Mozart &
Material Culture

Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste Raguenet, Hôtel de Ville et Place de Grève, 1753 (Paris, Musée Carnavalet)

Leopold Mozart to Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, Paris, 22 February 1764:

1. As a result of what I’ve told you about the wet weather, I must add that the Seine was so amazingly high about 2 weeks ago that the people here had to cross the Place de Grève in boats, and many parts of the city, towards the river, were impassable.

The Place de Grève (from 1802 the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville) was best known during the eighteenth century and earlier as a public meeting place and in particular the site of public executions.[1] The nineteenth-century embankment that now separates the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville from the Seine was built as part of Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s renovation of Paris; during Mozart’s time, the river directly abutted the square.

[1] See Leopold Mozart's letter to Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, Paris, 4 March 1764: 'Here the Place de Grève is where criminals are dispatched to the other world. Anyone who is a lover of these executions has something to see almost every day. Recently a serving girl, cook and coachman were hanged together side by side. They served a blind rich widow from whom they had stolen 30000 Louis d’or.'