Ever since watching the French Netflix movie Lords of Scam (reviewed here), I’ve been curious about the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville. This documentary traces the rise and crash of scammers who conned the EU carbon quota system and pocketed millions before turning on one another. Much of the action unfolds in Belleville, where the film’s central figure, Marco Mouly, grew up and learned to hustle.
Despite its rough-and-tumble nature, Belleville is home to a vibrant artistic community and boasts an enviable collection of street art. This week’s post provides a sampling, captured by yours truly on a recent trip to Paris.
Belleville’s Backstory in a Nutshell
In the second half of the 19th century, Belleville was a bustling working-class neighborhood. When Napoleon III enlisted the famous urban planner, Baron Haussmann, to redesign Paris, most laborers were forced to move out of the city center—either because their homes were razed to build new parks and boulevards, or because they could no longer afford to live there. Many relocated to Belleville. Over the decades, the quarter has welcomed successive waves of immigrants, creating a somewhat chaotic multicultural atmosphere unlike the elegant luxury on display closer to the banks of the Seine.
Here’s how Parisian historian Jacques Hillairet described the landscape of Belleville in 1953:
« Aucun coin de Paris n’a conservé autant que Belleville son caractère champêtre de commune suburbaine, aucun quartier n’a connu comme lui des paysages étonnants formés d’un lacis d’étroites ruelles qui s’enchevêtrent, où des poules picorent, où des canards barbotent, où s’allument le soir des réverbères au gaz, des passages dont la largeur varie entre 0,60 et 2 mètres, des terrains vagues, des maisons grises d’un à deux étages seulement, des jardins abandonnés, des cours fermées par des petites barrières en bois. »
“No corner of Paris has preserved as much of its pastoral character as a suburban commune as Belleville has. No neighborhood has known, as it has, those astonishing landscapes formed by a lattice of narrow intwined alleyways, where chickens peck, where ducks splash about, where gas lamps still light the evenings, with passageways ranging from .6 to 2 metres in width, with vacant lots, gray houses of only one or two stories, abandoned gardens, and courtyards closed off by small wooden barriers.”
As is true for urban neighborhoods worldwide, the 1980s marked the beginning of a process of gentrification. Attracted by cheaper rents and crumbling real estate, artists and industrious young people were the first to set up shop. Today, you’ll find wine bars, health food stores, luxury cheese shops, and vegan restaurants along Rue de Belleville, but the area still retains an air of unpolished grit with peeling paint, worn graffiti tags, littered corners, and other such rough edges.
A Sampling of Belleville’s Street Art
Located in the northeast of Paris, Belleville and its surroundings are devoid of museums and monuments, which often anchor my excursions when visiting big cities. As a result, I hadn’t taken the time to explore the area until my most recent trip to France in the fall of 2025. There are various articles online that attempt to guide you past shining examples of both sanctioned and spontaneous displays of public art. Such works, however, are transient, so on my first outing (following posted advice), I came away nearly empty-handed—meaning no worthy additions to my camera roll. However, a return to the neighborhood a week later—this time following a different path—delivered the experience I’d been hoping for. Voilà mes meilleurs clichés:
Horizontal Gallery of Belleville Street Art
Vertical Gallery of Belleville Street Art
Endnote
If you enjoy walks in urban environments, you might also like these views along Paris’s remarkable Coulée Verte.
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You photographed excellent outdoor murals. I live near Philadelphia, a city I never tire of exploring on foot. There are an amazing number of exterior murals in Philadelphia. Many/most of them were created via a quasi-governmental agency.
That’s great to know about Philadelphia. Who would have guessed that governments are capable of improving quality of life? In Ann Arbor, where I live, we have a number of good murals as well. Again, most are funded through taxes as are other examples of public art here. Thanks for stopping by.
Clever and amusing images showing a lot of artistic skill. I especially liked the goldfish trying to look scary with a shark fin. The young lady with a brain on her tray is certainly startling, though I’m not sure what message it was meant to convey.
I assume the girl on the winged wolf is a reference to some locally-known story?
So canard means “duck”? I wonder how that came to mean “falsehood” in English.
The word for “shark” seems to be completely different in every language. I would never have guessed requin meant that before looking it up.
I like the goldfish and brain on a platter images too. That’s an interesting question regarding the latter. I did a little googling and found reference to a famous scene in “Waiting for Godot”. The French are much bigger readers than Americans and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is commonly taught in high school. In the play, the two main characters talk about being served up on a platter, available to their enemies or in the case of the play, perhaps to the audience. So, maybe the image is about our brains being served up to authorities who are doing with them what they will. Pure speculation but I enjoyed tracking down a possible interpretation.
You pose great questions. I tried to find reference to a French folktale regarding a winged wolf without success but there does seem to be a Russian folktale, Ivan Tsarévitch et le loup ailé, that’s perhaps better known in France than here.
A canard can also be a wrong note in French.
Wow! You’re right about requin. I checked Italian: squalo; Spanish: tiburón; German: Hai; and, Latin: PISTRIS.
Have good rest of your weekend, Infidel.
Wow, Carol. Very cool art.
Glad you enjoyed it Melanie.