Paris Public Spaces

Market spaces constituted recurring ephemeral spaces where merchants participated in commercial exchange under careful regulation of the king. With gates that closed each night, Les Halles’s freestanding buildings and temporary lean-to structures were animated each day by market activity. Limited evidence is available to indicate whether Les Halles was actively guarded at night by royal power, but the monarch certainly regulated daytime activity at the market. Royal edicts regulated the types of goods available for sale at Les Halles and which merchants could gain access to the market. The invitation of foreign merchants to sell their goods at Les Halles rendered the market space a site of diplomacy, as these merchants gained permission from the king to sell their goods to French wholesalers.

The commercial space at Les Halles must be viewed in what Nicola Camerlenghi described as the longue durée. Philip Augustus created a market space at the site in 1182, and commercial activity has flourished at Les Halles ever since. In the fourteenth century, Louis I and Philip the Bold expanded the functions of Les Halles to include new buildings for cloth merchants and leatherworkers. Philip the Bold also gave permission to linen sellers and clothes makers to sell goods in temporary stalls along the walls of the Cemetery of St. Innocent. The market continued to grow in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, culminating in a total rebuilding of the halls by Francis I and Henri II in the mid-sixteenth century. Charles IX’s entry punctuated this long process of transformation and royal influence at Les Halles.

Charles IX’s visit reinforced the monarch’s role in securing commercial activity in Paris. Charles addressed wholesale merchants who lived in the streets surrounding the market; his arrival tied their success to his generous sanction of their activities. Les Halles was a crucial node in the Parisian commercial network, connecting wholesalers and retailers. Another example of early royal intervention and subsequent commercial activity occurred at the nearby Hôtel de la Reine, commissioned by Catherine de Medici, which eventually became the Bourse de Commerce. Because the monarch’s court assisted city officials in preparing for the ceremonial, the ceremonial could be viewed as a royal, rather than civic, expression. By including commercial spaces with religious spaces on the ceremonial route, the monarch intended to connect royal power with wealth and other symbols of power. By tying wealth creation in France to royal intervention, Charles IX reinforced royal claims to taxing power—and discouraged illicit commercial activity in the process. Treating the entire ceremonial as a royal argument, space becomes a mode of the maintenance of royal power in less-controlled, urban spaces.