Walks of Paris

Walk through Paris without rushing to its monuments. Enter the churches you find along the way. Some stand on famous squares; others occupy ordinary streets. Their doors open onto different centuries, but each gives you a place to stop, look, and pay attention. This book records a hundred such churches, entered between October 2018 and October 2026.

Together they span more than a thousand years of building. The bell tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was begun in 990, and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the twelfth century. Saint-Étienne-du-Mont still keeps its rood screen, a sixteenth-century gallery of carved stone that crosses the church between the nave and the choir. Pierre Mignard painted the dome of the Val-de-Grâce in the 1660s, and Saint-Marcel, on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, was built in the 1960s. Eighty-four of the hundred stand within the city, in every one of its twenty arrondissements, the city’s administrative districts; sixteen stand beyond it, from Neuilly-sur-Seine and Courbevoie to Vincennes, Villejuif and Versailles. Every one was reached on foot, by métro or by RER, the regional train network.

The chapters follow neighborhoods rather than the calendar, so churches a short walk apart sit together, as they do on the ground. Take them in any order. The record shows when each church was visited, not the streets walked between them; the route is yours to choose.

The record contains 232 visits catalogued so far, not every visit made. Each portrait lists their dates. Forty-three churches have one recorded visit; fifty-seven have more than one. Saint-Sulpice has eleven, from October 2018 to October 2026, more than any other church in the book.