Palais-Royal

This quiet, arcaded garden was for decades the most turbulent place in Paris. Its story begins with a cardinal: in the 1630s, Richelieu, Louis XIII's all-powerful minister, had the architect Jacques Lemercier build him a palace here, a stone's throw from the Louvre. He left it to the king, and from then on it was the Palais-Royal. Louis XIV spent part of his childhood here.

1A business with arcades

The palace later passed to the Orléans family. In the 1780s, the deeply indebted Louis Philippe d'Orléans enclosed the garden with arcaded galleries and let the ground floors to shops, cafés and gambling dens. Because it belonged to a prince, the police could not easily enter, and the place filled with strollers, pamphleteers and plotters.

2The spark of 1789

On 12 July 1789, when news broke that the minister Necker had been dismissed, the young journalist Camille Desmoulins climbed onto a table outside the Café de Foy and called on Parisians to take up arms. Two days later, the Bastille fell.

The garden has a little noon cannon, installed in 1786, which fired by itself when the midday sun, focused through a lens, lit the fuse.

3What to look out for

• Daniel Buren's columns (1986), in the main courtyard, which caused a huge controversy.
• The arcaded galleries, with old shopfronts still in use.
• The garden, with its clipped lime trees and central fountain.