Porte Saint-Antoine

The porte Saint-Antoine was one of the gates of Paris. There were two gates named the porte Saint-Antoine, both now demolished, of which the best known was that guarded by the Bastille, on the site now occupied by the start of Rue de la Bastille in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.

One of the oldest routes through Paris, dating to the Roman era, was that through the centre of the city heading for Meaux and Melun. This road began in Paris with what is now the Rue du Pourtour-Saint-Gervais as far as the Porte Baudoyer, the gate into the 5th-century enclosure level with the Rue des Barres and Place Baudoyer. Beyond the city walls, it was known as the Rue Saint-Antoine (including today's Rue François-Miron and Rue des Barres as far as Rue de Fourcy), since it served the Abbaye Saint-Antoine-des-Champs (on the site of today's Hôpital Saint-Antoine, in the 12th arrondissement), founded right at the start of the 13th century.

When King Philip II built the Wall of Philip II Augustus, a new gate was built 450 metres beyond the former one, level with 101 Rue Saint-Antoine, just to the east of the crossroads of Rue Saint-Antoine with the Rue de Sévigné, in front of what is now the Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis. This first gate was sometimes known as the "Porte Baudoyer" and was demolished in 1382.

In 1356 Charles V of France ordered the building of a new wall to replace Philip II's on the right bank. This new wall had only six gates to allow access into Paris to be controlled – one of these six was the porte Saint-Antoine, built quickly with two towers. Following Étienne Marcel's revolt (Marcel and 54 of his companions, meanwhile, were killed at the porte Saint-Antoine while trying to get into Paris by night), the king had fled his residence at the palais de la Cité for his hôtels in the Marais. The king thus demanded the construction of a chastel to protect his residence and the porte Saint-Antoine – completed in 1382, this chastel became the Bastille. During Charles VI of France's reign, the inhabitants of Paris got through the porte Saint-Antoine three times to attack the hôtel Saint-Pol and during the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War 1,500 Armagnacs got through it on 1 June 1418 before being repulsed by the Burgundians.

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