How Paris Got It’s Snail Shape and the Euphemism Behind Why the 13th Arrondissement Exists

Paris is often called the City of Love, a title I think it deserves. However, it seems the name is fitting for a rather less than romantic reason, and it’s all because of the 13th arrondissement. But that’s not all.

The 13th is the main reason Paris has a snail-like shape. If you look at a map of Paris’s arrondissements, you’ll see it. The districts don’t run in a straight line or a simple grid. They spiral outward from the center of the city, clockwise, like a snail shell. 

The 1st sits at the heart of everything, and the 20th wraps around the outer edge to the east. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, Paris had an entirely different number of arrondissements before 1860.

A City With Only 12 Arrondissements

Before 1860, Paris had 12 arrondissements, not 20. They were arranged in a simple layout, running roughly from west to east across the city.

That number gap, the missing 13th, turned into a running joke. If a couple was living together without being married, Parisians would say they had been “married at the town hall of the 13th arrondissement.” Since no such place existed, the implication was obvious. Their marriage wasn’t real, and they were living in sin.

Think of it like this. Scotland had Gretna Green, where runaway couples crossed the border to marry quickly and quietly. Paris had the mythical 13th, where couples went when they weren’t bothering to marry at all.

So very, very French. Love is all that matters.

Why Paris is Shaped Like a Snail

In 1860, Napoleon III and his chief city planner, Baron Haussmann, set about transforming Paris. The city was growing fast, and eight new arrondissements needed to be added, bringing the total from 12 to 20.

The original plan was straightforward. The new districts would be numbered from west to east, continuing the existing logic. Under that plan, the wealthy, well-heeled neighborhoods of Passy and Auteuil, sitting in the western part of the city, would have become the new 13th arrondissement.

The residents were not happy. Not because the number 13 is unlucky, though the French are as superstitious as anyone. The real problem was its rather savory association. Being assigned the 13th meant being publicly associated with living in sin. For some of the most powerful and socially conscious people in Paris, that was completely out of the question.

They pushed back, and they had the money and connections to make sure they were heard. The number 16 was assigned to their arrondissement instead, and it still carries its reputation for wealth and social status to this day.

To make that work, the entire numbering system had to be rethought. The solution was the spiral. Districts were numbered starting from the center and curling clockwise outward, all the way to the 20th. That is the layout that has been in place ever since.

The Neighborhood That Got Handed the Number Nobody Wanted

So where did the actual 13th end up? The southeast corner of the Left Bank, a stretch of working-class Paris that had neither the money nor the influence to object.

It was not a glamorous part of the city. The Bièvre River ran through it, and for centuries, the tanning and dyeing industries had used the river as a dumping ground. By the late 19th century, the Bièvre was so polluted and foul-smelling that the city finally decided to do something about it. In 1910, the river was covered over entirely and buried underground, where it remains today.

The 13th was rough, industrial, and largely ignored by the Paris that tourists came to see.

The Tower Blocks Nobody Moved Into

A century later, the city tried to fix the 13th with concrete.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a massive urban renewal scheme known as Italie 13 tore through the neighborhood. A cluster of high-rise towers was built on the site of a former freight yard, forming a complex of around a dozen buildings later called Les Olympiades. Each tower was named after a city that had hosted the Olympic Games. Anvers, Athènes, Helsinki, Londres, Mexico, Sapporo, Tokyo.

The towers were designed for young Parisian professionals. Modern apartments, multiple services, and an elevated pedestrian esplanade eight meters above street level. The idea was to attract a new, upwardly mobile population to the neighborhood and drag it into the future.

Nobody came.

The apartments sat largely empty. The young professionals the city had imagined filling them looked elsewhere. Les Olympiades, built with ambition and left standing in silence, was widely considered a failure.

The People Who Filled Them

Then history intervened in a way nobody had planned for.

In 1975, the fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia. Communist governments seized power in Laos. Hundreds of thousands of people fled Southeast Asia, and many of them made their way to France, the former colonial power in the region.

They arrived in Paris and found the 13th. The towers of Les Olympiades had empty apartments at rents that other parts of Paris couldn’t offer. People moved in, opened businesses, and built a community from scratch.

By the 1980s, the area around Avenue de Choisy, Avenue d’Ivry, and Boulevard Masséna had become the largest Chinatown in Europe. It is known as the Quartier Asiatique, or sometimes the Triangle de Choisy, and it draws people from across the city and beyond for its Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian restaurants, bakeries, and markets.

Tang Frères, the enormous Asian supermarket on Avenue d’Ivry, was founded in 1976 by brothers originally from Laos. It is now one of the largest Asian supermarket chains in the Western world. What began as a neighborhood store serving newly arrived refugees became an institution.

The 13th Arrondissement Today

The 13th is a different place now from the one that inherited an unwanted number in 1860.

If you’ve seen Jacques Audiard’s 2021 film, you’ll know it as Les Olympiades, released in English as Paris, 13th District. It follows a group of young people living in those same high-rise towers, whose lives are tangled together in complicated, very human ways. The film made people look at a neighborhood they had walked past for years and actually see it.

Beyond the Quartier Asiatique, the 13th has also transformed along its riverbanks. The stretch of the Seine near the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the François Mitterrand site of France’s national library, has been redeveloped into the Paris Rive Gauche district. It’s a mix of university buildings, offices, restaurants, and green spaces built on former rail yards and industrial land.

The neighborhood’s old railway lines have been turned into walking paths and parks. The Butte aux Cailles, a small hilltop area within the 13th, has a village-like feel, completely at odds with the nearby tower blocks, with cobblestone streets, independent bars, and an Art Deco public swimming pool dating from the 1920s that is still open to the public. It was actually featured in an episode of Emily in Paris.

Worth knowing if you go: the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Quai François Mauriac is free to enter for exhibitions, and the Manufacture des Gobelins on Avenue des Gobelins still runs tapestry weaving workshops using 17th-century techniques. Tours run on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons.

The 13th is not on most Paris itineraries. But then, neither was the joke that put it on the map.