Mediapart’s Paris offices, in the capital’s 11th arrondissement, sit above the former site of the cité Lesage-Bullourde, an insalubrious cluster of inhabited buildings and industrial workshops that were demolished in the early 1960s. That prompted Antoine Perraud to delve into the history of the Cité, the foundations of which date back to the end of the 18th century, in a four-part series of articles. Here he focuses on the period of the Second World War, and the German occupation of France, when the Cité’s Jewish population, many of whom had already fled persecution, were rounded up by French police and deported to Nazi death camps.
TheThe cité Lesage-Bullourde, the foundations of which were reportedly first laid at the end of the 18th century with stone from the then recently demolished Bastille prison nearby, during the French Revolution, was a small, dilapidated site of inhabited buildings and workshops that, because of their insalubrity, were finally razed to the ground in 1961.
