Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin

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The rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, in the IXe arrondissement of Paris was the street that gave this new quarter of Paris its generic name. It runs north-northwest from the Boulevard des Italians to the Église de la Sainte-Trinité,^[1] sited to provide a focal object at its upper end. It has the Metro station Chaussée d'Antin - La Fayette and one section of the Galeries Lafayette department store.

Here existed a swampy piece of ground north of the ancient porte Gaillon, one of the city gates built in the wall under Louis XIII. In the seventeenth century it was still a winding road, the chemin des Porcherons connecting the porte Gaillon to the humble village of Les Porcherons, with a straggling string of raffish premises and an unrailed bridge across the fouled brook of Ménilmontant. The notorious hostelry "La Grande Pinte" stood on the present site of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité. It was graded and resurveyed as a boulevard eight toises in width according to an ordonnance of 4 December 1720, and stretched from the end of rue Louis-le-Grand to rue Saint-Lazare. It received its popular and eventually official name from Louis Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duke of Antin (1665-1736), the son of the marquise de Montespan and superintendant of the Bâtiments du Roi, whose hôtel^[2] directly faced the opening of the new street; his name became attached to the roadway as early as 1712.

The higher ground and healthier air, it was thought, to the north and west of the heart of Paris attracted the upper classes in the eighteenth century. A series of glamorous hôtels particuliers were erected along the Chaussée-d'Antin in the later eighteenth century. That of Mlle Guimard, who made her reputation as a dancer at the opéra at 600 livres annually, and her fortune as the mistress of the prince de Soubise, was housed in an advanced Neoclassical style, erected for her by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in 1770-73. Madame d'Epinay and the baron Grimm, were visited by Mozart at n° 5 Chaussée-d'Antin in 1788. Cardinal Fesch, the archbishop of Lyon and uncle of Napoleon, lived in the Chaussée d'Antin. Between the two was the hôtel of Mirabeau, giving the Chaussée the Revolutionary name of rue de Mirabeau from 1791 until, with Mirabeau proscribed in 1793, it was renamed rue du Mont-Blanc in celebration of a commune that had been added to French territory. It regained its former name in 1815.

In the course of the nineteenth century commercial establishments changed the character of the street, and shops opened in the ground floors of the old residences. For Honoré de Balzac "The heart of Paris today beats between rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and rue du Faubourg Montmartre." In 1840 the street was extended past rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. The first one-way streets in Paris were the Rue de Mogador and the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, created on 13 December 1909.

[edit] Notes

^ Its site was determined in Baron Hausmann's urban planning, by the intersection of the prolonged rue Saint-Lazare, offering a perspective view from the Opéra Garnier. It was built to designs of Théodore Ballu, 1861-67; it was the site of Hector Berlioz's funeral, 11 March 1869. The church contains an organ by the creator of the Romantic organ, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, which he had to rebuild after damages incurred during the Paris Commune of 1870; on this organ Olivier Messiaen composed during the time when he was the organist, 1931 until his death in 1992.
^ Later the hôtel de Richelieu, Paris seat of the duc de Richelieu.