The crossroads where four arrondissements collide — and where Louis-Ferdinand Céline opens Journey to the End of the Night at a café table, with a recruitment parade passing and his narrator Bardamu jumping up to join the war.
The square grew from a tollgate: the old Barrière de Clichy in the customs wall, where in 1814 Marshal Moncey improvised the defense of Paris against the allied armies — the fight commemorated by the bronze monument that has anchored the crossing since 1869. When the wall came down the square knitted four arrondissements together at a single carrefour, and the neighborhood filled with the entertainment trades: cafés, music halls, cinemas, the working pleasures of Montmartre's downhill edge.
The Place de Clichy was the landmark for Langston Hughes's first real Paris room. In April 1924 he moved into an attic at 15 rue Nollet nearby: sloping roof, old furniture, a feather bed and a window over the chimney pots. Before Hughes moved on, Alain Locke found him there and invited him to lunch at an unnamed sidewalk restaurant near the square to discuss poems for the special Survey Graphic issue that became The New Negro. Neither The Big Sea nor Hughes's account identifies that restaurant, so it should not be attached to one of today's terraces.
Céline opens Journey to the End of the Night here, in the novel's most famous scene-setting: Ferdinand Bardamu and his friend idling at a café table on the place, talking large about patriotism and the times — until a military band and recruitment parade swing around the square, and Bardamu, carried away by exactly the rhetoric he was mocking, jumps up and follows it to enlist. The whole novel — the war, Africa, America, the slums — falls out of that one impulsive minute at the crossing. No opening in French fiction gets more mileage out of a café chair.
The square never gentrified into a monument of itself: it remains what it was, a working crossroads — brasseries and cinemas around the circling traffic, the Wepler still pouring on the north side, Moncey still defending his barrier in bronze. Sit at a terrace long enough and you can watch the novel's opening re-arm itself daily, minus the band.
Moncey holds the Clichy barrier against the allies — the square's founding legend.
The bronze monument to the defense rises at the center of the crossing.
The entertainment decades: cafés, music halls, and cinemas ring the square.
Langston Hughes lives nearby at 15 rue Nollet and lunches near the square with Alain Locke.
Céline opens Journey to the End of the Night at a terrace here — one parade, one impulse, and Bardamu is off to the war.
Brasseries, cinemas, and traffic circling Moncey — the working crossroads it always was.
Setting of the story
The famous opening: Bardamu at a café table on the place, a recruitment parade rounding the square, and one impulsive minute that launches the whole descent — war, Africa, America, and the night at the end.
Recalled in the memoir
Hughes recalls his attic lodging at 15 rue Nollet near the square and an unnamed nearby restaurant where he lunched with Alain Locke.
Visited by
Hughes lived nearby at 15 rue Nollet and lunched with Alain Locke at an unnamed restaurant near the square.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote about Place de Clichy in Journey to the End of the Night.
A surviving private address in Batignolles where a vanished working people's hotel gave the young American poet Langston Hughes his real-life version of a Paris garret in 1924.
Visit the place
Where Colette's 1907 mime with her lover Mathilde de Morny set off a riot and was banned by the police — her most notorious Paris performance.
Visit the place
The surviving Pigalle corner where the vanished Café Liseux and Hotel Liseux stood, and where Langston Hughes lodged during his 1937 and 1938 returns to Paris.
Visit the place
Crowded, smoky, and loud — Joe Zelli's Montmartre boîte, where the music hits you at the door and the novel's Paris nights go to end.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
