The Faubourg Saint Germain

In the 18th century, the Faubourg Saint-Germain emerged as the next great Parisian neighbourhood.

The Marais had fallen out of fashion, and the nobility sought something grander and airier on the Left Bank.

One of the main reasons nobles were drawn to this area was the construction of the Hôtel des Invalides, a magnificent military hospital and retirement home commissioned by Louis XIV - and later made famous by Napoleon, whose remains are buried there, in a tomb which can still be visited today.

The Invalides spurred development of the surrounding area - which offered larger plots, cleaner air and easier access to Versailles than the cramped Marais.

Many of these grand hôtels particuliers survive today.

They are mostly repurposed as ministries and museums - which makes the Faubourg Saint Germain one of the greatest concentration of 18th-century aristocratic architecture in the world.

The Hôtel Biron - built in 1730 - is now the Rodin Museum.

Rodin himself used the garden as a studio.

The Hôtel de Villeroy was built around 1710 by the Swiss banker Antoine Hogguer for his mistress, Charlotte Desmares - one of the leading actresses of the Comédie-Française and previous mistress of Louis XIV's son, as well as his nephew - the future Regent of France.

When Hogguer went bankrupt in 1726, the pair fled to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the hôtel was rented successively to the Dutch and English ambassadors before being sold to the Duke of Villeroy in 1735.

It has housed the French Ministry of Agriculture since 1881.

The Hôtel de Castries was home to a marshal of France and prominent figure at the court of Louis XVI.

It is now the office of the government spokesperson.

The Hôtel Matignon - built in 1722 - is now the French Prime Minister's residence and has the largest private garden in Paris.

The Hôtel de Boisgelin is the Italian Embassy - and was exchanged with Italy in return for the use of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome.

The Hôtel de Galiffet is the Italian Cultural Institute - and famously where Talleyrand, Napoleon's brilliant foreign minister, lived and entertained.

The Hôtel de Roquelaure was built for a Marshal of France whose family was famous for their wit and military prowess - a 'Roquelaure joke' was a recognisable genre of humour at the court of Louis XIV.

It then brielfy passed to the President of the Parliament of Paris.

It was then bought by Cambacérès - Napoleon's Arch-Chancellor and the second most powerful man in France - who turned it into a palace of dazzling receptions, hosting foreign dignitaries on Napoleon's behalf, his parties becoming legendary for their splendour and gastronomic refinement.

It then passed briefly to the future King Louis-Philippe before becoming a ministry in 1839.

It is now the Ministry of Ecology.

The Hôtel de Rochechouart was built in 1778 for the Vicomtesse de Rochechouart - whose husband was a deputy of the Constituent Assembly.

It was later bought by one of Napoleon's most celebrated commanders, Marshal Augereau, before becoming the Ministry of Education in 1829.

It is here that Jules Ferry launched his landmark reforms in the 1880s : free, compulsory and secular education, and the creation of secondary education for girls.

The Hôtel du Châtelet was built in 1770 for the son of the brilliant mathematician Émilie du Châtelet.

It is now the Ministry of Labour.

It was here that Léon Blum introduced paid holidays and the 40-hour working week in 1936, and where the Grenelle Accords were signed in May 1968 - giving French workers significant wage increases and union rights.

The Hôtel de Besenval - now the Swiss Embassy - was built for Baron Pierre-Victor de Besenval, a Swiss-born colonel in the French royal army whose salons were among the most fashionable in pre-Revolutionary Paris.

A close friend of Marie-Antoinette, he was military commander of Paris in July 1789 - and it was his decision to withdraw troops from the city that made the storming of the Bastille possible.

Arrested while fleeing to Switzerland, he was saved from execution only by the intervention of Jacques Necker, the French finance minister.

He left the hotel to his best friend Marshal de Ségur - with the understanding that it would pass to Ségur's son, widely believed to be Besenval's own illegitimate child.

Fun fact: a passionate art collector and notorious seducer, Besenval had commissioned the architect Brongniart to add a spectacular underground bathhouse.

The bathhouse became a sensation in Parisian society - though according to contemporary accounts it was only ever used once.

Switzerland purchased the building in 1938 - and its grand salon contains a Gobelins tapestry depicting Louis XIV swearing alliance with the Swiss Confederation in 1663.

The Hôtel de Monaco - now the Polish Embassy - was built in 1774 for the Princess of Monaco (and then mistress and wife of the Prince of Conde) - and later owned by Pauline Borghese, Napoleon's sister, notorious for her love affairs and disregard for social conventions, before passing to the Polish state.

The Hôtel de Brienne is now the Ministry of Defence.

Napoleon's mother Letizia lived here for a few years and Prime Minister Clemenceau ran the war effort from here during World War One.

The Hôtel de Lassay is the residence of the President of the National Assembly, and connects directly to the National Assembly (the Palais Bourbon) next door.

The Hôtel de Bourbon-Condé was built in 1780 for the 23-year-old unmarried daughter of the Prince de Condé, who had just left the convent where she was educated to live in the world.

Her rank as a Princess of the Blood prevented her from marrying.

She left France at the Revolution, became a nun in Poland, returned to Paris for religious work, and died in 1824 - never having lived in the house again.

The building was sold in 2008 to the royal family of Bahrain for €78 million - and is one of the few grand hôtels particuliers of the Faubourg to have never been taken over by the French state.

Note : the Faubourg Saint Germain is not the only area with hotels particuliers of this era - the Marais has some too, as well as the Faubourg Saint Honore.

Other prominent hotels of the day include the Elysee Palace (now the official residence of the President of France), the Hôtel de Charost (today's British embassy, purchased by the Duke of Wellington in 1814) and the Hôtel de Pontalba (the official residence of the American ambassador to France).

Fun fact : the Faubourg Saint Germain features prominently in Proust's famous novel À la recherche du temps perdu.

In the novel, the aristocratic characters navigate the drawing rooms of the hotels particuliers in the late 19th century with the same obsessive attention to rank and favour that once defined Versailles in the 18th.

At the centre is the Duchesse de Guermantes, a great aristocratic hostess - brilliant, witty, and utterly heartless - consumed by social performance.

Proust himself was both fascinated and repelled by this world - as an outsider (half-Jewish, bourgeois, gay) he spent years cultivating invitations to these very salons, only to expose their glamour as beautiful emptiness. His novel is a bittersweet autopsy of a dying social order.

To this day, the Faubourg Saint-Germain remains one of Paris's most prestigious addresses.

To get a sense of what life was like inside these hôtels particuliers, we recommend visiting the Musée Nissim de Camondo.

Built near the Parc Monceau in the early 20th century it is inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and houses one of the finest collections of 18th-century French decorative arts in the world.