Hôtel de Ville, Paris

The water merchants known as the nautes, from whom the Paris municipality descended, held a jurisdiction near the Grand Châtelet from 1250, and moved early in the fourteenth century to the parloir aux bourgeois, the Parlour of Burgesses. In July 1357 Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris, bought the maison aux piliers, the House of Pillars, in the name of the municipality, and it became the seat of the prévôté des marchands. It stood on a shingle beach that served as a river port for unloading wheat and wood, later merged into a square, the Place de Grève, where Parisians often gathered, particularly for public executions. The city's administration has occupied the same site ever since. Marcel was lynched in 1358 by an angry mob after trying to assert the city's powers too energetically.

By the sixteenth century the House of Pillars was falling into ruin, and in 1529 the municipal officers asked Francis I to replace it with a Renaissance palace, and obtained it. In 1533 the king decided to endow Paris, then reckoned the largest city of Europe and of Christendom, with a city hall worthy of his capital, and appointed the Italian architect Dominique de Cortone, nicknamed Boccador for his red beard, and the Frenchman Pierre Chambiges. The House of Pillars was pulled down, Boccador drew up the plans, and the foundation stone was laid on 15 July 1533 by the provost of the merchants Pierre Violle.

The southern range was built under Francis I and Henry II and was finished in 1551. The wars of religion then interrupted the work, and the northern range was built under Henry IV and Louis XIII between 1605 and 1628, under the direction of the provost of the merchants Robert Miron; the building was not complete until 1628, in the reign of Louis XIII. Charles Leconte, carpenter and master of works of the hôtel de ville, was the first to float a raft of timber down the Yonne and the Seine for the needs of the site, the train reaching Paris on 20 April 1547.

In 1652, during the Fronde, rioters burned the doors of the Hôtel de Ville and massacred members of the municipal assembly. On 14 July 1689 a statue of Louis XIV as a Roman emperor by Antoine Coysevox was unveiled at the far end of the courtyard, conceived for the Parisian celebrations of 1687 that marked the recovery of the gravely ill king and taken as the symbol of the official reconciliation between Paris and Versailles. On 17 June 1763 fireworks were fired on the Place de Grève for the publication of the Peace.

For the two centuries after 1628 no changes were made to the fabric, and the building was the stage for several famous events of the Revolution. On 14 July 1789 the last provost of the merchants, Jacques de Flesselles, was murdered by an angry crowd. On 27 July 1794 Maximilien Robespierre attempted to take his own life following a coup, and was arrested along with his followers. The Place de Grève was renamed the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville on 19 March 1803.

On the morning of 29 July 1830 Charles X left Paris for the château of Saint-Cloud and the royal troops fell back into the bois de Boulogne. François Guizot called for a provisional municipal commission, formally charged with provisioning the capital and named a provisional government in the Moniteur universel. Its five deputies, Casimir Perier, General Mouton, Pierre-François Audry de Puyraveau, François Mauguin and Auguste de Schonen, installed themselves at the Hôtel de Ville that afternoon. On 31 July, the deputies having offered the duc d'Orléans the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom and he having accepted, the commission sought to become a provisional executive and named commissioners to the ministerial departments; most were confirmed in their posts by Louis-Philippe the next day, and for barely a day they formed a ministry appointed by the municipal commission of Paris.

From 1834 the Hôtel de Ville was the seat of the Paris municipal council. In 1835, on the initiative of Claude-Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau, préfet of the Seine department, two wings were added and linked to the façade by a gallery, to give the expanded city government more space. The architects were Étienne-Hippolyte Godde and Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, and the enlargement and partial reconstruction were carried out to their plans from 1837 to 1848, preserving the Renaissance façade, with Antoine Vivenel as entrepreneur général directing the site; four painters, among them Jean-Victor Schnetz, were called in to celebrate the great Parisian revolutions on the walls of the old throne room.

Under the Second Empire the building was used by the new regime to showcase its power. In 1852, during the plebiscite in favour of Napoleon III, it was decorated in the Emperor's colours and the imperial proclamation was made there; it also became the seat of the Prefecture, and hosted celebrations such as the visit of Queen Victoria in 1855. To clear its access, Haussmann had nine streets razed to create the Avenue Victoria. After the defeat at Sedan, with the Corps législatif pressed by the crowd that had invaded the palais Bourbon into pronouncing the deposition of Napoleon III, the Government of National Defence was constituted at the Hôtel de Ville, and the Third Republic was proclaimed there in 1870. On 30 October 1870 revolutionaries broke in and captured some of the members of the Government of National Defence while demanding a communard government; the existing government escaped through a tunnel built in 1807, which still connects the building with a nearby barracks. On 23 January 1871 crowds gathered outside to protest against a speculated surrender to the Prussians, and were dispersed by soldiers firing from the building, who inflicted several casualties.

Under the Paris Commune, led at the building notably by Jean-Louis Pindy, the Hôtel de Ville became the seat of the Commune Council and of the National Guard. During the Semaine sanglante the Communards set fire to several buildings in order to slow the advance of the Versaillais army. On 23 and 24 May 1871, as the French army approached, they set fire to the Hôtel de Ville, to its annexe on the Avenue Victoria and to part of the Palais de Justice. Some fifteen members met in the building at eight in the morning to discuss its immediate evacuation, only Delescluze and one other protesting, and by eleven it was in flames. The archives and the library went with it, and both collections of the Parisian civil registers predating 1860, the city's and the court registry's, were lost, the first in the fire at the Hôtel de Ville and the second in that at the Palais de Justice. Fragments cleared from the ruins are displayed at the parc Monceau, the jardins du Trocadéro, the square Paul-Langevin and the musée Carnavalet.

The reconstruction was directed by Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes, who had won the public competition held for it. Accounts of its span differ: the rebuilding is generally dated between 1874 and 1882, while the works as a whole have also been reckoned to have run from 1873 through to 1892. The plan entailed removing the ruins and putting up a completely new building, its central façade replicating the original sixteenth-century Renaissance front and its side wings replicating those of the 1830s and 1840s but wider, the whole reaching 50 metres at its highest point. Behind the façades the interior followed an entirely new design, and the building was fitted with electricity, telephone, lifts and central heating.

The statues of illustrious Parisians on the older building, enlarged under Louis-Philippe, had mostly been destroyed during the Commune. For the new façades some 230 sculptors were commissioned to produce 338 individual figures of famous Parisians. Among them was Auguste Rodin, whose figure of the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert was finished in 1882.

In 1937 a bunker was built in the basements as part of passive defence. On 20 August 1944 fighters of the Comité parisien de la Libération took cover inside the Hôtel de Ville while harassing the German soldiers outside. Paris was liberated by the French 2nd Armoured Division on 25 August, and that day General Charles de Gaulle, chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, spoke from a window of the town hall, declaring: "Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!"

The French government designated the building a monument historique in 1975, and the office of mayor of Paris was recreated in 1977; until then the room that is now the mayor's office was the one occupied by the prefect of Paris. The mayor also had an official apartment of 1,200 square metres looking on to the garden, then private, and in 2003 Bertrand Delanoë had a crèche for the children of municipal workers installed there. Delanoë had been stabbed in the building in 2002, during the first all-night, city-wide Nuit Blanche festival, when its long-inaccessible doors were thrown open to the public; he recovered and did not lose his zeal for access. The square outside was laid out as a pedestrian space in 1982.

The Hôtel de Ville is owned and run by the municipality of Paris, whose headquarters it has been since 1357, and it houses the Council of Paris, the mayor and cabinet since 1977, and large receptions. Its total floor area is 55,000 square metres, and it is reckoned the largest municipal building in Europe. It can be visited free of charge on prior registration with the city's public relations service, and opens during the European Heritage Days. The men's and women's marathons of the 2024 Summer Olympics started there.