The City of Light. The Capital of Love. A center of haute couture and haute cuisine. Paris has many faces. Now, Paris City Hall wants to remind visitors of another famous identity — Paris as a cradle of upheaval — with a new app-based walking tour that explores the French Revolution.
The history of the decade-long period that overthrew a monarchy and helped shape modern history is easy to find, if you know where to look. In 1793, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads to the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution — today’s Place de la Concorde. The same year, revolutionaries renamed Notre Dame Cathedral a “Temple of Reason” and threw open the gates to the Jardin des Tuileries, transforming it into a “national garden” instead of a strolling ground for the elite.
Thanks to the Parcours Révolution (Revolution Trail) app, traces of that period are more accessible than ever.
The free app — available in five languages, including English — describes more than 120 points of interest across 16 neighborhoods. The app includes historical notes, biographical sketches and a timeline of events. Visitors can use the app’s map function to find points of interest, then look for the metal markers affixed to the ground at each site.
Guillaume Mazeau, the lead historian on the project, said he aimed to take a balanced approach in writing the app’s historical notes, describing both the elation of emancipation from rule by an absolute monarch as well as the bloody side of this tumultuous period, in which the revolutionaries who took over from the king sent roughly 17,000 to the guillotine.
“When we talk about this history, we have to talk about both sides,” Dr. Mazeau said. “Because for Parisians, it was a time of both joy and fear.”
Below is a handful of the neighborhoods featured in the app, with some highlights from each.
Place de la Concorde
The guillotine, which moved around the city, sat here for a long stretch in 1793 and 1794, when the square at the western end of the Jardin des Tuileries was called the “Place de la Révolution.”
In addition to the king and queen, another boldfaced name who succumbed to the guillotine on this spot was Maximilien de Robespierre, the powerful, charismatic figure who represented the greatest excesses of “the Terror” that followed the end of the monarchy. The Place de la Révolution also witnessed the execution of Olympe de Gouges, the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, and a feminist long ahead of her time.
Île de la Cité and the Conciergerie
Centuries before the Revolution, the Conciergerie (seen in this fiery moment during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics) was a medieval royal palace on the Île de la Cité, one of two naturally occurring islands in the Seine in the heart of Paris. The building took on a new life during the Revolution. It was here that the Revolutionary Tribunal hosted some 4,000 trials of people accused of undermining the nascent republic. About two-thirds of those trials resulted in death sentences.
The Conciergerie (tickets, 13 euros, or about $14.85) also housed the prison where Marie Antoinette — its most famous inhabitant — was incarcerated for more than two months before being condemned to death.
The Hôtel de Ville
Near City Hall (the Hôtel de Ville), the Gothic St. Jacques Tower rises 177 feet above a quiet, leafy square. If the solitary stone edifice appears to be missing a church, it’s because the tower, built in the early 1500s, is all that remains of the St.-Jacques de la Boucherie church, which the revolutionaries made national property in 1790. But the republic needed money, so the revolutionaries later sold the structure to a contractor, who dismantled the church and sold off its stones as building material. The tower was spared and repurposed as a factory for casting lead bullets.
You can book a guided tour and climb the tower’s 300 steps for a lofty city view (12 euros).
The Bastille
Today, the Bastille is a busy traffic circle anchored by an imposing 19th-century column. But in the run-up to the Revolution it was a fortress — surrounded by a moat — that served as a state prison. Among those imprisoned here were writers and printers who spoke out against the monarchy and were often detained without trial. On the morning of July 14, 1789, a crowd raided the building and, after hours of combat, took it over. Today, the fall of the Bastille is commemorated as the start of the revolution — and France’s national holiday.
Look for the Parcours Révolution marker on the sidewalk near the Café Français. A series of flat, round metal markers that run across the sidewalk and into the road trace the fortress’s original outline. Descend into the Bastille metro station to discover remnants of the old fortress on display.
The Odéon Neighborhood
This neighborhood on Paris’s Left Bank was home to many artists and intellectuals during the Revolution, among them the journalist Jean-Paul Marat, the founder and editor of the Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People), a newspaper beloved by revolutionaries.
It was inside Marat’s home at 30 rue des Cordeliers, now the site of a medical school, that the journalist was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, who blamed Marat for the bloody excesses of political repression. Four days after the murder, on July 17, 1793, the young woman paid for her crime by losing her head to the guillotine at — where else? — the Place de la Révolution.
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