Palais-Royal

Palace · Palais-Royal (1st)Paris,France

A walled Paris courtyard filled with 260 striped marble columns cut to different heights, its arcades once a forum the king's police could not enter.

Palais-Royal is a walled courtyard and garden in the middle of Paris, filled since 1986 with Daniel Buren's 260 striped marble columns, each cut off at a different height and chipped by years of climbing and skateboards. Behind a roofless double row of older columns the garden opens out: gravel walks, lime trees clipped into flat green walls, a round basin, two fenced enclosures thick with ivy and honeysuckle. Traffic runs close on every side, and inside you mostly hear boules landing on the gravel. The palace itself holds government offices and has no visitor entrance, so the courtyard and the garden are the whole of the visit. The duke of Chartres got the king's leave in 1781 to line three sides with buildings and rent out the ground floors, filling them with shops, cafés, theatres and gambling rooms. Royal police could not set foot on his land, so radical speakers used the garden as a forum. On 12 July 1789 Camille Desmoulins climbed onto a café table here and called the crowd to arms; the Bastille fell two days later.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for a narrow passage cut under the buildings — The site has no grand gateway. Every way in is an opening through the ground floor of the blocks around it, easy to miss from the street.
Cross the columns and the crowd thins — Most people stop in the courtyard to photograph the columns. Forty paces further north the garden is usually calmer, and quietest at its far end by rue de Beaujolais.
Look for the turning steel balls — Two basins among the bare columns hold polished steel spheres by Pol Bury; when the water runs they turn slowly, and most people walk straight past.
Come back after dark — After sunset a small light set into the paving glows red or green at every crossing point of Buren's grid, and blue light rises through the steel grates in the courtyard floor.
Take a side walk, not the middle one — The garden's centre is open gravel with no shade at all, while the two side walks run under double rows of limes and stay cool well into the afternoon.

Things to do

1
Find the corner where a speaker called Paris to arms
Walk up the west gallery, called the Galerie de Montpensier, to its northern end. Nothing marks the café that stood under these arches, where a young journalist called the crowd to arms on 12 July 1789. Look down the garden at the open ground that crowd filled, then up at the trees. That day people stripped green leaves from these trees and pinned them to their hats as a badge.
2
Crouch at a grate, then sight along the column tops
Three long trenches run between the rows of striped columns, and steel grates cover them. Kneel and look down: the columns carry on below ground, where they all stop at the same level, so a second set of column tops sits under the first. Stay low and look along one row above ground, where the tallest column and the shortest end at the same height, because the ground beneath them slopes. Then look closely at a stripe: every black and white band is 8.7 centimetres wide, the width Daniel Buren has used throughout his career.
3
Read the poem cut into the chair opposite you
In the garden, metal chairs stand in facing pairs on the gravel. Lines of poetry are cut right through their backrests, so from one seat you read the words on the other against the light. The Canadian sculptor Michel Goulet placed the first pairs here in 2016.