Paris of Dreams and Nightmares: The Dark Side of the City of Light

Dark and twisted stories lurk behind Paris’s elegant façade. On this walking tour, you’ll remove your rose-tinted glasses and look beyond the city’s beautiful exterior, where stories of torture, assassination, and terror mark its shadowy underbelly.

Starting at the foot of Pont au Change, the bridge across from the medieval Conciergerie’s former prison, you’ll hear about some of the brutal historical events that shaped the Paris you see today. As you walk through charming streets and past inviting cafés and alluring pastry shops, I’ll tell you about the horrors that unfolded in these very locations. You’ll see where King Henri IV was assassinated in 1610 after surviving a dozen previous attempts, and walk through 13 Novembre Garden, the new memorial park for the terrorist attacks of November 2015.

This tour is not for the faint-hearted. You’ll hear about medieval torture, the Holocaust, royal assassinations, and religious persecution. Yet it also passes some of Paris’ most stunning architecture, including soaring churches, Paris’ City Hall, and the playful Stravinsky Fountain. This almost circular walk ends back on the Seine riverside promenade, Voie Georges Pompidou.

On this two-hour tour, you’ll have an opportunity to:

• Stand before the Conciergerie’s Bonbec Tower, where prisoners were tortured during ”questioning”
• Cross Place du Châtelet and learn how the square eventually gave us the word ”morgue”
• See the site where Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, and thousands of others awaited judgment before being taken to the guillotine
• Visit the execution ground where heretics were burned at the stake and where the guillotine first fell on a criminal in 1792
• Hear about the Bloody Week of 1871 that led to the demolition and reconstruction of Paris City Hall
• View Mémorial de la Shoah, the Marais’ Holocaust memorial, and hear about the 76,000 French Jews deported to death camps
• Take in the Church of Saint-Gervais, where a German shell killed 91 worshippers during World War I

By the end of this tour, you’ll have a better understanding of how beauty and brutality have coexisted throughout French history. And how ignoring the dark side of the City of Light is to miss out on understanding Paris, France and the French.