13th arrondissement

Highlights: Gobelins · Butte-aux-Cailles · Place d'Italie · Quartier asiatique · Salpêtrière · Paris Rive Gauche

Long crossed by the river Bièvre and its tanneries, the 13th arrondissement made industry and labour its signature. From the royal manufactory of the Gobelins to the rebellious village of the Butte-aux-Cailles, from the towers of the Asian quarter to the architectural audacities of Paris Rive Gauche, it composes a plural Paris, popular and creative, that has never ceased to reinvent itself.

The Bièvre, water and work

Before it was an arrondissement, this territory was that of the Bièvre, a modest river whose waters attracted, from the Middle Ages, tanners, leather-dressers and dyers. It was along its banks that, in the 15th century, the family of dyers Gobelin settled, whose name would remain attached to the place.

In 1662, Colbert brought together the neighbourhood's workshops to found the Manufacture royale des Gobelins, intended to furnish the king's palaces and to spread the renown of French luxury. Still in activity, it has perpetuated for more than three centuries the art of high-warp tapestry.

The hospital of the poor and the learned

In 1656, Louis XIV founded the Hôpital général de la Salpêtrière, first intended to take in the destitute, before becoming one of the largest hospices in Europe. Its chapel in the form of a Greek cross, designed by Libéral Bruant, makes it a monumental architectural ensemble.

It was there that, at the end of the 18th century, Philippe Pinel freed the insane from their chains, the founding gesture of modern psychiatry, and then that, in the 19th century, Jean-Martin Charcot made the establishment a leading centre of world neurology, where a certain Sigmund Freud would come to study.

Villages and rebellious faubourgs

Attached to Paris in 1860, the 13th long kept its character of a working-class and rural faubourg. The Butte-aux-Cailles, spared by the large housing estates, keeps its cobbled lanes, its low houses and its workshops; it was there that the neighbourhood held out among the longest during the Commune of 1871.

Around the place d'Italie, the arrondissement industrialised in the 19th century, covered with factories and workers' housing, while the Bièvre, grown unhealthy, was gradually covered over and disappeared beneath the streets in the early 20th century.

New towers and the Asian quarter

In the 1960s and 1970s, the renovation of the Italie sector gave rise to a landscape of towers unprecedented in Paris, notably around the Olympiades platform. From the late 1970s, these new buildings welcomed a large community come from South-East Asia, fleeing the wars of Indochina.

Thus was born the largest Asian quarter in the capital, between the avenue de Choisy, the avenue d'Ivry and the porte de Choisy, with its shops, its restaurants and its Lunar New Year celebrations that enliven the whole arrondissement each year.

Paris Rive Gauche, laboratory of the 21st century

From the 1990s, the former railway and industrial sites of the south-east were transformed into a vast new quarter. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, inaugurated in 1996 with its four glass towers designed by Dominique Perrault, became its emblem, soon joined by the university, the cinemas and the businesses.

Abundant street art, the halle Freyssinet converted into a gigantic campus of start-ups, the passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir spanning the Seine: the 13th today embraces a rare creative modernity, while keeping, at the Butte-aux-Cailles as at the Gobelins, the village soul that makes its charm.