In the Faubourg of Luxury: Where Art Meets Power

Although one might say it first emerged in the early 18th century, the “faubourg saint Ho” did not wait for the death of Louis XIV to come to life. As far back as the 12th century, the boggy land acquired a degree of importance at a time when a growing population forced Parisians to develop this marshland to generate a food supply. By draining and drying out this expanse, market gardening and large-scale agriculture could be established. Starting in the 13th century, this western territory was the site of three villages governed by a Benedictine convent established in the most important parish by the name of Ville-l'Evêque.

A few patrician residences were built here and there in the 14th and 15th centuries; the aristocracy of the day, unsettled by the Hundred Years’ War and various epidemics, came to breathe cleaner air and enjoy fresh, abundant, and easily accessible foods.

The parish of Ville L'Évêque expanded in the 16th and 17th centuries, as taxes and duties on goods were less onerous outside the Paris walls. This encouraged many inhabitants to seek economic refuge in what was not yet called a “suburb.” People lived and nourished themselves there without the burdensome property and trade taxes being collected within the city walls. At the time, what is now the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré was known as Chaussée de la Conférence, named for a major event during the Wars of Religion: the meeting between Henri de Navarre and the Catholic League at which the future king decided to renounce his Calvinist faith.

While these were prestigious political developments, this "chaussée-faubourg" (“fore-town road”) was humbly lined with cottages and vegetable gardens, a mere extension of the Rue Saint-Honoré and not yet as coveted by the Marais quarter’s important families. Power was centered in the Louvre, around the Place Royale (Place des Vosges), and soon in Versailles, to remain so until Louis XIV’s death in 1715.

 Architects favored the classical style with a heavy touch of rocaille spirit: By hybridizing the Grand Siècle’s weighty discipline with rococo lightness, they brought forth the famed Regency style. These miniature palaces were built with facades of stone and metal, and the quarries of Saint Maximin in the Oise département were soon providing building sites with hard, luminous cut stone. This was the golden age of artistic ironwork, monumental gates, and railings in repoussé, hammered, and gilded iron. The courtyard facades came alive with pavilions, pediments, peristyles, and artistic openings.

Though the landscaping arts were still ruled by French symmetry and discipline throughout the first half of the 18th century, the space available between the street and the Avenue des Champs Elysées – established earlier by Le Nôtre – made creation of English-style grounds easy and attractive.And though the Royal Powers That Were ceased speculation and established numerous rules in 1724 in a radical attempt to control how plots of land were priced and allocated, this did little to calm the raging waters of the real-estate frenzy. The 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and the development of the Place Royale, now the Place de la Concorde, quickened this movement and the Faubourg Saint Honoré began drawing aristocratic and upper-class families en masse.

Jeanne Poisson, given the title of Marquise de Pompadour by her royal lover Louis XV, set her sights on a masterpiece of Regency architecture, the Hôtel d’Évreux. It was the largest and most sumptuous on the entire thoroughfare and undeniably illustrated the new (and relative) social diversity that thrived in this “new faubourg Saint-Germain,” more tolerant than the exclusively aristocratic district on the Seine’s left bank. The future Élysée Palace became the embodiment of the marquise’s flawless taste; she had just finished absorbing two small buildings adjacent to this construction and had those gardens enlarged.

The Élysée was sold to financier Nicolas Baujon in 1770 and literally became a pleasure palace under the French Directory before becoming home to a dynasty that would shape the country’s 19th century: the Bonapartes. Residents would include Joséphine, who would prefer Malmaison after her divorce from Napoleon, Joachim Murat and his wife Caroline, short-lived sovereigns of Naples, and then the celebrated “Prince-President” Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleon III). In some ways, it was at the Élysée that Napoleon III consecrated the indisputable link between monarchy, republic, and empire by carrying out a coup d’état that heralded the arrival of an imperial elite in this nearly new district, around the palace and beyond a square where today one can admire the last jewel of Louis XVI architecture: the Hôtel de Beauvau-Craon.

This building, with a Doric peristyle and subdued facades, brings tremendous elegance to the round square named after it and today houses France’s Ministry of the Interior.

The Second Empire led to the exterior esthetics that we still see today in the district. The elegant, Hausmann-sought revenue houses had an elegant, patrician architecture and left streets and avenues unencumbered, which appealed to families and merchants. Then, in the 20th century, fashion and luxury made a spectacular entrance with the establishment of three companies that still reign supreme: The first was Hermès and its exceptional saddlery, then Lanvin and Chanel for haute couture. Jeanne Lanvin and Gabrielle Chanel opened private showrooms on Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, drawing a stylish international stampede. In the interwar period, while her designs were being produced and sold on Rue Cambon, Coco Chanel received, housed, and fed artists she admired on Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré.

Today, these embassies of good taste still rub elbows with genuine diplomatic residences, such as the embassies of the United States and the United Kingdom. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré, created out of necessity through the conquest of inhospitable land, has managed to generate an inspired inertia that harbors some of France’s finest and most influential forces.