City walls of Paris  

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Walls of Paris (Rabelais)

Over time, several city walls of Paris were built :

• an hypothetical gauloise enclosure
• a Gallo-Roman wall
• two medieval walls including the main one : the wall of Philippe Auguste
• the wall of Charles V, extending on the right bank
• the Louis XIII wall, extending on the western part of the right bank
• the Wall of the Farmers-General, for tax purpose
• the Thiers wall.

From ancient times up to the twentieth century, Paris was always surrounded by walls, except for roughly a century between 1670 (date of the demolition of Louis XIII wall ordered by Louis XIV) and 1785 (date of the beginning of construction of the Farmers-General wall).

The purpose of these walls was to defend the town and protect people, but also, later, to assess taxes for goods sold in Paris (The Farmers-General Wall). Phillipe Auguste's wall marked the first time Paris had really been protected from attack in any substantial way, and allowed the town to both consolidate and expand, frequently to slightly more than could be contained by the existing walls.

As Paris grew, new houses were built inside the wall, but also outside the wall. After some decades, the wall was destroyed and the place of the wall rebuilt or transformed into a street or boulevard, with a new wall being built outside, including more houses and sometimes gardens or vegetable fields.

Only a few traces of these walls survive - a few sections of the wall of Philippe Auguste and some pavilions of Claude Nicolas Ledoux parts of the Farmers General Wall. The main contribution to the layout of Paris made by the walls was that of the major streets and concentric boulevards:

• The Grands boulevards (=Main boulevards), built by replacing the walls of Charles V and Louis XIII,
• The outer boulevards, built in place of the Wall of the Farmers-General
• The Boulevards des Maréchaux (=boulevards named after Marshals of France), built in place of the internal enlarged walkway of the Thiers wall,
• The Boulevard périphérique (=Paris Ring Boulevard), built outside the boulevards des Maréchaux.

The parallel streets, Rue de Cléry and Rue d'Aboukir in the second arrondissement, mark the placement of the wall built by Charles V.