Le Marais, Paris

Le Marais is a historic Paris district spread across parts of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Seine’s Right Bank. It is a historic neighbourhood rather than an administrative quarter, so its boundaries are not sharply fixed. The name evokes the marshland that once occupied this area, before drainage and cultivation transformed it.

As you walk among its handsome façades and narrow streets, you are moving through a district shaped by repeated reinvention. From the seventeenth century, aristocratic families built substantial private residences here, many of which still survive. After the French Revolution, noble families left, and the area fell into disrepair.

Its recovery began in the 1960s, when André Malraux helped launch a preservation programme for the neglected district. Today, restored mansions hold museums, while galleries, restaurants and fashion houses animate the streets. The Marais also carries the history of communities that settled here: Ashkenazi Jews from the late nineteenth century, Chinese residents after the First World War, and LGBT communities that became prominent from the 1980s. Rue des Rosiers remains associated with Jewish life, and the district is still a vivid meeting place of architecture, art and living culture.