9th arrondissement

Highlights: Nouvelle Athènes · Saint-Georges · Faubourg Montmartre · Chaussée-d'Antin · Grands Boulevards · SoPi (South Pigalle)

Between the effervescence of the Grands Boulevards and the gentleness of the little streets of the Nouvelle Athènes, the 9th arrondissement has for nearly two centuries combined a resolutely Parisian elegance. Here, Haussmannian architecture embraces the memories of romantic salons, the shop windows of the department stores and the chandeliers of the Opéra Garnier. A neighbourhood where history can be read on every façade, and where the art of living is passed down, discreet and refined, to this day.

The origins of an arrondissement born of the Second Empire

The 9th arrondissement officially came into being in 1860, when Napoleon III and Prefect Haussmann redrew Paris and raised its number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty, absorbing in the process the neighbouring communes and hamlets. The newly created territory brought together former quarters with quite distinct identities — the Chaussée-d'Antin, the faubourg Montmartre, Rochechouart — where market gardeners, open-air quarries and taverns were gradually giving way to a nascent urbanisation, already prized by a bourgeoisie in search of new addresses.

Within a few decades, the great Haussmannian works traced the straight avenues, cut through the rue La Fayette and the rue de Châteaudun, and gave rise to those ashlar buildings with running balconies that still today form the backbone of the arrondissement. An urbanism conceived for circulation, hygiene and light, which would give the 9th its elegant and airy silhouette, so characteristic of Second Empire Paris. The population flocked there rapidly, drawn by the proximity of the centre, the quality of the new buildings and the joint rise of shops and services.

The Nouvelle Athènes, home of the romantic spirits

Long before the administrative creation of the arrondissement, from the 1820s, the hilly quarter that stretches around the place Saint-Georges attracted a colony of artists and writers charmed by its gardens and its façades in the antique style: it was nicknamed the Nouvelle Athènes. George Sand held salon there, Frédéric Chopin lived close by, at the square d'Orléans, and Eugène Delacroix set up one of his studios there before settling on the rive gauche. This small world of artists and actors made the neighbourhood one of the most vibrant crucibles of Parisian romanticism.

Two precious testimonies of this effervescence remain today: the musée de la Vie romantique, housed in the former house-studio of the painter Ary Scheffer, on the rue Chaptal, with its cobbled courtyard and its garden planted with roses; and the musée Gustave Moreau, on the rue de La Rochefoucauld, laid out by the artist himself in his own home to preserve his work there. The place Saint-Georges, with its fountain and its hôtels particuliers, remains one of the most refined enclaves in the capital, a silent witness to that romantic golden age. The streets that today bear the names of Athènes, Bruxelles or Milan recall this ambition of a neighbourhood conceived as a capital of the arts, away from the tumult of the nearby grands boulevards.

The Grands Boulevards, theatre of Parisian life

The boulevard des Italiens and the boulevard Montmartre formed, in the 19th century, the beating heart of Parisian high society: one came there to see and be seen, on the terraces of the Café Riche or the Tortoni, among theatres and concert halls. It was also in this effervescence that the covered passages developed, those galleries of glass and iron that sheltered shops and strollers from the weather: the passage des Panoramas, opened as early as 1799, is the oldest Parisian example, soon joined by the passages Jouffroy and Verdeau. The Théâtre des Variétés and the Folies Bergère, on the rue Richer, added to this neighbourhood of the boulevards a reputation as a permanent stage, where all of Paris thronged each evening.

On 5 January 1875, the inauguration of the Palais Garnier came to crown this neighbourhood of spectacle. Designed by the architect Charles Garnier after fifteen years of construction, the Opéra imposed its grand staircase and its gilding in the flamboyant style of the Second Empire, becoming one of the most admired monuments in Paris and the symbol of the refinement of the 9th arrondissement.

The golden age of commerce and finance

The 9th also established itself as a high place of modern commerce. In 1865, Jules Jaluzot opened the department store Printemps on the boulevard Haussmann; in 1893, Théophile Bader in turn founded the Galeries Lafayette, which would expand over the decades to their famous glass dome. These cathedrals of commerce, with their shop windows and their wrought-iron staircases, invented a new way of strolling and buying, which would forever make the renown of the neighbourhood.

Around the Chaussée-d'Antin and the boulevard des Italiens, banks and finance houses established their headquarters: the Société Générale, founded in 1864, settled on the boulevard Haussmann, while the Crédit Lyonnais raised, from 1876, its imposing Parisian headquarters on the boulevard des Italiens. This dual vocation, mercantile and financial, added to the cultural life of the neighbourhood and durably shaped the identity of the 9th arrondissement.

Saint-Georges, SoPi: the art of living today

Today, the 9th combines these legacies with ease. The Saint-Georges quarter has kept its bourgeois and hushed atmosphere, its antique dealers and its preserved 19th-century façades, while the south of the arrondissement, nicknamed SoPi, for South Pigalle, since the 2010s, has reinvented itself as a hub of refined nightlife, among wine bars, creative tables and independent shops.

From the Nouvelle Athènes to the Grands Boulevards, the arrondissement thus offers a rare art of living: that of a Paris on a human scale, where heritage elegance dialogues with an assertive contemporary vitality, a place where history continues to be written, between memory and modernity.