2nd arrondissement

Highlights: Bourse · Sentier · Grands Boulevards · Passages couverts · Bibliothèque Richelieu · Montorgueil

The smallest of the Parisian arrondissements is also one of the most intense. Between the Bourse and the Grands Boulevards, the 2nd long beat to the rhythm of business, textiles and the press. Its glass galleries, its shopping streets and its 19th-century façades today compose a lively quarter, where the memory of Parisian trade mingles with the timeless charm of the covered passages.

On the edge of the city walls

Long situated at the northern limits of Paris, the territory of the 2nd took shape between the former walls of Charles V and Louis XIII, then along the Grands Boulevards laid out from 1670 on the ramparts levelled by Louis XIV. From this history of borders, the arrondissement keeps a dense fabric of narrow streets, inherited from the faubourgs that once crowded against the gates of the city.

The butte des Moulins, torn open in the 19th century by the cutting of the avenue de l'Opéra, and the winding line of the rue Montorgueil, the old route by which the catch of fish came up towards Les Halles, recall this past still legible in the plan of the quarter.

The temple of finance

Under the First Empire, Napoléon endowed Paris with a stock exchange palace. Raised by the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart from 1808 and completed in 1826, the Palais Brongniart imposes its peristyle of Corinthian columns like an ancient temple dedicated to commerce.

Around it were concentrated banks, stockbrokers and press headquarters: the Bourse quarter became in the 19th century the nerve centre of the French economy, a business vocation perpetuated today by the corporate headquarters and start-ups established in its Haussmannian buildings.

The golden age of the covered passages

The 2nd arrondissement preserves the finest concentration of covered passages in Paris. The passage des Panoramas, opened as early as 1799, the galerie Vivienne, inaugurated in 1823 beneath its glass domes and mosaics, or the passage du Grand-Cerf offer these interior streets where shops and strollers shelter from the weather.

Born of property speculation and the new taste for the shopping promenade, these galleries of iron and glass invented, before the department stores, an elegant way of making commerce a spectacle. Restored and once again sought after, they today make the discreet charm of the arrondissement.

The Sentier, capital of textiles

Around the rue du Sentier and the place du Caire, the quarter established itself from the 19th century as the heart of Parisian garment-making. Workshops, wholesalers and manufacturers kept alive there, generation after generation, the great trade in fabric and clothing, in a bustle of deliveries and rolls of cloth.

A hearth of successive waves of immigration and of expertise, the Sentier has more recently welcomed a new wave of digital entrepreneurs, to the point of being nicknamed the Silicon Sentier, extending its tradition of commercial boldness in another form.

A lively quarter, between press and gastronomy

Long the seat of the great newspapers, around the rue Réaumur and its buildings of iron and glass that pioneered modern architecture, the 2nd retains a resolutely urban atmosphere. The rue Montorgueil, now pedestrianised, unfolds there one of the liveliest market atmospheres in Paris.

To live in the 2nd is to choose a dense and vibrant Paris, where the covered passages, the terraces of Montorgueil and the façades of the Grands Boulevards compose a central art of living, at once rooted in heritage and resolutely contemporary.