Couvent des Jacobins de la rue Saint-Honoré

You are walking toward the site of a building that once held the intellectual and political heart of the French Revolution. In the early seventeenth century, this ground was home to the Dominican order, who established the Couvent des Jacobins on the rue Saint-Honoré. The monks were nicknamed Jacobins because their original Paris headquarters was located on the rue Saint-Jacques. By the late eighteenth century, this quiet monastery held an immense library of over thirty-two thousand printed books and hundreds of rare manuscripts, serving as a repository of immense knowledge before the tides of history swept through its halls.