Planning and expansion
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Place des Vosges

The first systematic attempts at planning were introduced by Henri IV at the beginning of the seventeenth century: regulating street lines and uniformity of facade, and laying out the first geometric squares. The place des Vosges dates from this period, as does the Pont Neuf, the first of the Paris bridges not to be cluttered with medieval houses. Henri thus inaugurated a tradition of grandiose public building, which was to continue to the Revolution and beyond, that perfectly symbolized the bureaucratic, centralized power of the newly self-confident state concentrated in the person of its absolute monarch.

The process reached its apogee under Louis XIV, with the construction of the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Bastille, the places Vendôme and Victoire, the Porte St-Martin and St-Denis gateways, the Invalides, Observatoire and the Cour Carrée of the Louvre – not to mention the vast palace at Versailles, whither he repaired with the court in 1671. The aristocratic hôtels or mansions of the Marais were also erected during this period, to be superseded early in the eighteenth century by the Faubourg St-Germain as the fashionable quarter of the rich and powerful.

The underside of all this bricks and mortar self-aggrandizement was the general neglect of the living conditions of the ordinary citizenry of Paris. The centre of the city remained a densely packed and unsanitary warren of medieval lanes and tenements. And it was only in the years immediately preceding the 1789 Revolution that any attempt was made to clean it up. The buildings crowding the bridges were dismantled as late as 1786. Pavements were introduced for the first time and attempts were made to improve the drainage. A further source of pestilential infection was removed with the emptying of the overcrowded cemeteries into the catacombs. One gravedigger alone claimed to have buried more than ninety thousand people in thirty years, stacked "like slices of bacon" in the charnel house of the innocents, which had been receiving the dead of 22 parishes for 800 years.

In 1786 Paris also received its penultimate ring of fortifications, the so-called wall of the Fermiers Généraux, with 57 barrières or toll gates (one of which survives in the middle of place Stalingrad), where a tax was levied on all goods entering the city.