had fourteen thousand residents living on a tangle of medieval streets. Between 1853 and 1870 Baron Haussmann tore down ninety percent of it on Napoleon III's order. Today the island has a courthouse, a cathedral, a hospital, a flower market, and almost no residents. The boulevards that replaced it were not built for traffic. They were built for cannon fire.
Parvis Notre-Dame - Place Jean-Paul-II
On the night of May 30, 1780, a wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents — the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris — collapsed under the weight of the corpses behind it, dumping liquefied human remains into the basement of a tavern on Rue de la Lingerie. Bread shops down the block reported the smell ruined their flour. Six years later, the city began moving six million skeletons out of central Paris into a former limestone quarry on the Left Bank. The Catacombs are the result.
Fontaine des Innocents
10 min audio
In November 1793, a doorman from the Val-de-Grâce hospital named Philibert Aspairt went into the limestone quarries beneath Paris carrying a single candle. He was looking for a wine cellar. Eleven years later, his skeleton was found in a forgotten section of the tunnels, still holding the keys to the hospital. He was three meters from a known exit. The candle had burned out.
Catacombs of Paris
56 min audio
Between January 1793 and June 1794 the guillotine on this square executed approximately one thousand three hundred people, including a king, a queen, the leaders of the Revolution that killed them, and a long list of people whose names are not on any plaque. The square has been renamed three times to forget. The Egyptian obelisk in the center was a gift from a viceroy who wanted to be remembered for something else.
Obélisque de Louxor
On May 23, 1871, with Versailles troops advancing through Paris during the final week of the Commune, twelve men under a Communard named Jules Bergeret stacked tar barrels in the Tuileries Palace and lit them. The palace burned for two days. The shell stood for twelve years. In 1882 the French Republic voted to demolish what was left rather than restore the symbol of the kings and emperors who had lived in it. The garden you are walking through is the empty footprint.
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel
The square in front of Paris City Hall has been used for executions since the Middle Ages. La Voisin, who poisoned for Louis XIV's mistress, was burned alive here in 1680. The building behind the square — the Hôtel de Ville — burned in May 1871, taking with it the entire civil archive of pre-1871 Paris. Most Paris genealogies stop at the fire.
Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville
On the evening of February 8, 1962, four months after the Pont Saint-Michel massacre and against the same prefect of police, an anti-OAS demonstration in eastern Paris was charged by police at the entrance to the Charonne metro station. The crowd was funneled down the metro stairs. The police followed them down. Nine demonstrators were trampled and beaten to death on the staircase. They were French. They were trade unionists. The country noticed this one. Maurice Papon kept his job.
Charonne
On the morning of May 28, 1871, after a night of fighting through the tombs of Père Lachaise, Versailles troops captured the last of the Communards still in arms. They were lined up against the southeast wall of the cemetery and shot. The bodies were thrown into a trench dug at the foot of the wall and covered with earth. The grass in front of the wall is the mass grave. Most visitors to Père Lachaise come for Jim Morrison and never find the wall.
Communards' Wall
Auguste Blanqui spent thirty-three of his seventy-six years in French prisons. He was elected president of the Paris Commune from his cell in Cahors in 1871 and never got to take the office. He is buried in Division 91 of Père Lachaise. A few kilometers away, the Passage des Panoramas — one of the twenty surviving covered shopping arcades that Haussmann did not get around to demolishing — is still in operation. Both are monuments to what survived.
Tombeau d’Auguste Blanqui
40 min audio
On the morning of July 16, 1942, French gendarmes under Vichy police chief René Bousquet arrested 13,152 Jews in Paris and locked them inside an indoor cycling track on the Boulevard de Grenelle. Four thousand one hundred and fifteen of them were children. There were no Germans in the building. The velodrome was demolished in 1959. The plaque came in 1994.
Square des Martyrs Juifs du Velodrome d'Hiver
There is an elementary school on Rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais that has been continuously teaching children since the nineteenth century. By the door is a bronze plaque listing the names of the students deported from this school, in the words of the plaque, 'because they were born Jewish.' One hundred and sixty-five of them. None came back.
Public Elementary School Des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais
On March 11, 1944, neighbors on a quiet street in the sixteenth arrondissement called the fire brigade about black smoke pouring from a chimney. Inside the basement of number 21 they found a coal-fired furnace, a triangular soundproofed room with a viewing hole, and the dismembered remains of at least twenty-seven people. The doctor who lived there had advertised himself, for two years, as a smuggler of Jews to Argentina.
21 Rue le Sueur
On August 19, 1944, Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy of the French Forces of the Interior went down a manhole on the Place Denfert-Rochereau and into a bunker twenty-six meters below the surface. From that bunker, with telephone lines to every arrondissement and a small staff, he commanded the insurrection that liberated Paris from the Wehrmacht. The Germans never found him. The bunker is still there. The catacombs entrance on the same square is named for him.
The Liberation of Paris Museum - General Leclerc Museum - Jean Moulin Museum
4 min audio | 1 stops
At the western tip of the Île de la Cité, the Square du Vert-Galant folds a vanished medieval islet into a public park. In March 1314, Jacques de Molay, last grand master of the Knights Templar, was burned there in a slow fire after retracting confessions extracted under torture. He named the pope and the king from the flames. Both were dead within a year. One stop on the medieval Paris that turned finance, heresy, and royal debt into smoke.
At the western tip of the Île de la Cité, where the river splits and the bateaux-mouches turn around, there is a small triangular park called the Square du Vert-Galant. On the night of March 18, 1314, the last grand master of the Knights Templar was burned at the stake on this ground, in a low fire of green wood. He cursed the king of France and the pope from the flames, by name. Both men were dead within a year.
Square du Vert-Galant — site of the Île aux Juifs
4 min audio | 1 stops
At the Mur des Fédérés, the last Communards were shot into a trench in May 1871. Louise Michel survived that week, asked the military court to kill her if it had courage, was deported to New Caledonia instead, came back after amnesty, and drew hundreds of thousands into the streets for her funeral in 1905. She is not buried at Père Lachaise. Her procession only passed the wall. One stop on revolutionary memory that refuses to stay inside the cemetery gates.
On 22 January 1905, a funeral cortège left the Gare de Lyon and walked fourteen kilometers across Paris to bury a seventy-four-year-old schoolteacher at the Cimetière de Levallois-Perret. The cortège passed the Mur des Fédérés on the way. The schoolteacher had fought beside the men shot against that wall. She had been sentenced to death, sent to New Caledonia in chains, taught the children of the Kanak tribes during their 1878 uprising, and come back to be buried in her mother's tomb. Hundreds of thousands of people walked behind her coffin.
Mur des Fédérés — Louise Michel cortège passage
17 min audio | 4 stops
At Drancy, a failed modernist housing estate became the main transit camp for Jews deported from France, then returned to social housing after the war. On the Île de la Cité, Maurice Papon later ran the Paris police from a building tourists pass on the way to Sainte-Chapelle. In a sixth-floor room on Avenue Foch, Pierre Brossolette jumped rather than give the Gestapo names. At Mont Valérien, the Wehrmacht shot one thousand and eight men in a clearing still preserved by name. Four stops through occupation, collaboration, resistance, and the Republic's long habit of promoting men before admitting what they did.
Between August 1941 and August 1944, sixty-seven thousand Jews passed through a half-finished social-housing project in the Paris suburbs called the Cité de la Muette. From here, sealed freight cars carried them east. The U-shaped building still stands. Three of its four sides are apartments, occupied today, where families live and hang laundry from the windows. The fourth side is a memorial.
Cité de la Muette — Drancy Internment Camp Memorial
Across the river from Notre-Dame, on the Île de la Cité, there is a stone office building most tourists walk past on the way to Sainte-Chapelle. From 1958 to 1967 the man at the top of it was Maurice Papon — the same Maurice Papon who, in 1942, had signed deportation orders for fifteen hundred and sixty Jews in Bordeaux. He held both jobs with the same hand.
Préfecture de Police de Paris
Avenue Foch is the most expensive residential street in Paris. At number 84, on March 22, 1944, a Resistance leader named Pierre Brossolette stepped to a sixth-floor window and threw himself out of it rather than continue being interrogated by the Gestapo's Section IV. He died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière the same day. He had not given them a single name. The plaque on the building was put up forty years later.
84 Avenue Foch — Pierre Brossolette plaque
Eight kilometers west of central Paris, on the wooded slope of a low hill above the Seine, is the principal execution site of the German occupation in France. Between August 1941 and August 1944, the Wehrmacht shot one thousand and eight men in a small clearing in the woods. The clearing is still there. The chapel where they spent their last night, scratching their names into the plaster, is still there. Every name is on a plaque. The plaques are read aloud once a year.
Mémorial de la France Combattante — Mont Valérien
12 min audio | 3 stops
The Passage des Panoramas is one of the few surviving covered arcades from the Paris Walter Benjamin spent thirteen years trying to understand. At Port-Royal, a 2023 station project reopened fifty Roman graves that Haussmann's crews had almost missed. Under Trocadéro, police found a fully wired cataphile cinema in 2004, then returned days later to find it stripped clean with a note on the floor: do not search. Three stops through the commercial, Roman, and illegal Paris beneath the surface city.
In 1850, Paris had roughly a hundred and fifty covered shopping arcades — iron-and-glass passages cut through the blocks, lit from above, full of bookshops, cafés, milliners, and stamp dealers. Haussmann demolished most of them. About twenty-five survive. Walter Benjamin spent thirteen years writing a thousand-page book about them and never finished it. He killed himself at the Spanish border in 1940. The book was published forty-two years later.
Passage des Panoramas
In March 2023, a construction crew digging a new exit for the Port-Royal RER station ran into the southern Roman cemetery of Lutetia — fifty graves, second century, undisturbed since the year two hundred. The cemetery had been dug into once before, by Haussmann's workmen in the 1860s, who took the grave goods and threw the skeletons back into the ground without records. The 2023 dig is the first time anyone has looked carefully.
Saint-Jacques Necropolis — Port-Royal RER excavation
In September 2004, during a training exercise in the closed sections of the Paris quarry network, a police squad found a fully equipped underground cinema below the Palais de Chaillot. Stone-carved seating for twenty, a projector running noir thrillers, three telephone lines, a stocked bar, and a sound system playing recordings of barking dogs. They went back two days later with a generator and a search warrant. The cinema was gone. A handwritten note on the floor said: Do not search.
Palais de Chaillot — site above the 2004 cataphiles cinema discovery