Quartier Beaubourg and Hôtel de Ville
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Beaubourg

The lively quartier around the Pompidou Centre, known as Beaubourg, also offers much in the way of visual art. The colourful, moving sculptures and fountains in the pool in front of Église St-Merri on place Igor Stravinsky, on the south side of the Pompidou Centre, were created by Jean Tinguely and Niki de St-Phalle; this squirting waterworks pays homage to Stravinsky – each fountain corresponds to one of his compositions (The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, etc) – but shows scant respect for passers-by. Stravinsky's music in many ways paved the way for the pioneering work of IRCAM (Institut de la Recherche et de la Coordination Acoustique/Musique), whose entrance is on the west side of the square. Founded by the composer Pierre Boulez, it's a research centre for contemporary music and a venue for concerts; much of it is underground, with an overground extension by Renzo Piano.

To the north of the Pompidou Centre numerous commercial art galleries and the odd bookshop and salon de thé occupy the attractive hôtels particuliers of narrow, pedestrianized rue Quincampoix. Halfway down the street on the right is the delightful, cobbled passage Molière, with its quirky shops, such as Des Mains et des Pieds, where you can get a plaster cast made of your hand or foot.

A little further east of here, hidden on impasse Berthaud, off rue Beaubourg, is the Musée de la Poupée (daily except Mon 10am–6pm; €6; M° Rambuteau), a doll museum certain to appeal to small children. In addition to the impressive collection of antique dolls, there are displays of finely detailed tiny irons and sewing machines, furniture and pots and pans and other minuscule accessories.

South of the Pompidou Centre, rue Renard runs down to the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the city's government and a mansion of gargantuan proportions in florid neo-Renaissance style, modelled pretty much on the previous building burned down in the Commune. An illustrated history of this edifice, always a prime target in riots and revolutions, is displayed along the platform of M° Châtelet on the Neuilly–Vincennes line. Those opposed to the establishments of kings and emperors created their alternative municipal governments in this building: the Revolutionaries installed themselves here in 1789, the poet Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic here in 1848, and Gambetta the Third Republic in 1870. But, with the defeat of the Commune in 1871, the conservatives, in control once again, concluded that the Parisian municipal authority had to go if order was to be maintained and the people kept in their place. Thereafter Paris was ruled directly by the ministry of the interior until eventually, in 1977, the city was allowed to run its own affairs and Jacques Chirac was elected mayor.