The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in
Paris. It is located in the Marais district, and it straddles the dividing-line between the 3rd and 4th arrondissements of Paris.
History :
Originally known as the Place Royale, the Place des Vosges was built by Henri IV from 1605 to 1612. A true square (140 m x 140 m), it embodied the first European program of
Royal city planning. It was built on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles and its gardens: at a tournament at the Tournelles, a royal residence, Henri II was wounded and died. Catherine de
Medicis had the Gothic pile demolished, and she removed to the Louvre.
The Place des Vosges, inaugurated in 1612 with a grand carrousel to celebrate the wedding of Louis XIII and Anne of
Austria, is the prototype of all the residential squares of European cities that were to come. What was new about the Place Royale in 1612 was that the housefronts were all built to the same design, probably by Baptiste du Cerceau,[1] of red brick with strips of stone quoins over vaulted
Arcades that stand on square pillars.
The steeply-pitched blue slate roofs are pierced with discreet small-paned dormers above the pedimented dormers that stand upon the cornices. Only the north range was built with the vaulted ceilings that the "galleries" were meant to have. Two pavilions that rise higher than the unified roofline of the square
Center the north and south faces and offer access to the square through triple arches. Though they are designated the Pavilion of the King and of the Queen, no royal personage has ever lived in the aristocratic square. The Place des Vosges initiated subsequent developments of Paris that created a suitable urban background for the French aristocracy.
Residents of the Place des Vosges :
- No. 1bis Madame de Sevigné was born here
- No. 6, "Maison de Victor Hugo" Victor Hugo from 1832–1848, in what was then the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée, now a museum devoted to his memory, managed by the City of Paris
- No. 7 Sully, Henri IV's great minister
- No. 8 poet Théophile Gautier and writer Alphonse Daudet
- No. 9 (Hôtel de Chaulnes), seat of the Academy of Architecture, currently also tenanted by Galerie Historisimus
- No. 11 occupied from 1639-1648 by the courtesan Marion Delorme
- No. 14 (Hôtel de la Rivière). Its ceilings painted by Lebrun are reinstalled in the Musée Carnavalet. Rabbi David Feuerwerker, Antoinette Feuerwerker and Atara Marmor
- No. 15 Marguerite Louise d'Orléans, wife of Cosimo III de' Medici
- No. 17 former residence of Bossuet
- No. 21 Cardinal Richelieu from 1615–1627
- No. 23 post-impressionist painter Georges Dufrénoy
