The 8th arrondissement stretches from La Madeleine to Parc Monceau, from Gare Saint-Lazare to the Arc de Triomphe. It encompasses the Champs-Élysées, Place de la Concorde, and the Church of Saint-Augustin. This is where I was born.
I grew up in a bourgeois apartment with my brothers and sister—an apartment my father has never left. As a teenager, I felt a certain discomfort admitting where I lived. This privileged corner of Paris seemed cut off from the rest of the city. So at the age of 18, I moved eastward, then later lived abroad. I only returned to rue de Lisbonne to visit my parents.
Recently, I’ve taken a new kind of pleasure in walking through the 8th. I’ve started observing, listening, and paying attention to the different ways people live in the neighborhood. I turned it into a podcast: eight episodes, eight portraits of residents. It’s called Octophone, and it’s available on all streaming platforms (for now, only in French, unfortunately).
You have to understand that this arrondissement was born from a modernist and hygienist utopia in the mid-19th century, driven by one man: Baron Haussmann. In a mix of fury and ambition, the old neighborhoods were torn down to make way for the classical buildings that have since shaped the style of the entire city. These buildings, fitted with elevators and connected to a sewer system—a true revolution at the time—attracted the great fortunes and aristocratic families of the capital, as well as Marcel Proust, who immortalized in his work the snobbery and insularity of these groups.
Beyond the beauty of its Haussmannian architecture and tree-lined avenues, the 8th arrondissement offers a sense of space, diversity, and a very particular continuity. In other words, it is an immutable Paris, clean, bourgeois, and cinematic, that more than deserves a stroll.
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