Marché des Enfants Rouges

1 · Opening

The oldest covered market in Paris is named after an orphanage. That is not a curiosity; it is the etymology of this entire register showing through.

2 · Why it matters

Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François I, founded a hospice for abandoned children in 1534. Its charges were dressed in red because red was the colour of Christian charity, and Parisians seeing small red figures in the streets of the Marais knew whose protection those children were under. The house was called the Enfants-Rouges.

Louis XIII ordered a market for the growing Marais and the aristocratic Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges. His commissioners bought land at the corner of the rue de Bretagne, and the king's master carpenter, Perceval Noblet, raised a wooden hall on sixteen oak pillars. It was equipped with a well — there was no running water — butchers' stalls, a stable and a dung pit. That list is the infrastructure of a pre-modern hospitality site exactly: water, meat, horses, waste.

The market took the orphanage's name from its neighbour and kept it after the hospice closed. Hospitality, hospice, hostel and hospital all descend from the same Latin root, and the Library rarely gets to point at a single address where the charitable and the commercial senses of the word stand next to each other. Remnants of the orphanage chapel are still visible on the rue des Archives.

3 · Signature & ritual

The market has become a restaurant without ever deciding to. Two thousand square metres and roughly twenty stalls now hold Moroccan, Japanese, Lebanese, Italian and French kitchens serving cooked food at communal tables, beside the produce, cheese and flower vendors that remain.

Madrid converted San Miguel in one act, in 2009, and the Library records the date. Paris arrived at the same result stall by stall, through tenancy rather than decision, and there is no date to record. It is the miniature of what the whole group has been circling: a market becomes a dining room either by design or by attrition, and only one of the two can be dated.

5 · LHL connections

• LHL-S-215Mercado de San MiguelThe same conversion, made in one dated act rather than by attrition.
• LHL-S-221Mercato Centrale FirenzeThe conversion built into an empty floor, so the market underneath survived intact.
• LHL-S-218Borough MarketThe other market saved by a public decision rather than by its own trade.

6 · Timeline

• 1534Marguerite de Navarre founds the hospice des Enfants-Rouges; its children are dressed in red, the colour of charity.
• ⛑ 1615Louis XIII orders the Petit Marché du Marais; a wooden hall on sixteen oak pillars is raised by the king’s master carpenter, with a well, butchers’ stalls, a stable and a dung pit. Some accounts date the market to 1628.
• ⛑ 1772 / 1777The orphanage closes; accounts of the year differ.
• ⛑ 1722 / 1772The market is renamed for the Enfants Rouges.
• 1790sGeoffroy d’Assy, who had acquired the covered market, is guillotined; his descendants take it on.
• 1912The City of Paris buys the market.
• 1982The market is listed as a historic monument on 8 March.
• 1990sIt closes and is threatened with demolition for a car park; residents campaign to save it.
• 1995Pierre Aidenbaum is elected on a promise to save and rehabilitate the market.
• 2000The market reopens in November.

7 · LHL story

“The Red Children” — Paris’s oldest covered market is named for an orphanage whose charges wore red for charity — the charitable root of the word hospitality, still on the sign four centuries later.