The current Hôtel de Ville was built between 1874 and 1882 by Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes. It replaced the original Renaissance building, Domenico da Cortona’s so-called Boccador hôtel of 1533, which had been destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871. The Third Republic faced a choice: whether to rebuild in period, or to declare a new municipal style. Ballu and Deperthes split the difference. They reconstructed the silhouette and the proportional system of the sixteenth-century building, then expanded and re-detailed it in a Neo-Renaissance vocabulary scaled up to the size of the modern administration.
The composition follows the logic of a French Renaissance château, extended along the principal frontage to a length of 230 metres. The facade is organised as a rhythm of three pavilions and connecting wings. The central pavilion is the tallest and carries a clock tower modelled on the sixteenth-century original. The two end pavilions are crowned by steep pavilion roofs in slate, and the connecting wings between them are slightly lower with continuous mansard roofs. The elevation is composed in three storeys plus an attic. A rusticated base supports a principal storey of engaged Ionic columns framing round-arched windows. Above that a second principal storey carries Corinthian columns and arched windows of the same rhythm. An attic storey with a balustrade caps the wall before the roof. 136 statues of figures from Parisian history are set into niches between the windows, distributed among more than seventy sculptors, including Auguste Rodin, who carved the figure of the Renaissance architect Jean Goujon. The interior grand staircase deliberately quotes Garnier’s grand staircase at the Opéra, since Ballu wanted the city hall to compete on civic dignity with the imperial monument.
The project of the building is essentially restorative. It is a state institution rebuilt to assert that the destruction of 1871 was an aberration rather than a watershed. In that sense, it is the perfect institutional gesture of the Third Republic, looking back to the Renaissance to claim continuity through a century of revolutions.