Montmartre, the hilltop neighborhood hovering on the northern fringes of your Paris city map, is in many ways the perfect French cliche: checkered tablecloths, artist’s easels filling petite squares, and bohemian cabarets offering up high-kicking cancans.
The literal high point is the bone-white Sacre-Coeur Basilica, from where the City of Light fans out at your feet.
Just over a century ago, life on the hill was a working-class commotion of bistros and dance halls. Low rents lured struggling artists whose canvases now sell for millions (Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo).
These days, the hill is equal parts charm and kitsch — vaguely small-town rustic but mobbed with tourists and pickpockets. But if all you do is eat an overpriced crepe and marvel at the views, you will have missed out on Montmartre’s charm and history. To get away from the crowds, take a walk on the back streets, where a bit of village Montmartre survives.
A stroll takes you amid the traces of the many people who’ve lived here over the years: monks stomping grapes (1200s), farmers grinding grain in windmills (1600s), dust-coated gypsum miners (1700s), Parisian liberals (1800s), Modernist painters (1900s), and all the artists, poets, dreamers and drunkards who called Montmartre home.
Start at the Montmartre Museum. This 17th-century manor house offers the best look at the history of the neighborhood and the amazing period from 1870 to 1910. In its day, the house was the meeting place for a who’s who of artists, including Auguste Renoir, Raoul Dufy, and Maurice Utrillo (whose gorgeously lit attic studio is a highlight).
Montmartre was the perfect escape from grimy Paris. Rents went down as the hill went up, so younger, more avant-garde artists lived on the “butte,” the top of the hill.
Long ago a wall separated Paris from Montmartre, and to enter the city you passed through tollbooths that taxed anything for sale. Budget-minded drinkers took to the hill to drink tax free. In those days, Montmartre was blanketed with grape vines, reverentially tended by the monks and nuns of a large abbey.
A favorite hotspot was the ivy-covered cabaret called Au Lapin Agile. A poster above the door gave the place its name: a rabbit (“lapin” in French) leaps out of a pot while balancing the bottle of wine that he can now drink — rather than be cooked in.
This is where artists and writers gathered to perform serious poetry, recite dirty limericks or deliver anarchist manifestos. Once, in a practical joke on the establishment art community, patrons tied a paintbrush to the tail of the owner’s donkey and entered the resulting “abstract painting” in an art show (it won critical acclaim). Even today, the old personality of Au Lapin Agile survives, with jazz or blues sessions taking over the basement most nights.
Montmartre was once dotted with 30 windmills, used to press the monks’ grapes and mill farmers’ grain. Two of these functional windmills still stand, but nowadays, the most famous is the “Red Windmill” — the Moulin Rouge dance hall.
When it opened in 1889, the nightclub seemed to sum up the pleasure-seeking belle epoque. Most nights, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was among the customers, busily sketching as cancan girls kicked their legs. He’d been hired to create the cabaret’s advertising, and the colorful posters he made of singers, dancers, and club owners are now among the most recognizable works hanging in museums anywhere (including Paris’ Musee d’Orsay).
At the foot of Montmartre is Paris’s red light district, the infamous Pigalle (or “Pig Alley,” as American soldiers nicknamed it during WWII). If you venture here, stick to the bigger streets, hang on to your wallet, and avoid the bars, where a 150 euro bottle of what would otherwise be cheap champagne comes with a friend.
Montmartre retains some of the untamed appeal that drew bohemians and nonconformists to its winding lanes. As you wander, you may catch an echo of the free spirits who once partied, painted, and cancanned here.
IF YOU VISIT…
SLEEPING: Le Relais Montmartre has 26 cozy rooms with plenty of amenities (splurge, www.relaismontmartre.fr). Hotel Basss offers snappy modern rooms with splashes of color (moderate, www.hotel-basss.com).
EATING: The raucous La Fourmi cafe/bar has affordable lunches and generous cheese plates (74 Rue des Martyrs, tel. 01 42 64 70 35). Autour de Midi et Minuit is a classic French bistro sitting on top of a jazz cellar (11 Rue Lepic, tel. 01 55 79 16 48).
GETTING AROUND: Montmartre is a hill. To get to the top without having to climb, take the funicular that rides up to Sacre-Coeur Basilica, or catch the Montmartrobus city bus that runs from the Pigalle Metro stop.
TOURIST INFORMATION: www.parisinfo.com.
©2016 Rick Steves
Tribune Content Agency
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