Place de l'Hôtel de Ville

My favourite square in Paris. I wish I still lived in the 4th.

The public square in the 4th arrondissement of Paris that is now the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville (City Hall Plaza) was, before 1802, called the Place de Grève. The French word, "grève", means "a flat area covered with gravel or sand situated on the shores of the ocean or on the banks of a river." The location presently occupied by the square was the point on the sandy right bank of the river Seine where the first riverine harbor of Paris was established.

Later it was used as a public meeting-place and also as a location where unemployed people gathered to seek work. This circumstance accounts for the current French expressions, être en grève (to be on strike) and faire (la) grève (to strike, literally: "to do a strike").

However, the principal reason why the place de Grève is remembered is that it was the site of most of the public executions in early Paris. The gallows and the pillory stood there.

The highest-profile executions took place on the grève, including the gruesome deaths of the assassins Jacques Clément, François Ravaillac, and Robert–François Damiens, as well as the bandit-rebel Guy Éder de La Fontenelle. In 1310 the Place de Grève was also the site of the execution of the beguine heretic Marguerite Porete. In the words of Victor Hugo (in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), the grève was "the symbol of medieval and ancien régime justice: brutal, corrupt, and inadequate."