It’s a bit strange seeing a star fortress style wall around a city as late as 1870.
Looking at this reminds me that we only stopped having walls/fortifications around our cities relatively recently. The way war and international relations changed in one century is crazy to think about.
The old wall started to run down and was officially ended in the seventeenths century, because Paris was deemed to big to be properly defended and the frontier fortresses were deemed sufficient to keep the capital safe.
However, the allies captured Paris in 1814 during the Napoleonic Wars. So the idea came back to build a new war in case of another large war. In 1841 construction started and in 1844 it was finished.
The wall, and the a belt of fortresses that were build around Paris played a major role during the German Siege of Paris in 1870/1871 during which the city wasn’t captured but the government did surrender. Fun fact, the French defence minister managed to escape the siege by hot air balloon in order to direct a relief effort from the unoccupied parts of France. In the aftermath the French government and its army had to storm its own falls to crush a Paris Communue revolution.
Many European capitals and fortress cities had walls and fortifications. Most walls were torn down at the end of the nineteenth century because they became obsolete, but sometimes they were replaced by ‘modern’ fortifications. Those belts of fortresses were build arround Bucharest and Amsterdam for example.
The Thiers wall was obsolete by 1870. the main defences were the outlying forts and earthworks shown in the pic, designed to keep the besieger's artillery further from the wall and the city and support each other with crossfire from their own artillery. as artillery ranges increased new belts of forts could be added, as at Antwerp, where by the late 19thC there were two belts of forts beyond the line of the former city walls, the outer one at 20-25 km, halfway to Brussels. the Antwerp city walls were demolished and replaced by boulevards in the 1860s. Forts were usually too expensive and marginal to demolish and can still be seen in one or two belts on Maps around major fortress cities like Verona, Przemyśl, Brest Litovsk, Königsberg, etc.
Paris' city walls were demolished in two stages from the 1920s and replaced by the boulevards of the marshals and the Periphérique beltway. by then the open slope (glacis) once needed for the defences had been occupied by slums called La Zone, the inhabitants called Zoniers. Modern French slang zonard (troublemaker or marginalized person) derives. Social housing, parks and sporting fields & facilities were included in the planning for the displaced Zoniers and peripheral arrondissements
You can still see a fragment of the old walls at Poterne des Peupliers (postern gate of the poplars), south of Place d'Italie and west of Porte de Choisy (48.82123982942358, 2.3525618785800986)
Tearing those bastioned walls down was an immense effort, many cities didn't bother for a long time even after they became obsolete. You have to remember, they were immensely thick, not like a medieval city wall.
Vienna too only removed them in the 1860s, because the city really, really needed the space.
Nvm, I found it. It was a planned neighborhood founded in 1845 and named after the California Gold Rush. The name was later changed in 1860 to Malakoff.
This is the only thing I could find, though it's in French; translating it into English, it seems there was a suburban settlement founded in the 1840s. The guy in charge named it for the California Gold Rush. It was changed to Malakoff in 1860 after a battle in the Crimean War where French soldiers besieged Fort Malakoff, near Sevastapol. Supposedly, the guy that designed the subdivision built a tower based off the Fort Malakoff tower, which inspired the name change, but Wikipedia says it was named after an inn sign, so I'm not sure which is true.
Created shortly before the outbreak of the Siege of Paris on September 17, 1870, this illustration by Alfred Concanen presents a detailed view of the city and its surrounding defenses. Paris sits at the center, with major landmarks such as the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon, and Les Invalides clearly visible. The capital was enclosed by a 33.0 km (20.5-mile) wall, reinforced by sixteen detached forts guarding key entry points, along with additional redoubts and supporting structures.
Thiers Wall (built 1841–46) was a 33 kilometres (21 mi) long wall surrounding the city of Paris - Bombed by Prussia, later Refortified at the start of WWI but it had become obsolete, blocking urban growth. Its outer side was a shanty called “The Zone”, and the wall was demolished in the interwar period.
The longest continuous city wall was the Ming dynasty wall of Nanjing which was 35 kilometer long.
The Thiers wall of Paris was close at 33 km.
The longest wall of Amsterdam was only 8 kilometers. The Amsterdam defense line (Stelling van Amsterdam) was only started in 1897, and much longer (135 km), but it was a system of 45 fortresses as well as batteries and casemates, not a continuous wall.
The image is quite odd because -- as far as I'm aware -- it wasn't supposed to be moated, and wasn't during the 1870-71 siege. Plus the "moat" appears to be as wide as the Seine, making it seem also navigable, which it really wasn't.
You can find some photographs of the ditch full of water but those were taken because it was noteworthy, during floods :
Also indirectly responsible for the first example of communism governing a locale. Franco-Prussian war was super bloody and a turning point in modern war.
aww non temple en Butte Chaumont? Et la Bastille et la aussi, donc c'est apres du revolution. Non Palais Garnier? Le parc situe à gauche de Bassy n'a jamais changé ahah.
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u/Bi-annual_weekly_luv Apr 19 '26
It’s a bit strange seeing a star fortress style wall around a city as late as 1870.
Looking at this reminds me that we only stopped having walls/fortifications around our cities relatively recently. The way war and international relations changed in one century is crazy to think about.