How to research a house in Paris

Researching a Paris house means reckoning with two great disruptions written into the record: Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of the 1850s–70s, which drove boulevards through medieval quarters and replaced whole streets with the uniform stone façades we now think of as quintessentially Parisian; and the fires of 1871, when the Paris Commune's final days destroyed much of the city's état civil. Both shape what you can find. Here is how to work the French record.

Start with the address: the BAN and the cadastre

France has an excellent free national geocoder — the Base Adresse Nationale (BAN), run by the government with no key required (it's the official source Plot uses to resolve French addresses). It pins your address precisely, which matters in a city that renumbered and renamed streets repeatedly.

For the parcel itself, the cadastre — the national land-parcel map — is published openly at cadastre.data.gouv.fr. Be clear about what it is: it gives you parcel geometry and reference numbers, not ownership. The names of owners (the matrice cadastrale and the modern fichiers fonciers) are held by the tax authority and are access-restricted. So the cadastre tells you the shape and identity of your plot, not who held it.

Ownership: the sommier foncier and the Archives de Paris

The closest thing to a French ownership chain is the sommier foncier — the registers the conservation des hypothèques (mortgage registry) kept per property, recording transfers and charges through the 19th and 20th centuries. For Paris these are held at the Archives de Paris, indexed by the parcel, and consulted on site. There is no free online deed feed; this is archive work, but it's the real ownership trail.

The people: the état civil, and the 1871 problem

Civil registration — état civil, the registers of births, marriages, and deaths — is the spine of French family-and-house research, kept by the mairie of each arrondissement and deposited at the Archives de Paris. Here is the hard fact: in May 1871, fires during the Semaine sanglante destroyed the Hôtel de Ville and the Palais de Justice, and with them the central état civil of Paris before 1860 — millions of acts. A vast reconstitution effort (the état civil reconstitué) rebuilt perhaps a third of it from parish duplicates, notarial records, and family papers; the Archives de Paris have digitised the reconstituted registers and the post-1860 acts, browsable by arrondissement and year. If your search hits a wall before 1860, the fire is usually why.

Note that France, unlike Britain, has no equivalent of a nominal household census open to the public at the same depth — the recensements (population lists) survive unevenly and, where they do, are browsed by district at the Archives de Paris rather than queried by address.

Historic press: Gallica

This is where the French record shines online. Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), has digitised an enormous run of newspapers and periodicals — and it's freely searchable. Search your street name as a phrase and you'll surface property notices, faits divers, advertisements, and society columns naming specific Paris addresses. Gallica is the live press source Plot queries for French addresses, pulling mentions of a street straight from the BnF's digitised serials.

Notarial records and the Minutier central

France's distinctive deep source is the notaire. For centuries, French property sales, marriage contracts, inventories, and wills passed through notaries, whose minutes survive in extraordinary depth. The Minutier central des notaires de Paris, held at the Archives nationales, preserves Parisian notarial acts back to the 1400s. They are not address-indexed and reading them takes patience (and palaeography), but for the pre-Haussmann city they are often the only way to put a name to a house.

Reading Haussmann in the record

Haussmann's rebuilding shows up concretely. If your building is a classic immeuble haussmannien — six storeys of cut stone, the second-floor balcony, the mansard roof — its parcel history often begins in the 1850s–70s with an expropriation and rebuilding, the older structure simply gone. The Atlas municipal and historic plans (many on Gallica) let you compare the pre- and post-Haussmann street and see exactly what was swept away.

How Plot helps in Paris

For a Paris address, Plot builds a real page from the open French record: it resolves the address through the official BAN geocoder, searches Gallica for historic press that names your street, and gathers Wikimedia imagery and the cross-referenced public record (Wikidata, OpenStreetMap heritage) around it. It's honest that the cadastre is geometry-only and that the deep ownership trail and the pre-1860 état civil mean a visit to the Archives de Paris — but it assembles the freely available layer in a minute and shows you where the archive work begins.

Research your Paris house →