Rotonde de la Villette

The Rotonde de la Villette stands as a grand survivor of an era when Paris was tightly controlled by a fiscal wall. Built between seventeen eighty-four and seventeen eighty-eight, this striking neoclassical structure served as the Barriere Saint-Martin, a high-stakes customs house where tax collectors levied duties on every merchant entering the city. Its architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, designed this building to be the most imposing of the dozens of toll gates that once ringed Paris. Parisians despised the wall because it forced them to pay higher prices for food and wine, leading them to sack and burn many of these tax barriers just days before the French Revolution officially began.