Hôtel de Ville
Gothic-Renaissance city hall where Robespierre spent his last night and de Gaulle declared Paris liberated.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Hotel de Ville in Paris opens on the night of July 27, 1794, when Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, fled to Paris's city hall and barricaded himself inside as soldiers loyal to the National Convention surrounded the building. It traces the square outside, once the city's execution ground for centuries, and the fire that gutted the building in 1871. Stand at the facade rebuilt stone by stone afterward, nearly identical to what burned.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Conciergerie
Gothic royal palace turned Revolutionary prison, antechamber to the guillotine during the Terror.
Place de la Concorde
Vast royal square turned Revolutionary execution ground, now anchored by a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian obelisk.
Place de la Bastille
Square marking where a royal fortress fell in seventeen eighty-nine, anchored by a gilded column honouring eighteen thirty.
Domaine National du Palais-Royal
Colonnaded royal garden where a café-table speech ignited the French Revolution in 1789.
Champs-Élysées
Two-kilometre boulevard where liberation parades and German occupiers alike once marched.
Grand Palais
Beaux-Arts exhibition palace with an iron-and-glass nave that still bears bullet scars from 1944.