The Jardin du Palais-Royal is the sort of place you could walk past a hundred times without realising it exists.

Tucked behind collonaded arcades in the 1st arrondissement, this formal garden began life in the 1630s as Cardinal Richelieu's private backyard. It then passed to the crown, and eventually to the cash-strapped Duke of Orléans, who lined three sides with elegant apartment buildings to pay his debts.

What happened next was extraordinary. Because a quirk of royal privilege kept the police out, the arcades became a lawless paradise of gambling dens, forbidden books and revolutionary plotting. In July 1789, a young lawyer named Camille Desmoulins climbed onto a café table here and helped spark the storming of the Bastille two days later.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace this arc from Richelieu to revolution, following the path of an assassin who bought her knife in these arcades to the controversial striped columns artist Daniel Buren installed in the courtyard in 1986.