Stunning Historical Photos of Les Halles from the Early 20th Century, The Lost Marketplace of Paris Known as 'The Belly of Paris'

For nearly nine centuries, Les Halles sat at the heart of Paris — a sprawling, chaotic, and endlessly alive marketplace that fed an entire city. It was known as “The Belly of Paris,” a name that fit perfectly. Fruit sellers shouted across narrow lanes, butchers hauled carcasses through the early morning dark, and florists arranged bouquets a few steps away from stalls piled high with fresh-caught fish. The smells alone told you everything: warm bread, wet stone, raw meat, and cut flowers, all mixed together under a canopy of iron and glass.

The market’s origins trace back to a Royal Decree in the twelfth century, when the King of France formally established a central market in Paris. For hundreds of years, it operated in various forms across the city center. The modern version — the one captured in these photographs — was born in the nineteenth century. Architect Victor Baltard designed its twelve iron-and-glass pavilions in a bold style that was considered avant-garde at the time. High beams, paint-encrusted rivets, and wide glass awnings defined the look. The structure was both functional and striking, built to handle the enormous volume of trade that passed through every single day.

Each pavilion specialized in a different trade. One handled fish, another meat, another vegetables, another cheese. Stalls spilled out of the pavilions and into the surrounding streets, so the market was impossible to contain within any boundary. It grew organically, loudly, and without apology.

The market was most active at night. While most of Paris slept, the meat and fish pavilions roared to life. Thousands of tons of goods were unloaded, sorted, butchered, and traded before sunrise. Workers moved through gas-lit passages with hooks and handcarts, and by dawn, the buying and selling were already well underway. The photographs taken around 1900 show this world in raw detail — workers hauling loads, vendors arranging displays, and the iron structures rising above it all.

By the early 1900s, the market employed thousands of workers — from the legendary “Forts des Halles,” the muscle-bound porters who carried impossibly heavy loads on their backs, to the women who scrubbed market bags in the gutters each night so they could be filled again the next morning. The fish stalls were among the busiest. Oysters arrived by the cartload, especially around the Christmas season when demand exploded. Workers stacked baskets five and six high along the pavements to keep up.

The flower and cheese markets drew a different kind of crowd. Women browsed flower stalls that lined the streets just outside the main pavilions, while cheese sellers kept their stock in cool underground cellars beneath the market. In 1930, a dedicated cheese conservation room was formally opened in those cellars — a sign that even within the chaos, there was careful attention to quality and storage.

Beyond food, Les Halles was a social world of its own. Workers held annual festivals inside the pavilions. The Lily of the Valley festival each spring drew large crowds, with dancing in the halls and children dressed in costumes wandering through the market stalls. Police patrolled the district regularly — not because of unusual crime, but simply because the volume of people, goods, and money moving through the area demanded a constant presence.

In August 1929, a violent fire broke out at the central wholesale marketplace, damaging sections of the complex and drawing massive crowds of spectators. The market recovered and kept operating, but the event illustrated how vulnerable such a dense, crowded site could be. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Les Halles continued to expand its offerings. Game stalls opened just after hunting season, and the opening days saw abundant displays of pheasants, hares, and other wild game hanging from hooks in long rows.

Each December brought one of the market’s most dramatic spectacles: the arrival of oysters for the Christmas and New Year celebrations. On December 23, 1936, workers unloaded wave after wave of oyster shipments, stacking crates and baskets along the market streets as buyers competed to secure their supply for the holiday season. The following year, poultry vendors lined the streets with rows of dressed birds, and butchers set up elaborate displays of geese and chickens for the Christmas market.

The early 1930s brought economic depression to France as it did to much of the world. In 1931, a crowd gathered outside a Les Halles butcher’s shop that was distributing food to unemployed neighborhood residents. Workers at the nearby wine quays continued filling barrels, and market sellers washed their empty sacks in the street gutters each night, ready to be refilled at dawn. The market kept moving regardless of the wider world’s troubles.

When German forces occupied Paris in 1940, Les Halles kept operating — but under entirely different conditions. Rationing was imposed, supply chains were disrupted, and the abundance that had defined the market for generations gave way to scarcity. Photographs from 1940 and 1941 show German soldiers present in the district and soup kitchens set up to feed those who could not afford food. By early 1945, people were searching through garbage cans in the Les Halles district for scraps.

As France was liberated in 1945 and the occupation ended, life at Les Halles slowly resumed. Butchers returned to work in January 1946 while rationing measures were still in force. Poor children picked up cherries that had fallen from trucks in the streets, and people still searched garbage bins for discarded food. At the same time, workers were beginning to carry sacks of potatoes through the lanes again, and sellers were hawking radishes from the pavement — the market district returning to something approaching its old rhythm.

The postwar years brought new troubles. In November 1947, wholesale fishmongers went on strike, and long queues formed outside the few shops that remained open. That same month, a garbage collectors’ strike left the streets of the Les Halles district buried under piles of refuse. On December 12, 1947, Parisians marched near Les Halles to protest rising food costs and supply shortages. Meanwhile, in the meat pavilion that year, the American singing group the Peters Sisters paid a visit — an unusual and widely photographed moment of celebrity in an otherwise grim period.

By the 1960s, the sheer size of the market had become a problem for the city. Delivery trucks clogged the surrounding streets day and night, creating traffic bottlenecks that paralyzed central Paris. The market also required massive structural repairs that would have been costly to carry out. In 1971, the decision was made to dismantle the Baltard pavilions and move the wholesale operations to Rungis, south of Paris. Two of the iron-and-glass pavilions were carefully dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere — one in Yokohama, Japan, and one in Nogent-sur-Marne, just outside Paris. The site they left behind was redeveloped as a major underground transit hub, connecting new express rail lines running east, west, and south across the city.