1st arrondissement

Highlights: Louvre · Palais-Royal · Les Halles · Tuileries · Place Vendôme · Île de la Cité

At the exact centre of Paris, where the Seine embraces the Île de la Cité, the 1st arrondissement gathers within a few streets the palais du Louvre, the jardins des Tuileries, the Palais-Royal and the place Vendôme. Eight centuries of royal power, artistic creation and splendour meet here, in a setting of golden stone and drawn perspectives where the monumental heart of the capital still beats today.

From fortified castle to the largest palace in Europe

Around 1190, as he prepared to leave for the Crusades, Philippe Auguste had a fortress raised to the west of his city wall to protect Paris from incursions coming up the Seine: the first Louvre, whose keep foundations can still be admired in the museum's basements. Charles V made it a royal residence in the 14th century, before François Ier razed the old keep to begin, from 1546, the Renaissance metamorphosis entrusted to Pierre Lescot.

From reign to reign, the palace grew: Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV gave it its Cour carrée, its great riverside gallery and its Colonnade. Turned into a museum in 1793, at the height of the Revolution, the Louvre displayed the kings' collections to the people and established itself as one of the greatest museums in the world, crowned in 1989 by the glass pyramid of Ieoh Ming Pei.

Royal gardens and ordered squares

In 1564, Catherine de Médicis had the palais des Tuileries built and a vast garden laid out, which André Le Nôtre redesigned a century later for Louis XIV, giving it its parterres, its ornamental pools and its great westward perspective, the origin of the axis that now runs all the way to La Défense. Burned down during the Commune in 1871, the palace disappeared, but the garden remains one of the most beloved in Paris.

At the end of the 17th century, Jules Hardouin-Mansart laid out the place Vendôme, a jewel of classical harmony devoted to the glory of Louis XIV, before it received the Napoleonic column and then the great jewellery houses. Nearby, the Palais-Royal, raised for the cardinal de Richelieu and ceded to the Crown, opened its galleries and its garden to the public in the 18th century, a hearth of Parisian life and of ideas on the eve of the Revolution.

The belly of Paris

As early as the 12th century, Philippe Auguste established the great market of Paris at Les Halles. For more than eight hundred years, this quarter fed the capital: in the 19th century, the architect Victor Baltard raised there his famous pavilions of cast iron and glass, which Zola would immortalise as the belly of Paris.

In 1969, the wholesale market moved to Rungis; the pavilions were demolished, giving way to the Forum des Halles, a vast underground complex crowned since 2016 by the Canopée. Beneath this modernity, the memory of the great market still runs through the pedestrian and shopping streets of the quarter.

The founding island and the justice of the kingdom

The western tip of the Île de la Cité belongs to the 1st arrondissement, with the Conciergerie, former palace of the Capetian kings turned court and prison — Marie-Antoinette was held there before her execution — and the Sainte-Chapelle, a jewel of Rayonnant Gothic raised by Saint Louis around 1248 to shelter the relics of the Passion.

Around the Palais de Justice there took shape, over the centuries, this judicial heart of France, while the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, former parish of the kings facing the Louvre, recalls the constant proximity of spiritual and temporal power.

Living at the centre of the Parisian world

Today, the 1st arrondissement combines the prestige of its institutions — musée du Louvre, Comédie-Française, Conseil d'État at the Palais-Royal — with a rare quality of life in the heart of the city. The arcades of the rue de Rivoli, the gardens of the Palais-Royal and the windows of the place Vendôme compose a setting where every stroll crosses the history of France.

To live in the 1st is to choose an address at the exact centre of Paris, between Seine and gardens, in an exceptional heritage where royal stone, the light of the Tuileries and the refinement of the great houses shape an art of living without equal.