The name comes from a beautiful convent of Capuchin nuns whose garden was on the south side of the boulevard prior to the French Revolution.

1 stood the Neapolitan Café, famous for the writers, journalists, and actors who were its patrons, such as Catulle Mendès, Jean Moréas, Armand Silvestre, and Laurent Tailhade.

14 was the site of the Hotel Scribe and the location of the former Grand Café where the first public showing of movies by Auguste and Louis Lumière took place in the Salon Indien on 28 December 1895.

27 stood the former store, the Samaritaine de Luxe, built by Frantz Jourdain, a specialist in Art Nouveau.

It was replaced in 1893 by the Olympia theater, a famous music hall founded in 1888 by Joseph Oller and taken over in 1952 by Bruno Coquatrix.

And it here that at Nadar's invitation, the First Impressionist Exhibition was held on 15 April 1874, exhibitors included Renoir, Édouard Manet, Pissarro, and Claude Monet.

Another of Claude Monet's paintings painted from a window in Nadar's studio is entitled Boulevard des Capucines, and is now visible in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow or the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

On 23 February 1848, a battalion of the 14th regiment blocked the boulevard to protect François Guizot.

The demonstrators put the corpses in a dumper and called the people of Paris to arms.