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Park · Tuileries / Concorde · 1er arrondissement

Jardin des Tuileries

The buildingStill standing
Getting inWalk straight in
What's there nowStill the same

André Le Nôtre's great axis between the Louvre and the Concorde — the garden every walker in these pages crossed sooner or later, palace or no palace.

Address
Pl. de la Concorde — Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris
IllustrationThe Tuileries basin in summer, green chairs ringing the water and the fountain playing against the Louvre

The great free crossing, at strolling pace.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The Tuileries is the oldest walking route in central Paris: Le Nôtre drew its axis for Louis XIV in the 1660s, and Paris has promenaded it ever since. The palace that named it burned with the Commune in 1871 and was never rebuilt. What the 1920s inherited was a palace-less royal garden, all gravel, statuary, and chestnut shade, running from the Louvre's arms to the Place de la Concorde.

For the expatriates it was connective tissue: the grand, free, unavoidable crossing between the Right Bank of money and offices and the bridges home to the Left. Miller logs the crossing in Tropic of Cancer in a single walking breath — the garden as verb rather than destination — which is honest to how the era used it. Its neighbors tell the same story: the Crillon at its west gate, the old Gare d'Orsay across the river at its south.

The garden has since collected the Orangerie's water lilies, the Jeu de Paume, and several restorations, but Le Nôtre's geometry — and the walk — are exactly where the era left them.

In their words

…walking through the Jardin des Tuileries…
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

What it is
Le Nôtre's royal garden (1660s) on the axis from the Louvre to the Concorde
The missing palace
The Tuileries palace burned with the Commune in 1871 and was never rebuilt
In the books
The era's great free crossing — logged mid-stride in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
Today
Open — geometry intact, Orangerie and Jeu de Paume at its corners

In images

Le Nôtre's geometry — the chairs, the basin, the palace-less axis.Editorial illustration
The great free crossing, at strolling pace.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1664

    Le Nôtre lays out the garden on the royal axis.

  2. 1871

    The palace burns in the Commune's last week; the garden carries the name alone.

  3. 1930s

    Miller's generation crosses it as the twenties crowd did — on foot, between banks.

  4. Today

    Open end to end; the axis runs unbroken from the Louvre to the Concorde.

On the map

Related books

Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Mentioned in passing

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

Crossed mid-stride in the novel's walking prose — the garden as route between the two banks of Miller's Paris.

Writers who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American · Author of The Scarlet Letter, who passed through Paris for one week in January 1858 on his way from the American consulate at Liverpool to Italy — and wrote it all down. He found the city more magnificent than London and colder than anything in America: "new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold." He left saying he was quite tired of Paris and longed for home.

Visited by · 1858

A dusk walk in January 1858, cut short for fear of being locked in behind the railings. The bare earth under the trees prompted the sentence that became his verdict on the whole city — that nothing in Paris takes root.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, Volume 1 (Project Gutenberg etext) (1871), Hotel de Louvre, January 12th [1858]

Illustrated portrait of Henry Miller

Henry Miller

American · The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

Henry Miller wrote about Jardin des Tuileries in Tropic of Cancer.

Within walking distance

Bright present-day color view of Le Meurice and the rue de Rivoli arcades

Hotel · Tuileries — facing the garden on the rue de Rivoli

Le Meurice

A grand hotel on the rue de Rivoli facing the Tuileries, and the Paris address Salvador Dalí returned to for roughly thirty years — arriving for a month at a time with a retinue, and treating the suite as a studio, a stage and a place to be seen.

Visit the place
Bright color view of pedestrians beneath the pale stone rue de Rivoli arcades

Apartment · Tuileries (1st)

204 rue de Rivoli

The apartment Camille Pissarro took for the first half of 1899, facing the Jardin des Tuileries — at least six versions of the garden came out of its windows, sorted by weather, hour and season.

Visit the place
Bright present-day color view of the Costes entrance at the former Hôtel Lotti

Hotel · Vendôme (between the Tuileries and the place Vendôme)

Hôtel Lotti

A luxury hotel on the rue de Castiglione, between the Tuileries and the place Vendôme. It is the strongest candidate for the "Hotel X" of Down and Out in Paris and London — the vast, filthy basement kitchen where George Orwell worked seventeen-hour days as a plongeur. It trades today as part of the Hôtel Costes.

Visit the place
The Orangerie's east portico in color — pale limestone, gilded ORANGERIE lettering, trimmed trees at either side under a clear sky.

Museum · Tuileries

Orangerie des Tuileries

The 1852 orangery of the Tuileries garden, converted to Monet's specifications and opened in 1927 as the museum of the Water Lilies.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Jardin des Tuileries, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1Tropic of Cancer

    Novel
    Henry Miller, 1934
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for Jardin des Tuileries.

  2. 2OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Jardin des Tuileries.

    View source

  1. 3Camille Pissarro, The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon

    Website
    The Metropolitan Museum of Art
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Jardin des Tuileries page.

    View source

  2. 4Henry Miller: The Paris Years

    Biography
    Brassaï, 1995
    Used for

    Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Jardin des Tuileries.

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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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