Saint-Ouen flea market

The Saint-Ouen flea market began as an informal shantytown for outcasts who were physically barred from the city center. In the late nineteenth century, as the architect Baron Haussmann aggressively redesigned Paris with wide boulevards, thousands of rag-and-bone men were pushed beyond the city's old military fortifications to this exact spot. These scavengers, often called moonlight fishermen because they worked by night to avoid police, set up their makeshift stalls on the muddy, lawless terrain just outside the capital's reach. They sold the discarded household items they gathered from the city's trash, and the name flea market emerged from the unfortunate tendency of their secondhand clothing and mattresses to harbor tiny, biting insects.