Municipality of Paris

The building before you serves as the official seat of the Paris municipal government, a role it has held since the middle of the fourteenth century. While it appears to be a historic Renaissance palace, the structure you see is a late nineteenth-century reconstruction. The previous building, which stood on this spot for over three hundred years, was reduced to a hollowed-out shell during the final, violent days of the Paris Commune in eighteen seventy-one. When the government moved to reclaim the city, insurgents set the building ablaze, destroying centuries of municipal archives and historical records in the process.