Down to the Faubourg St-Antoine
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The principal thoroughfares running from Père-Lachaise back to the Bastille are rue de la Roquette and rue de Charonne. There's nothing particularly special about the numerous passages and ragged streets that lead off these into the lower 11e arrondissement, except that they are utterly Parisian, with the odd detail of a building, the obscurity of a shop's speciality, the display of vegetables in a greengrocer's, or the graffiti on a Second Empire street fountain to charm an aimless wanderer. Plus the occasional reminder of the sheer political toughness of French working-class tradition, as in the plaque on some flats in rue de la Folie-Regnault commemorating the first FTP (Francs-Tireurs Partisans) Resistance group, which used to meet here until it was betrayed and its members executed in 1941. Further north, square de la Roquette was the site of an old prison, where 4000 members of the Resistance were incarcerated in 1944. The low, forbidding gateway on rue de la Roquette has been preserved in their memory.South of rue de Charonne, between rue St-Bernard and impasse Charrière, stands the rustic-looking church of Ste-Marguerite (Mon–Sat 8am–noon & 3–7.30pm, Sun 8.30am–noon & 5–7.30pm; M° Charonne), with a garden beside it dedicated to the memory of Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul who persuaded the retreating Germans not to blow up Paris in 1944. The church itself was built in 1624 to accommodate the growing population of the faubourg, which was about 40,000 in 1710 and 100,000 in 1900. The sculptures on the transept pediments were made by its first full-blown parish priest. The inside of the church is wide-bodied, low and quiet, with a distinctly rural feel. The stained-glass windows record a very local history: the visit in 1802 of Pope Pius VII, who was in Paris for Napoleon's coronation; the miraculous cure of a Madame Delafosse in the rue de Charonne on May 31, 1725; the fatal wounding of Monseigneur Affre, the archbishop of Paris, in the course of a street battle in the faubourg on June 25, 1848; the murder of sixteen Carmelite nuns at the Barrière du Trône in 1794; and the quartier's dead of World War I. In the now disused cemetery of Ste-Marguerite, lies the body of Louis XVII, the 10-year-old heir of the guillotined Louis XVI, who died in the Temple prison. The cemetery also received the dead from the Bastille prison. From square R. Nordling, rue de la Forge-Royale – with the Casbah nightclub magnificently decorated in North African style at no. 18 – takes you down to rue du Faubourg-St-Antoine. After Louis XI licensed the establishment of craftsmen in the fifteenth century, the faubourg became the principal working-class quartier of Paris, cradle of revolutions and mother of street-fighters. From its beginnings, the principal trade associated with it has been furniture-making, and this was where the classic styles of French furniture – Louis Quatorze, Louis Quinze, Second Empire – were developed. Many furniture workshops, as well as related trades such as inlayers, stainers and polishers, still inhabit the maze of interconnecting yards and passages that run off the faubourg, especially at the western end. One of the most attractive courtyards is at no. 56, with its lemon trees, and ivy- and rose-covered buildings. To the east, rue du Faubourg-St-Antoine ends at place de la Nation. The place is adorned with the "Triumph of the Republic" bronze, and, at the start of the Cours de Vincennes, the bizarre ensemble of two medieval monarchs, looking very small and sheepish in pens on the top of two high columns. During the Revolution, when the old name of place du Trône became place du Trône-Renversé ("the overturned throne"), more people were guillotined here than on the more notorious execution site of place de la Concorde.
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