Walk the 11ème,
your way.

The 11ème is the densest arrondissement in France. About 41,000 people per square kilometre - more than central Tokyo, more than Manhattan south of 14th Street. The reason is partly historical: this was Paris's working-class furniture-maker quarter from the 15th century onwards, and the buildings were always packed tight to fit more workshops on the slope. The reason is partly geographic: there is no major monument, no royal palace, no green space - the 11ème is a grid of late-19th-century 6-storey apartment blocks. That density makes it the most lived-in part of central Paris, with the highest concentration of small restaurants, bars, cafés and food shops per metre of pavement. It's also why the 11ème, more than any other arrondissement, is where modern Paris eating happened.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the sans-culottes

In 1471 Louis XI gave the abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs - on the eastern edge of the medieval city - the right to host artisan workshops outside the city guilds. The result was a 350-year-old furniture-making quarter known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Cabinet-makers, carvers, gilders, marquetry artists, upholsterers - the trade flourished outside the rigid guild system, with goods flowing to the royal court at the Louvre, then Versailles, then back to Paris. The workshops were arranged around narrow cours (courtyards) opening off the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine; you can still walk through a dozen of them today - the Cour du Bel Air, the Cour Damoye, the Cour des Trois Frères, the Passage du Cheval Blanc.

The workshop economy made the Faubourg a political hothouse. The 1789 storming of the Bastille was led by the sans-culottes of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine - they marched the half-kilometre west to the prison and tore it down with hammers and saws from their own workshops. Every later 19th-century uprising - 1830, 1848, 1871 - had its barricades in these same streets. The last Communards' barricade fell in May 1871 at the corner of the Rue Saint-Maur (now in the 10th but on the 11ème border); the 147 men shot at the Mur des Fédérés the next day were almost all from this arrondissement.

20th-century working-class then 2000s bohémien

Through the 20th century the 11ème stayed working-class. The furniture trade declined (most workshops closed by 1970) but was replaced by garment factories, small printing presses, ironworks, and Sentier-style textile sweatshops. The Cirque d'Hiver - the 1852 indoor circus on Rue Amelot, still operating - was the neighbourhood's only entertainment landmark. The arrondissement was almost completely missing from tourist guides until the late 1990s.

Two things changed in the 2000s. First, the Oberkampf bar strip exploded - Aux Deux Amis (cocktails + natural wine in a 1900 grocery shopfront), Pop In (rock and indie), Café Charbon (a vast 1900 brasserie with original tile work), and a dozen smaller bars on Rue Saint-Maur. Young Parisians, priced out of the Marais, made the 11ème their evening neighbourhood. Second, in 2011 the chef Bertrand Grébaut opened Septime at 80 Rue de Charonne - a 35-seat restaurant with a short blackboard menu, no tablecloths, and food at one-third of the Michelin-haute-cuisine price. Septime got its first Michelin star in 2014 and started a trend: bistronomy.

Bistronomy, defined

Bistronomy is the 11ème's most consequential cultural export. The premise: a chef trained in Michelin-starred kitchens (think L'Arpège, L'Astrance) leaves the haute cuisine establishment, opens a 30-seat restaurant in a working-class neighbourhood, charges €60-90 for a tasting menu (versus €300+ uptown), prints the menu on a blackboard, has no dress code, takes online reservations only. The cooking is precise, the wines are biodynamic, the service is friendly. Septime is the canonical example, but the format has spread to dozens of restaurants: Le Servan (Tatiana Levha, Filipino-Russian cooking), Le Chateaubriand (Iñaki Aizpitarte, the original bistronomy pioneer from 2006), Yard, Vantre, Bistrot Paul-Bert, Le Verre Volé. The 11ème has the highest concentration of these restaurants in the world.

13 November 2015, and the rebuilt 11ème

On Friday 13 November 2015, coordinated attacks across Paris by Islamic State terrorists killed 130 people - 90 of them at the Bataclan concert hall on Boulevard Voltaire, where an American rock band, Eagles of Death Metal, was on stage. Four other 11ème locations were attacked the same evening - bars and bistros on Rue de Charonne, Rue Bichat (just across the canal in the 10th), and Boulevard Voltaire. The 11ème was the epicentre because the terrorists chose ordinary places people went to drink and listen to music on a Friday night - the targets were the bobo lifestyle and the multicultural openness of the neighbourhood.

The 11ème's response was to keep going. The Bataclan reopened in November 2016 with a Sting concert; it has been running shows continuously since. Septime stayed open through it all. Pop In stayed open. The cafés on Rue de Charonne reopened within weeks. There is a permanent plaque on the Bataclan, and small individual memorials at each of the attack sites - but the working memory is that this is a neighbourhood that fought back by refusing to change its habits. Today the 11ème is the same Oberkampf bar strip, the same Marché d'Aligre Sunday morning, the same Septime four-week reservation, the same multilingual children running across Place Léon Blum after school. The arrondissement that the attackers chose is still, more than any other, where modern Paris drinks and eats.