Boulevards of The Marshals (Paris) - History

History

The boulevards of the marshals occupy the site of the old military road (or Rue Militaire) that ran along the inside of the fortified walls of Thiers, built around 1840. The expansion of the land area of Paris in 1860, by annexing bordering communities, created a situation where everything within the wall was Paris and everything without was not. The large berm immediately outside the wall and its dry moat led to a profound disruption and complication of the synergistic relationship between Paris and its suburbs.

In the 1920s, the dismantling of the enclosure permitted the building of a series of boulevards encircling the city, in the same way that the destruction of the wall of Louis XIII had eventually given birth, at the end of the 17th century, to the great boulevards of the right bank. This also served to re-integrate, to a large extent, Paris with its hinterland.

The boulevards of the marshals concept was almost fully realized by 1932, but the section known as Boulevard Amiral Bruix (an admiral of the Napoleonic era), was not incorporated until 1987. The Boulevard du General Martial Valin, a general of the Free French air corps, and the Boulevard du General Jean Simon, another officer of the Free French and a hero of the liberation of Paris, were not added to the circle until 2005.