The first systematic attempts at planning were introduced by Henri IV at the beginning of the seventeenth century: regulating street lines and uniformity of façade, and laying out the first geometric squares. The place des Vosges dates from this period, as does the Pont Neuf . Grandiose public buildings from this period perfectly symbolise the bureaucratic, centralized power of the newly self-confident state.

 

Louis XIV is responsible for the construction of the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Bastille, the places Vendôme and Victoire, the Porte St-Martin and St-Denis gateways, the Invalides, Observatoire and the Cour Carrée of the Louvre - not to mention the vast palace at Versailles , which Louis made the home of his court in 1671. The aristocratic hôtels or mansions of the Marais were also erected during this period, to be superseded early in the eighteenth century by the Faubourg St-Germain as the fashionable quarter of the rich and powerful.

The underside of all this bricks-and-mortar self-aggrandizement was the general neglect of the living conditions of the ordinary citizenry of Paris. The centre of the city remained a densely packed and insanitary warren of medieval lanes and tenements. And it was only in the years immediately preceding the 1789 Revolution that any attempt was made to clean it up. A further source of pestilential infection was removed with the emptying of theovercrowded 800-year-old cemeteries into the catacombs.

In 1786, Paris received its penultimate ring of fortifications, the so-called wall of the Fermiers Généraux, with 57 barrières or toll gates (one of which survives in the middle of place Stalingrad), where a tax was levied on all goods entering the city.