Beneath your feet, between two train cars, the Paris metro hides 17th-century vaults, stones from the Bastille, and an entire neighborhood built on ancient quarries: here’s where to look and how to recognize them.
Beneath your feet, between two train cars, the Paris metro hides 17th-century vaults, stones from the Bastille, and an entire neighborhood built on ancient quarries: here’s where to look and how to recognize them.
When talking about the old Paris metro, one readily imagines abandoned stations and tunnels plunged into darkness. The reality is more surprising, and above all, more accessible: some of the oldest traces of the capital can be found on platforms where crowds of travelers pass by every day without noticing them. You just need to know where to look.
The Paris underground is far from a blank slate. It has been excavated for stone and plaster, like in the old gypsum quarries in the northeast of the city. It has also received bones: in 1786, those from the Cemetery of the Innocents were transferred to old quarries that would become the Catacombs of Denfert-Rochereau. Finally, it holds the foundations of buildings long since demolished, such as the fortress of the Bastille.
In digging its tunnels, the metro has crossed all these layers. Sometimes, it has destroyed them. Sometimes (and this is where the story becomes fascinating), it has revealed them, cleared them, and then integrated them into its own facilities.
This article takes you to three specific locations: the area around the Danube station, the Bastille station, and the Châtelet station. For each, you will know what to look for, where to look, and what it tells you.
Industrial archaeology studies the traces left by work and exchanges: quarries, docks, workshops, warehouses, machines, transport routes. No trowel is needed to practice it. Most often, it involves reading a landscape, understanding why a street only has low houses or why an old wall still supports a boulevard.
The subway holds a special place in this story. It is itself a gigantic technical work, but it is also, somewhat despite itself, a first-rate archaeologist. Each construction site opens a window onto what lies beneath the pavement, and engineers sometimes find themselves face to face with foundations or vaults that no one remembered anymore.
Paris is full of witnesses to this productive past, sometimes hidden beneath your feet. On Rue des Immeubles-Industriels, in the 11th arrondissement, a huge 200-horsepower steam engine installed beneath the pavement provided energy to the workshops of nineteen buildings whose construction began in 1872. On Quai de la Gironde, in the 19th, the former warehouses of the Magasins Généraux de Paris span 12,000 square meters along the canal. The remains encountered by the subway belong to the same family: that of a city that has dug, transported, and built a lot.
Exit the metro at the Danube station in the 19th arrondissement, and the atmosphere changes abruptly. On Rue de la Mouzaïa and Rue Miguel-Hidalgo, somewhere between the Buttes-Chaumont park and the Chapeau-Rouge hill, you won't see any tall buildings on the horizon. The houses are one or two stories at most, and it feels as if a piece of suburbia has been placed right in the heart of Paris.
This landscape has a very concrete explanation: it rests on ancient gypsum quarries. Gypsum was extracted here from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, with extraction ceasing only in 1872. These quarries were not isolated either: old alleys leading from Rue Rébeval went up to the Chaumont hill, with its mills and quarries.
A little curiosity along the way: the name Mouzaïa is not Parisian; it comes from a place in Algeria. The area was also once referred to as the America district, echoing Rue des Carrières-d'Amérique, which has mostly become Rue Manin today (its name is debated, and we will return to that a bit later).
Nota Bene: gypsum is the rock from which plaster is made. It is from these quarries that the plaster mentioned later was sourced, and they left behind a subterranean landscape riddled with voids.
A quarry is primarily an emptiness. Once the rock is extracted, galleries remain, and a terrain that resembles Swiss cheese inspires no confidence in anyone. After 1872, when operations ceased, candidates for construction did not flock to the area: for a time, a few shacks planted on bare mounds constituted the entire urban planning of the place.
This abandoned land initially benefited others. Marginals, pickpockets, and all sorts of criminals found an ideal base. It was only once the quarry entrances were filled in that subdivisions began to appear, very gradually, along the main roads, and a few bold individuals built small houses on narrow alleys.
The result is still very visible on site. To recognize this type of neighborhood, look for:
the height of the houses: one or two stories, never more,the layout of the streets: short alleys rather than wide avenues,the little garden in front of each dwelling, almost always planted with climbing roses and ivy,the materials: stone or brick, for modestly sized homes.
These small houses mainly housed workers from the eastern neighborhoods of Paris, who found here, just a stone's throw from Belleville, modest but suitable accommodation. A lightweight habitat on fragile ground: the logic is simple, and it has shaped the entire neighborhood.
Where does the curious name Carrières-d'Amérique come from? For a long time, the explanation seemed obvious: the plaster extracted from these quarries would have been exported all the way to Louisiana. A nice story that transported the rock from the 19th arrondissement across the Atlantic.
However, a historian has cast doubt on this. For him, "America" simply referred to a distant and inaccessible place, a sort of America for poor people. Except that the journal of an 18th-century traveler does indeed mention boats loaded with plaster from Paris heading to America. The debate remains open, and everyone can choose their version while strolling.
In any case, plaster has long marked the Parisian landscape. Even in 1935, journalist Marius Richard described the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, one side white, the other black, divided between the plaster that whitened men and the coal that darkened them.
Today, the residents of the neighborhood, these "Americans" of a particular kind, have changed significantly. Most no longer seem to work the three shifts, and their colorful little houses, hidden behind fences, delight passersby.
Let's change the scenery and head to the Place de la Bastille. Almost nothing remains of the famous fortress above ground. It was quickly demolished, and most of its stones were sold off to build buildings and the Pont de la Concorde. The Bastille has, in a way, been recycled within Paris itself.
A demolition first targets what is visible. The foundations, however, are buried, and they can survive long after the structure they supported. All it takes is for a construction site to dig in the right spot for them to reappear.
This is exactly what happens in 1898. The excavation for the very first line leads to a significant discovery on Rue Saint-Antoine: the foundations of the tower known as "of Liberty," one of the towers of the fortress. A very real piece of the Bastille, which had remained under the street since the destruction of the building.
This construction site perfectly illustrates what the metro has contributed to the knowledge of old Paris. Without it, these foundations would likely have remained beneath the pavement, unknown to all.
The remains were uncovered at numbers 211 and 236 on Saint-Antoine Street. Take note of these two addresses: they still allow us to locate the discovery on the ground today.
To help you visualize the area, try this little exercise. Position yourself where Saint-Antoine Street begins: small square cobblestones laid in the roadway outline the contour of the old fortress. Then head to number 3 of the square, where a map indicates the exact location of the fortress and the imposing fortification that surrounded it. As you move from one to the other, you realize that you are literally walking on the old structure.
One very concrete question remains, the one posed by any find of this kind: what to do with these stones? Leave them in place or sacrifice them for the construction site? At Bastille, a third option was chosen.
Rather than letting the foundations disappear, they were dismantled stone by stone and then placed in Henri-Galli Square. They are still there, and you can see them outdoors. The square can be reached on foot from Bastille station or Sully-Morland station.
A tip for a good look: keep in mind that what you see is no longer in its original place. The stones have left Rue Saint-Antoine to be reassembled elsewhere. It is an authentic relic, but displaced, and that changes the interpretation: you observe the shape and masonry of a tower base, not its actual location.
Take the opportunity to continue to the Arsenal basin. Where the Saint-Martin canal flows out, to the right when walking towards the Seine, you can still see a whole section of wall: it is an old ditch wall, which today serves as a retaining wall for Boulevard Bourdon. Here, the relic has remained embedded in the city, without dismantling.
(A small digression for the curious: even the carillon of the fortress, installed in 1764 and spared from melting, eventually traveled. It first rang in a café in the square before becoming state property: it can now be seen in L'Isle-Jourdain, in Gers, where it is displayed at the campanile museum... far from the Bastille.)
Now descend to the Bastille station. On the line 5 side, on the platform for trains heading to Bobigny, a few stones have been left in place: these are the remnants of the counterscarp, the outer wall of the ditch that surrounded the Bastille. This time, it is not a displaced relic, but a fragment preserved where it originally stood.
To spot them, choose your platform carefully (the one towards Bobigny, not the other) and take the time to walk along the wall instead of waiting for the train to arrive. Most travelers pass by without looking up. You will now know that these stones have witnessed the Bastille standing.
The comparison with the Henri-Galli square is instructive. On one side, foundations dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. On the other, stones integrated into the metro's decor, in their original location. Two ways of preserving, which can be found elsewhere in Paris.
Nota Bene: around a fortress, the ditch is bordered by two walls. The escarpment is the one on the fortress side, while the counterscarp is the one facing it, on the outer side. The stones on line 5 thus mark the outer edge of the ditch that protected the Bastille.
Head to Châtelet for the most spectacular vestige. On line 7, take the platform for trains heading to La Courneuve, near the exit on rue Saint-Martin: ancient vaults line the station there. They are slightly higher than the tunnel, and this small offset will help you spot them.
These vaults date back to the 17th century. They are the oldest piece of infrastructure in the entire network, much older than the metro itself: they existed more than two and a half centuries before the first line was opened in 1898. The network has, in a way, annexed a piece of historical platform.
Nota Bene: a piece of infrastructure refers to a civil engineering construction designed to cross or support something, such as a bridge, a tunnel, a platform wall, or a vault. Saying that these vaults are the oldest piece of infrastructure in the metro means that no structure in the network is older than they are.
But how do 17th-century arches end up at the edge of a metro line? To understand this, we must go back to the reign of Louis XIII, along the banks of the Seine.
In 1642, Louis XIII ceded a piece of land between the Pont au Change and the Pont Notre-Dame. The new owner, the Marquis de Gesvres, had only one obligation: to build a quay supported by a series of arches. The structure was built, open to the Seine, its vaults aligned at the water's edge.
These vaults have a very particular name: they are called "cagnards," the name given to the vaults built in front of a port. The location, well situated, quickly becomes a hideout for a disreputable crowd. Pickpockets and homeless wanderers take refuge in these dark alleys, right in the heart of the city.
Remember the word, it will be useful when you look at the engravings displayed on the panels of the station. A cagnard is thus a port architecture, designed for the river, and not an underground construction. If these vaults are now underground, it is because the city has changed around them.
The whole structure remained thus, open to the Seine, until the mid-19th century. It was then that its history took a turn.
In 1860, masonry walls closed off the openings of the arcades. No demolition: the vaults remained in place, simply bricked up. Cut off from the river, they disappeared from the sight of Parisians, then from their memory, and the cagnards fell into oblivion.
For decades, only a few engravings and a painting by Hubert Robert recalled the existence of these dark passages. One might say that you had to love prints or frequent painting to know they had existed.
This mechanism of forgetting is not exceptional in Paris, and it can be quite useful for archaeologists. The wall of Philippe Auguste offers a fine example: the rapid growth of the city has "digested" it more than destroyed it, relying on its solid walls. Several sections of the wall have thus been hidden but preserved, in the back of a workshop or at the end of a courtyard.
The lesson holds for any curious walker: a hidden vestige is not necessarily a lost vestige. A wall, a cellar, or the back of a courtyard can long protect what seems to have disappeared.
Around 1921, the construction work for the Ivry-Villette metro reached the banks of the Seine. The engineers then came across the old vaults, located exactly on the route of the new line. The cagnards, bricked up about sixty years earlier, resurfaced... underground this time.
The state of affairs was far from romantic. The vaults were cluttered with rubble, pipes, and sewer outlets. They could have simply been sacrificed. Instead, they were carefully cleared and preserved.
It is thanks to this choice that you can see them today on a platform of line 7. The metro continued on its path, but made room for this piece of old Paris instead of erasing it.
This decision did not come solely from the engineers. It responded to the request of an institution that was already safeguarding the memory of the capital at that time.
This institution is the Municipal Commission of Old Paris. It is its wise members who requested that the vaults of Châtelet be cleared and preserved. Its meetings result in minutes, compiled into a collection, which form a true written memory of old Paris: there are sometimes minor subjects, such as a note from 1987 dedicated to a boundary marker of Paris.
At Châtelet, as elsewhere, the preservation of a vestige involves a few actions that can be summarized as follows:
clear the structure of what clutters it, such as rubble, pipes, and sewer outlets at Châtelet,preserve on-site when possible, like the vaults of line 7 or the stones of the counterscarp at Bastille,dismantle and reassemble elsewhere when the vestige cannot remain, like the foundations of the Liberty Tower at Henri-Galli Square,explain to the public, using panels and old engravings.
The dismantling stone by stone is not an isolated case. On Rue Saint-Jacques, facing the Val-de-Grâce, the portal of the former convent of the Carmelite Sisters of the Incarnation nearly disappeared during the construction of a building in 1978: under pressure from protests, it was dismantled and then reassembled behind glass. Even more spectacular, the Hôtel de Massa, already classified at the time, was transported piece by piece across Paris in 1927: its proportions were transferred to a plan, each stone numbered, and the work involved more than sixty people from various trades over two years.
Not everything is saved intact. By the edge of the Canal Saint-Martin, the Hôtel du Nord has kept only its façade, preserved in 1984 thanks to an association chaired by actress Arletty: behind it, everything has been redone, and today people come for the café-restaurant much more than for the old walls. All the more reason to savor the vestiges that, at Châtelet or Bastille, have withstood the test of time.
Good news: these remnants can be discovered freely, along a metro journey or a simple walk. Here’s a little route to see them in good conditions:
Châtelet: line 7, on the platform towards La Courneuve, near the exit on rue Saint-Martin. Take the footbridge that connects the two platforms; it allows for a better view of the arches. Then take the time to read the panels, which reproduce engravings from the 18th century depicting the cagnards.Bastille: line 5, platform direction Bobigny, for the stones of the counterscarp. Then go back to the surface to see the cobblestones marking the ground where rue Saint-Antoine begins and the plan of number 3 of the square, then head to the Henri-Galli square and the Arsenal basin.Danube: exit the station and wander randomly, down rue Miguel-Hidalgo then rue de la Mouzaïa, not forgetting the villa Claude-Monet. Preferably come in spring, when fruit trees and climbing flowers scent the alleys, and remain discreet, as these little houses are inhabited.
One name is still missing from this picture: that of Hector Guimard, the architect of the metro entrances renowned as some of the strangest in the world. To enter his universe, take a detour to Castel Béranger, at 14, rue La Fontaine, in the 16th arrondissement (metro Michel-Ange-Auteuil). It was this building that, in 1897, introduced a thirty-year-old architect to the general public, and the City of Paris awarded him in 1898 during its first facade competition.
Observe the façade, where the straight line seems banished: seahorses attached to the chains, walls covered with flamed sandstone, the architect's face caricatured and hidden in the wrought iron of the balconies. His nicknames of "house of Devils" and "Disturbed Castle" say enough about the effect produced at the time. Guimard designed absolutely everything, down to the door handles and locks, relying on artisans skilled in wrought iron, ceramics, and artistic casting. Keep this perspective in mind when you pass under one of his metro entrances: you will no longer see them the same way.
Three stations, three ways to read the underground: in Danube, an entire neighborhood shaped by old gypsum quarries; in Bastille, the stones of a vanished fortress; in Châtelet, a 17th-century platform that has become the oldest piece of art in the metro. To enjoy it, learn to look up, to stop, to get a little lost. And the next time you wait for a train, take a look at the walls: old Paris may be just behind.
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