PLACE DU TERTRE

This famous square, which takes its name from its geographical position at the top of the Montmartre hill, already existed in the ^14th century. It gained a certain charm from the trees planted here in 1635 and was also the site of a justice gallows before Montmartre's first town hall was established in 1790, in the home of the town's mayor, Félix Desportes de Blinval (whose memory is preserved by a plaque at no. 5 on the square). It was on this same square that, at the end of the 1870 war against Prussia, the Garde Nationale stored some of its cannons, an arsenal that led to a riot that was partly to blame for the Commune when the government of Adolphe Thiers wanted to recover it. The artistic vocation of the Place du Tertre dates back to the ^18th century when the first bohemian artists - painters, singers, etc. - began to occupy the site. At the center of an area of cabarets and venues for poets and songwriters, one of the oldest restaurants is "La Mère Catherine", dating from 1793 (at no. 6). The square's fame was further enhanced on December 24, 1898, when Louis Renault climbed up the hill with his first prototype petrol-powered car (see commemorative plaque at ^no. 21). At no. 7 (or 9, according to others), Maurice Drouard (1886-1915) set up his sculptor's studio there in 1912, an artist to whom we owe the publication of a book in 1915 featuring numerous magnificent sketches of old Montmartre, then in the process of disappearing (the Radet mill, rue du Calvaire, rue Norvins, Maison de Berlioz, rue du Mont-Cenis, the Moulin de la Galette, place du Tertre...). Although the area has changed considerably and is now popular with tourists, it has retained its charm, with little houses dating from the 18th and early ^19th centuries. In the center, the "marché des peintres" (painters' market), where portraitists and caricaturists flock, is a delight for some tourists, a far cry from the days when Degas, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Utrillo strolled the neighborhood or crunched a few pennies at the Hôtel Bouscarat (at the corner of rue du Mont-Cenis and place du Tertre), living day by day among a whole community of artists. It's worth noting that over the last few decades, the space devoted to this portrait artists' market has shrunk in favour of the terraces that are so widely frequented by visitors from all over the world. We can only recommend an early morning visit - especially for the nostalgic.