Brilliant Paris
FR
Tour Jean-sans-Peur

Oldest Paris · 2nd arrondissement

Tour Jean-sans-Peur

A duke’s tower built after a political murder, where a stone oak, hawthorn and hops spread across the top of the stair.

Photo: Delauney, Alfred Alexandre (Gouville-sur-Mer, 13–07–1830..., CC0, Wikimedia Commons

On a November night in 1407, Louis d’Orléans, brother of the mad king Charles VI, was cut down in a Marais street by men in the pay of his cousin John, Duke of Burgundy. John admitted it, justified it, and went on to fight the Orléans party, the Armagnacs, for control of the kingdom. Paris became a city of two factions, and the duke wanted a stronghold to match his position. Between 1409 and 1411 he added this tower to the Burgundian town house, the hôtel de Bourgogne, which his family had acquired through marriage in 1369.

It was part refuge, part statement. The upper storeys held two well-lit rooms, each with a fireplace and its own latrine, where the duke could sleep safely; a lower passage reached the old wall of Philippe Auguste, which ran through the property and offered another way out. The duke’s emblem, a carpenter’s plane, answered the knotted club of his murdered rival.

The finest thing inside is a gift to the eye rather than to defence. At the top of the spiral staircase, the stone vault opens into a carved tree: an oak rising from the newel, with hawthorn branches and climbing hops twisting through it. The usual reading makes it a family tree, the oak for John’s father Philip the Bold, the hawthorn for his mother Margaret of Flanders, and the hops for John himself.

John was murdered in his turn in 1419 on the bridge at Montereau. After the Burgundian line ended in 1477 the house passed to the Crown and was sold off in pieces in the sixteenth century; on part of the site the Confrérie de la Passion built the hôtel de Bourgogne theatre, the city’s first permanent playhouse. The tower survived because its staircase was too useful to demolish.

When rue Étienne-Marcel was cut through in the 1860s, the surrounding buildings came down and the tower suddenly stood alone. The City bought it in 1874, it was listed in 1884, and since 1999 an association of friends has opened it to visitors, with small exhibitions on daily life in the Middle Ages.

What to look for

  • The carved vault at the top of the spiral stair: oak, hawthorn and hops in stone.
  • The great spiral staircase itself, modelled on the one Charles V had built at the Louvre.
  • The latrines set behind the fireplaces of the upper rooms, with their own ventilation shaft; the friends’ association calls them the oldest pit latrines in Paris.
  • From the street, the machicolations and the way the tower stands alone, its vanished house only implied.
Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Timeline

  1. 1407Louis d’Orléans murdered on the orders of John the Fearless
  2. 1409–1411Tower built onto the hôtel de Bourgogne
  3. 1419John the Fearless killed at Montereau
  4. 1548Confrérie de la Passion acquires part of the site for its theatre
  5. 1874Tower bought by the City of Paris
  6. 1884Listed as a historic monument
  7. 1999Opened to visitors by an association of friends

Plaques within 250 m

  • 29 Rue Etienne-Marcel · 60 m
    EMPLACEMENT DU THÉÂTRE DE L'HÔTEL DE BOURGOGNE, ANCIEN HÔTEL D'ARTOIS LES CONFRÈRES DE LA PASSION LES ENFANTS SANS SOUCI LES COMEDIENS DE LA TROUPE DITS DE L'HÔTEL DE BOURGOGNE LA COMÉDIE ITALIENNE ET L'OPÉRA COMIQUE DONNÈRENT ICI LEURS REPRÉSENTATIONS DE 1547 À 1785
  • 12 Rue Du Cygne · 110 m
    en face de cette maison/sur le chemin/de Compostelle/s'élevait l'hôpital/saint jacques aux pèlerins
  • 21 Rue Dussoubs · 180 m
    AU PREMIER ETAGE D'UN IMMEUBLE, SUR UN PAN DE MUR ENTRE DEUX FENETRES",ICI EST DECEDE PAUVRE/ LE 6 FEVRIER 1793/ CARLO GOLDONI/ DIT LE MOLIERE ITALIEN/ AUTEUR DU BOURRU BIENFAISANT/ IL ETAIT NE A VENISE L'AN 1707/ LE CHOCOLATIER/ ANGE TOFFOLI ANCIEN MINISTRE/ LE COMMANDEUR SENATEUR J. CONSTANTIN// DU 6 AU 12 MAI 1952/ ARLEQUIN SERVITEUR DE DEUX MAITRES/ DE CARLO GOLDONI/ A TRIOMPHE A PARIS/ LE PICOLO TEATRO DE MILAN/ DEDIE CE SOUVENIR/ A CARLO GOLDONI/ QUI MOURUT DANS CETTE MAISON
  • 32 Rue Montmartre · 190 m
    ENCEINTE DE PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE PORTE MONTMARTRE
  • Chapelle Des Musiciens, Eglise Saint-Eustache · 240 m
    JEAN GUILLOU / 18 AVRIL 1930 - 26 JANVIER 2019 / MUSICIEN, COMPOSITEUR, / IMPROVISATEUR ET POETE. / ORGANISTE TITULAIRE, IL FIT RAYONNER / DE SON GENIE LE GRAND ORGUE DE / SAINT-EUSTACHE PENDANT 52 ANS.

Commemorative plaques, Ville de Paris open data (ODbL); transcriptions as published, in French.

Sources

More places nearby

Oldest Paris · 3rd House of Nicolas Flamel A charity house of 1407 built by a Paris scrivener whom later centuries turned into an alchemist. Its tenants owed him prayers. 440 m · 6 min walk Covered passages · 1st Galerie Véro-Dodat Two pork butchers’ 1826 shortcut between the Palais-Royal and Les Halles, where crowds once pressed against a window full of caricatures. 740 m · 10 min walk Covered passages · 2nd Galerie Vivienne A notary’s speculation of the 1820s, Pompeian in its colours, where Vidocq once climbed the stairs at no. 13. 740 m · 10 min walk Covered passages · 2nd Passage des Panoramas Named for vanished rotundas of painted cities: the oldest Paris passage, and the first public place in town lit by gas. 1.0 km · 14 min walk