A tax gate became five roads meeting at a wheel

Five roads collide where a tax wall once stood

You are standing almost on top of Place de Clichy, the great wheel of a square where five roads collide — Boulevard de Clichy, Avenue de Clichy, Rue de Clichy, Boulevard des Batignolles, Rue d'Amsterdam. It is not an old square by Paris standards, but the ground remembers something older: this was the site of the barrière de Clichy, one of the toll gates set into the Wall of the Farmers-General, the tax wall that ringed the city until the Revolution's aftermath tore most of it down. Beyond the barrier lay open country and the village of Clichy; through this gate came the produce carts, the smugglers, the everyday traffic of a city testing its edges.

The square you see now took its current shape only in 1864, when the roads that had run along both faces of the old wall — one inside, one outside it — were fused into a single wide boulevard. That act of urban surgery is what gave Paris the Boulevard de Clichy and, by extension, the wide-open plaza under your feet. A short walk northeast, seventy-five metres marks where the Métro burrowed beneath the square in the twentieth century, Line 2 and Line 13 crossing at the same old crossroads that the tollgate once guarded.

The district around you built its reputation on argument and ambition rather than commerce: barely a hundred and forty metres off, painters and writers who would remake French art gathered on Sundays and Thursdays at the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy — Manet holding court, Monet, Degas, Renoir and Zola pulling up chairs, sketching out what would become Impressionism over café tables not far from where you now stand.

Guardsmen and cadets held the barrière for one day

The Place de Clichy carries a memory older than its boulevards: in March 1814, this gate was where Paris fought its last defense against the invading armies of the Sixth Coalition. A ragtag force of National Guardsmen, army cadets and Napoleonic veterans under Marshal Moncey held the barrière against Russian and Prussian troops for a single brutal day before the city capitulated. The fighting was fierce enough that a bronze memorial statue was later raised on the square to the defenders — ordinary Parisians who died holding a customs gate against a professional army, in an engagement that changed nothing strategically but became one of the city's proudest last stands. Whatever ground you're standing on absorbed that day's musket fire and its dead were carried off the same paving that the toll-carts had rattled over for decades.

The wall itself was never popular. The barrières of the Farmers-General existed to tax goods entering Paris, and Parisians hated them enough that the wall's gates were among the first targets of mob violence in July 1789, days before the storming of the Bastille — crowds burned and looted the tollhouses up and down the wall's length. Whether this particular gate suffered that fate isn't settled in what survives, but the pattern along the wall was consistent: these were despised checkpoints long before they were picturesque ruins, and their destruction was itself a form of revolutionary theatre.

Nearby cabarets sold heaven, hell and staged horror

A little under half a kilometre southeast, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opened in 1897 and ran for sixty-five years as a byword for stage horror — murders, mutilations and hauntings performed nightly for an audience that came precisely to be disturbed. Grand Guignol to anyone who studies horror as a genre; its plays were engineered to make spectators faint, and reportedly did.

Not far past it, twin cabarets once faced each other on the Boulevard de Clichy: Cabaret de L'Enfer and its opposite number, the Cabaret of Heaven, both built around 1892 by the same impresario, Antonin Alexander. Patrons entered Hell's mouth through a sculpted demon's face; the whole enterprise was theatrical damnation sold as an evening out, one of the stranger commercial ideas Montmartre ever produced.

A little further, past half a kilometre, the Cimetière du Nord — Montmartre Cemetery — holds the district's dead since the early nineteenth century, the third-largest burial ground in Paris after Père Lachaise and Montparnasse.

Closer in, around three hundred to five hundred metres east, the district's cafés built modern art and modern nightlife side by side: Le Chat Noir, generally credited as the first true cabaret, opened in 1881; the Café du Tambourin hosted Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec a few years later; and the Moulin Rouge, four hundred metres off, opened in 1889 and burned down in 1915 before being rebuilt.

Nearer three hundred metres, the small Sainte-Rita chapel was consecrated in 1956 specifically to serve the prostitutes of Pigalle — a parish built for the trade the neighbourhood was famous for, opposite the Moulin Rouge itself.

A rail tunnel and ancient seas underlie the square

The Batignolles rail tunnel, half a kilometre west, was carved through this ground in stages from 1837, carrying trains toward Gare Saint-Lazare until a 1921 accident led planners to strip most of it back into an open cutting.

Underneath all of this — the wall, the cabarets, the cemetery — lies Eocene-era rock: limestone laced with clay, gypsum and sand, laid down between roughly 56 and 34 million years ago in the shallow seas and lagoons that once covered the Paris basin. It is unglamorous ground, mostly, except that the gypsum in it is the same mineral that built plaster of Paris and quarried much of the city above it.