3rd arr

This will sort of be a two-part post because the 3rd and 4th arrs are very closely linked.  Together they make up an area of the city called Le Marais, meaning "the marshlands," my very favorite area of the city and one with a really interesting history.  The 3rd makes up the northern portion, and the 4th is to the south, right on the river.  So in this post I'll give some of the older history and some 3rd-specific information, and I'll discuss the modern day Marais when I talk about the 4th arr.

I've mentioned before that at its beginnings Paris was much smaller than it is today, and that it was mostly comprised of the islands in the river, the area on the right bank surrounding the royal palaces (the 1st and 2nd arrs), and areas on the left bank (the 5th and 6th arrs).  In medieval times the Marais was outside of Paris city limits, and I'm not exactly sure when it was technically incorporated into the city.

Despite that status the Marais has been connected to the city since very early on: in 1240 the Knights Templar built a huge, fortified church in the middle of the 3rd arr that lasted until Napoleon's time.  This painting is from 1795, long after it had been abandoned by the Templars and made into a prison/fortress.

Napoleon decided that almost 600 years was a good enough lifespan for this old thing and knocked it down.  Today there are still two long streets named for it and its former home became a pretty park.

And just because I think it's super cool here is a daguerreotype of the road next to where the Temple was in 1838, soon after they had finished demolishing the structure:

Anyway, lots of other religious orders installed themselves in area after the Templars did, and most of the main streets in the 3rd and 4th still refer to them.  Interestingly, this is the one area of Paris where I almost never see nuns; all the orders are gone now.

So by the 13th-14th century this area had a pretty good reputation: away from the city proper (ie, away from the poor people) but right down the street from the heart of the political regime, fortified by the Templars, lots of religious orders in residence.  Nobility began building their mansions here, mostly in the 3rd arr, and many survive today, mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Hotel de Sens, now an art museum:

Part of the Hotel de Soubis, how a historical museum and home of the National Archives:

I think all of the existing mansions are in the 3rd, and partly because of this there are also lots of great, interesting museums in the 3rd.  The state eventually took control of all these former homes - either when the family died out or sold them, or when they lost their titles during the Revolution - and needed something to do with them, so they mostly became museums.

Similarly an old priory in this arr, St Martin-des-Champs, was converted into the Museum of Arts et Metiers (I know what that means but can't translate it - arts and industry I guess), one of the coolest museums you will ever see.  This place has prototypes or first version of basically all important inventions ever: early flying devices, cameras, recording devices, binoculars, calculators, computers, pieces of the Statue of Liberty...the list goes on.  It also has the original Foucault Pendulum.

Other museums in the 3rd include: Musee Carnavalet (one of my very favorites - Paris' personal museum of art, history, and artifacts just relating to the city), Picasso museum, Museum of the Art and History of Judaism, the doll museum, a museum just full of locks and keys from Roman times to now, and I think two fine art museums. 

Okay back to the history: so, lots of aristocrats started moving here from the 13th-16th centuries - definitely more in the 3rd than the 4th.

In the meantime, in 1394 all Jews were technically expelled from France - though the Paris region decided to treat this as "expelled from Paris proper."  There were plenty of Jews living in Paris at the time who found that they could just transplant to the Marais and be outside Paris while still living the Parisian lifestyle.  From this point on (and still today) the Marais was "the" Jewish ghetto. 

It appears that they mainly ended up settling in the 4th arr, but there were still a lot of Jews mingling with the aristocrats in the 3rd.  I find this an interesting dynamic, especially since if anyone were to have tried to enforce the national expulsion it would have been the nobles.  Apparently they didn't care enough or it didn't bother them enough.

Anyway, it's partly for this reason that after aristocrats were effectively crushed in the late 18th century and rulers stopped the expulsions the government kept a kind of laissez-faire approach to the Marais.  There were not a lot of renovations or expansion projects here because they didn't really want to interfere with a ghetto that was running nicely on its own.  So the Marais has ended up being one of the most untouched areas of the city: the streets are absolutely tiny, many still cobblestone, and it's the area with the highest concentration of medieval buildings.

A silly arty picture but it gives you an idea.

By the mid to late 19th century lots of Eastern European Jews were having serious trouble with their governments and fled to Paris.  Nearly all of them settled in the Marais and it became even more insulated and religious (before it was less bound by religion and more by a common culture); from what I've read about Paris during the Dreyfus affair around the turn of the century (a very ugly anti-Semitic episode in which a non-practicing Jewish army man was accused of spying) you would have been hard-pressed to find an observant Jewish family in Paris outside of the Marais.  You can probably imagine how that worked out later in the century.  I'll discuss that in the post on the 4th arr.

Lastly, the 3rd is home to the oldest open-air market, the Marché des Enfants Rouges (red children - named for an orphanage nearby with a distinctive red uniform).  It's like the markets I described last week but much bigger, permanent and open every day, and including several cafes.  I have to say, this is probably the best market in Paris and the cafes are really excellent - cheap and delicious.

Now, the 3rd is not as distinctively Jewish as the 4th.  It's also home to a small Chinatown.  The real, very large, one is in the 13th arr but this one has a definite presence.

It also has some really good clothes shopping - the 3rd and 4th are definitely my favorite areas for that.  It's full of quirky little boutiques and vintage stores.  There are lots of good restaurants too - it's a great place to hang out.

What not to miss in the 3rd: the Museum of Arts et Metiers, the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the Musee Carnavalet and Picasso Museums (if you like the subject areas of course).

(Also, a disclaimer, NONE of the pictures in this post are mine.  I found them all online.  It's raining again today and I have some stuff to do, so no adventuring for me.  Lastly, I've added a "reactions" button at the end of the posts in an attempt to get some more feedback.  All you have to do is click!  It won't even tell me who clicked what so go nuts.)