About Inspiré par Hillairet

View from the stairs of the Panthéon

As a child, whenever my mother would take me on a trip, she would stop and say, "Imagine X was standing here, right where we are now."  And those words always struck me, whether we were at home or in a faraway land.  And I still repeat those words to myself every day as I walk through my adopted home, Paris.

Paris is captivating enough when you take it at face value, but I always wanted to know more about the every day streets and what happened on them.  My searches to learn more about them all led to one name, Jacques Hillairet, and his grand oeuvre, the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris.  An encyclopedia of each street, and some history to go with it, this tome was exactly what I craved. My yellowed edition is the cradle of this site, the birthplace of my exploration of the streets we can walk today, starting with the origins of the streets in the past.

I owe a debt to these two sites, that provide lovely content and helpful links and maps.  

http://www.linternaute.com/sortir/rue-paris

http://www.parisrues.com/

Please take a look and support them!

Who is Hillairet

Ever since I first heard about Jacques Hillairet, I wanted to buy all his books.  But who was he?

There's not a lot of information out there about him, and even less in English.  There is a short wikipedia post on him in French, in which I discovered that Jacques Hillairet was a pen name.  His real name was Colonel Auguste Coussillan, and he was a career military officer, recipient of the Légion d'honneur, and was active in both world wars.  Born July 31, 1886, in Commentry, a town of around twelve thousand inhabitants at the time, in the region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. He was taken as a prisoner of war in 1940, but after the liberation, he moved to Paris.

In Paris, he became interested in the anecdotal history of Paris, eventually publishing several works on Paris with Editions de Minuit.  The culmination of these works (in my humble opinion), is the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris, first published in 1960, and still regularly republished, with the most recent edition in 2004.

Hillairet lived to the age of 97 years, and lies at rest in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, in the 88th division; at this link you can see a photo of the man and his tomb.  And as of 1990, in the most fitting tribute, he has his own street named after him in Paris, rue Jacques Hillairet in the 12th arrondissement.  It is next to a park and the lovely promenade plantée, Métro Montgallet.

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/paris/sights/parks-gardens/promenade-plantee
http://www.goodmorningparis.fr/blog/walks/la-promenade-plantee-a-green-and-unusual-walk-in-paris/
http://europeantrips.org/promenade-plantee-the-first-elevated-park-in-the-world.html