Paris's Galeries de Bois - modern shopping centre archetype

The Galeries de Bois in the Palais-Royal in their pre-revolution heyday. Photo: Design Pics/Rex

“At that time, the Galeries de Bois were one of the most illustrious Parisien curiosities. It is useful to describe this ignoble bazaar because for 36 years it played such a great role in Parisian life that there can be few men aged 40 to whom this description - incredible as it may seem to the young - will not give pleasure.”

Honoré de Balzac - Les Illusions Perdues.

The Galeries de Bois, at what is now Palais Royal, took their inspiration from the souks of Arabia and the forums of ancient Rome, and became the inspiration for the covered shopping passages and arcades that would spring up over Paris around the end of the 18th century. They were also an early prototype of the modern shopping centre.

Created in the 1770s in the square around the magnificent royal palace (originally built by Cardinal Richelieu in 1628 and later inhabited by royals), they became the artistic, social and political centre of the French capital, drawing the great and good away from the royal court at Versailles.

By day the galleries, bookshops, cafés, and restaurants were a meeting place for the aristocracy, intellectuals and other members of the Parisien beau monde who mingled with students from the elite polytechnic school and traders from the Bourse (stock exchange).

City dwellers escaped the hustle and bustle of central Paris, with its dust and disagreeable smells, to buy the latest fashions there, while Parisien dandies came dressed in their finest and fanciest simply to flâner (stroll). The restaurants boasted that their kitchens and cellars were the best in Europe. Aristocrats and the emerging middle classes attended plays by Molière at the Comédie Française theatre, situated in one corner of the square.

Galeries de bois, Palais Royal. Photo: Brown University Library

It was hardly surprising that no foreigner could pass through Paris without visiting the Galeries de Bois, considered the very epicentre of civilised, intellectual and philosophical Europe. It was the place to see and be seen.

However, Balzac’s text describes two distinct faces of the Galeries. “The poetry of this amazing bazaar shatters at night fall. It is horrible and cheerful at the same time,” he wrote.

At dusk the place was indeed transformed. The elegance of daytime was replaced by the libertinage of the night. Girls with low-cut dresses – front and back – and elaborate coiffures converged on the Galeries, turning them into what historians have described as an immense and opulent market, a capharnaüm of all dissolutions. It was here the soldiers of the empire dreamed of spending their money – but it never lasted long. Charlatans, gambling houses, ventriloquists, pimps and prostitutes held court on the doorstep of the royal palace.

The party ended during the 1848 French revolution, when the Palais Royal was ransacked and declared a national palace. In 1933, large parts of the Galerie d’Orléans that had replaced the Galeries de Bois, including the shops and glass roof, were demolished – leaving just the columns.

Today, the Palais-Royal and its garden are still owned by the state and have entered perhaps the calmest phase in their long and colourful history. The prostitutes moved north into the notorious St Denis and Pigalle areas long ago; the flâneurs – as the Yves Montand song goes – also went north to stroll the Grands Boulevards; and the kings and emperors of the empire gave way to the presidents and prime ministers of the modern-day Republic.

The Comédie Française is still here, but the 17th-century palace buildings are now home to the Conseil d’Etat (State Council), the Constitutional Court and the Ministry of Culture, as well as the National French Library. Chic shops, art galleries and restaurants, including the celebrated Grand Véfour, flank the gardens, but children now play in the royal Cour d’Honneur that since 1986 has been home to the controversial but iconic Colonnes de Buren, by French conceptual artist artist Daniel Buren.

 Daniel Buren’s controversial striped columns installation at the Palais Royale. Photo: Imagestate Media Partners/Alamy

This installation of 260 striped columns of different heights was placed in the listed courtyard at a cost of €1.5m – despite opposition from then city mayor Jacques Chirac, who went on to become president. The columns – denigrated as an eyesore and resembling sticks of seaside rock sweets – underwent a staggeringly expensive €4m renovation before reopening to the public in 2010. Like the glass Louvre pyramid Buren’s columns, popular with tourists, have also gained grudging acceptance from locals, and have now become part of the Paris landscape.

Source: Paris's Galeries de Bois, prototype of the modern shopping centre – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 6