Europe

What if behind the stately façades of the 8th arrondissement lay one of Paris’s most romantic neighborhoods? Between Gare Saint-Lazare, Place de l’Europe, Rue de Londres, and Parc Monceau, this walking tour takes you through a very chic Haussmannian setting… where you encounter brothels, forgotten slums, resistance fighters, movie stars, bloody crimes, and political utopias.

You first discover the world of trains and cinema: Gare Saint-Lazare immortalized by Monet, giant suitcase and clock sculptures, sets from La Bête Humaine and Un homme et une femme, the birth of Fouquet’s in a discreet bar, and a Belle Époque brasserie, classified as a historic monument, that secretly served during the Occupation. On Place Trinité – d’Estienne d’Orves, you pass from the first martyrs of the Resistance to the guitars of Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, and Jacques Dutronc, hanging out there before fame.

Around Place de l’Europe – Simone Veil, you walk through an open-air city map: streets named London, Vienna, Constantinople, Edinburgh… where Monet and Debussy once lived. Further along, Rue du Rocher takes you back to Roman pilgrims, a cemetery of guillotined victims, and “Little Poland,” a forgotten slum beneath the chic veneer. Rue de la Bienfaisance spans extremes: a revolutionary school for young girls, the roundup of 63 Jewish children, and a bourgeois crime in a grand hôtel particulier.

Avenue de Messine then aligns scandals and cinema: Alain Delon’s apartment, his romance with Romy Schneider, the unsolved Markovic murder, the filming of Le Samouraï, and the former Cinémathèque where Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol learned to love cinema. On Rue de Monceau, you encounter an antisemitic institute during the Occupation, Louis de Funès’ building, and the moving Nissim de Camondo Museum, an 18th-century palace frozen in time by a family decimated by the Shoah.

The tour ends in Parc Monceau, a garden of tales and ghosts: wild experiments by the nobility, the first parachute jump in history, executions during the Commune, before it became one of Paris’s most elegant parks. The audio guide shows you where to look to spot the pyramid, ruined columns, invisible plaques… and all the stories you would miss on a simple stroll.