The municipal pawnbroker of Paris, founded in 1777 and still trading from the same address in the Marais. Parisians called it ma tante — my aunt — and it is where George Orwell left his clothes for the money to eat during the poverty of Down and Out in Paris and London.
The Crédit Municipal is the city's own pawnbroker. It was founded in 1777 as the mont-de-piété, a public institution set up to lend small sums against goods at controlled rates, expressly so that the poor would not have to go to private lenders charging whatever they liked. It has been doing that for nearly 250 years, and it is doing it today at 55 rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
Parisians called it ma tante — "my aunt" — the polite fiction you used when explaining where an object had gone. The nickname is the point: the institution was respectable enough to be a euphemism, and used widely enough to need one.
It runs all the way through the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London. George Orwell's poverty in that book is an arithmetic of what can be pawned and for how much, and the pawnshop is where the arithmetic is settled. Clothes go in; a few francs come out; the francs buy bread and tobacco and a bed for a few more days.
He also describes the process itself with the eye of someone who has queued in it — the valuations, the waiting, the way an institution designed to help the poor still processes them. The scene where he walks to a pawnshop with overcoats and finds it shut until four in the afternoon, having gone sixty hours without food, is on the boulevard de Port-Royal; the head office in the Marais is the institution behind it.
It is worth walking past for one reason above all the other Orwell addresses: nearly every other place in the book is either gone, renamed, or turned into something else. This one is still a pawnbroker, still municipal, still lending against what people bring in. You can go in.
The mont-de-piété is founded as a public pawnbroker lending at controlled rates.
Orwell pawns clothing to eat during the events of Down and Out in Paris and London.
The book is published, with the pawnshop running through the Paris chapters.
Still operating from the same Marais address as the Crédit Municipal de Paris.
The city's own pawnbroker, founded in 1777 as the mont-de-piété. It was created so that Parisians short of money could borrow against their possessions at controlled rates rather than from private lenders. It still operates from 55 rue des Francs-Bourgeois in the Marais.
"My aunt" was the polite euphemism Parisians used for the pawnshop — where you said an object had gone rather than admitting you had pawned it. The nickname stuck because the institution was both respectable and very widely used.
It is where he pawned clothes for money to eat during the events of Down and Out in Paris and London. Pawning is the engine of that book's Paris half — the whole economy of it is what can be pawned and for how much — and he describes the queueing and the valuations from the inside.
Yes, and that makes it unusual among Orwell's Paris addresses. Almost everything else in the book is demolished, renamed or turned into something else. The Crédit Municipal is still a working municipal pawnbroker at the same address, still lending against goods and still holding public auctions.
Visited by · 1929
Orwell pawned clothing with the municipal pawnbroker to buy food during the events of Down and Out in Paris and London. Pawning is the engine of the book's Paris economy, and he describes the queueing and the valuations from inside the queue.
The old aristocratic quarter on the Right Bank that became the centre of gay Paris in the 1990s, at the end of a migration that started in Saint-Germain.
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Visit the place
The inside-out building of 1977 that houses the Musée national d'art moderne, closed for a five-year renovation since September 2025.
Visit the place
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The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
