Leonard Pitt in Lost Paris

Few people would guess that this sleepy garden, where life seems to pass in slow motion, is the place where the French revolution ignited in July, 1789. At a time when Montmarte was still a small village outside of Paris and the Champs Elysées was still a wood, the Palais Royal was the center of Parisian social life. Day and night the populace flocked there to indulge every taste and fancy in an atmosphere that was as lively as a Middle Eastern bazaar. Be it food, drink, sex, gambling, or political discussion, everything could be found in the Palais Royal: in the cafÈs with their fine wines, beers, coffees, and chocolate, the restaurants with their haute cuisine, the elegant shops under the arcades with the finest jewelry, glass, porcelain, and clocks, or the gaming tables and houses of prostitution.

Cafés were partisan places in those days. The prostitutes went to the Café de la Renommée. The "elegants" assembled at the Café de Chartres. Musicians went to the Café du Caveau. Financiers went to Café de Foy, which also had the tastiest sorbet. The best chocolate was found at Café Lemblin.

By July of 1789, revolutionary fervor in Paris had reached a frenzied pitch. Crowds flocked to the Palais Royal for the latest news, rumors, or simply to vent their spleen. On July 12, a fiery young lawyer, Camille Desmoulins, leapt onto a table at the Café de Foy, and in a fit of passion exhorted the crowd, "Aux armes citoyens!" This was the first call to arms, and history took a terrible turn.

When the authorities closed the gambling houses in 1836, the garden began a long and steep decline into a somnombulant state that lasted until the 1980s. For decades the only people to frequent the garden were gandmothers and nannys pushing their baby strollers.

The only remnant of the Palais Royal's glory days is the restaurant Au Grand Vefour tucked away in the north corner. In recent years several cafés have opened up again under the arcades with tables spilling out into the garden bringing life and animation back to this urban treasure.

Note: In the 1920s a Paris city planner, grappling with growing problems of automobile circulation, proposed the idea of putting a road through the Palais Royal as part of a new east-west thoroughfare cutting across the city.