The village of La Chapelle lies on a natural pass between the hills of Montmartre and Belleville, on the ancient road linking Lutetia to the north, where Saint Geneviève decided to build an oratory in honor of Saint-Denis.

La Chapelle was largely integrated into the new 18th arrondissement of Paris, created in 1860, with the north divided between Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, and Aubervilliers, marking the end of any autonomous municipal life and the disappearance of the village as such.

[14][15] The village was at the junction of this road with the old tin route linking the English Channel and the North Sea to the Rhone valley (now rue Philippe-de-Girard[16]), without passing through Lutèce.

[20] After Caesar, who chose this sacred site to assert his domination over the Gallic tribes, several emperors understood the symbolic significance of this sanctuary: Constantine went there, convinced that he had been invested with a divine mission by Apollo, and Julian had himself proclaimed Auguste.

[23] As far back as Roman times, there was probably a small village on the Col de La Chapelle, between the wooded hills of Montmartre and Belleville, close to a temple dedicated to Bacchus.

The Évangile cross, located at the crossroads of today's rue de l'Évangile and rue d'Aubervilliers, marks a milestone on the route.Crossroads During the Great Jacquerie in 1358, the fields and vineyards of the village of La Chapelle-Saint-Denis, as well as the granary of the Lendit fair, were devastated and set on fire by the English and the troops of Charles le Mauvais, King of Navarre,[60][52][note 8] under the supervision of Étienne Marcel from the La Chapelled windmill.

[61][note 9] These regular depredations led, at the request of the villagers, to an ordinance by Charles V freeing La Chapelle from the obligation to house troops and from the right of capture in exchange for twenty carts of paille.

[64] In 1427, a troupe of 120 Bohemians, supposedly from Lower Egypt and claiming to have converted to Catholicism, settled there, armed with a bull from Pope Martin V entrusting them to ecclesiastical charity,[64] and lived by begging and fortune-telling.

Joan of Arc was staying in the village of La Chapelle with the Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon, the Counts of Vendôme and Laval, Marshals Gilles de Rais and Lahire, and their troops.

[68] Once peace had returned, Charles VII passed through the village on his way to making a triumphant entry into Paris in 1437, but it was at the foot of the Leaning Cross in 1461 that the officers carrying the king's body demanded an additional ten sols from each of them to continue their journey.

[75] In November 1567, the village was not spared by the Wars of Religion, and was at the center of the Battle of Saint-Denis,[note 10] in which Catholics and Huguenots clashed and the Constable de Montmorency was mortally wounded by a bullet in the back.

[81] Guinguettes began to develop around the 1660s, as a means of escaping the high taxes levied on wine as it entered Paris and saw an influx of workers and soldiers, as well as Parisian bourgeois looking for a stroll in the "countryside and suburbs".

[84] One of these innkeepers, whose sign was Le Grand Faucheur, was named sole legatee of Louis XIV's historiographer, François Eudes de Mézeray, who had fallen in love with the village.

[85][86] These taverns played host to the discreet meetings of the Fillon[note 13] and Cardinal Dubois, which helped foil the Cellamare Conspiracy, as well as the raucous Cartouche gang, which included a native of the area, the rascal Marie Miou, known as Charlotte La Chapelle.

[90] In the 1720s, La Chapelle benefited from the demarcation of the enclosures and boundaries of Paris and its suburbs, a Parisian operation designed to tolerate the construction of only modest houses with a boutique and a small doorway, not a carriage entrance, and with a single upper floor.

[93] The road to Saint-Denis was rebuilt, aligned, and widened to 65 meters, a vast traffic circle was built and two ancient marble columns that Suger had compared to Hercule were preserved.

[94] In 1757, the old Gothic tympanum of Saint-Denys church was replaced by a classical façade with four pilasters and Doric capitals framing the doorway, topped by a cornice, a bull's eye surrounded by drapery and a triangular pediment dominated by a cross and adorned with a royal coat-of-arms.

[115][114] It was also this mill that Mademoiselle de Montpensier evoked in a picturesque episode of the Fronde, in 1652, and which was the starting point of the fighting between the troops of the rebellious Condé and Turenne's royal army, which turned to the advantage of the former.

[120] Even if the communal organization of La Chapelle was non-existent,[121] it nevertheless benefited from more tangible coordination, from 1788 onwards, when a campaign of complaint and protest against the methods of the Fermiers généraux[122] was undertaken, under the leadership of the parish syndic, M. Gautier,[122] assisted by a lawyer ex-employee of the Gabelles, a certain Darigrand, whose memoir served to draft the cahiers de doléance of the Paris suburbs.

[note 31] Politicians got involved: Bailly defended his troops and the tax authorities, while La Fayette supported the National Guard, which had quickly come to the aid of the municipal officials; even Parisian newspapers such as Père Duchesne, by Jacques-René Hébert, Le Courrier, by Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, and Les Révolutions de Paris, by Louis-Marie Prudhomme, commented on the scuffle.

[12] Urbanization was the result of subdivisions built by landowners, such as the Cottin or Trutat de Saint-Ange families, or speculators who acquired plots of land mainly for agricultural purposes until the 1830s.

Inaugurated on February 16, 1845, by the Prefect of the Seine, Rambuteau, it was located on the site of today's Collège Marx-Dormoy and included a justice of the peace, schoolroom, and a police station.

Opened in 1804 outside the town, on rue Marcadet,[note 35] to replace the former burial ground on place de Torcy in the heart of the village, this cemetery was itself overtaken by population growth and the cholera epidemic of 1849,[143] and was finally closed and disused in 1878.

[145] This new place of worship, intended to be a modest building, benefited from annexation to Paris, which provided it with a porch and, in a curious twist, the mayor and councilors of the former commune, as well as the parish priest and architect, were depicted on the capitals of the nave and choir pillars, in medieval style.

[173] If the hygiene and sanitation of the streets were doubtful, a privilege of the inhabitants of La Chapelle, which they had obtained from time immemorial but lost in 1777, allowed them to collect the sludge and filth accumulated in the capital's roads to enrich their land with fertilizer.

[181] For the exercise of justice, this bailli[182] was assisted, with the approval and appointment of the chaplain of the abbey of Saint-Denis, by a bailliage lieutenant and a fiscal procurator, as well as several offices, substitut, clerk, notary, bailiff, seer, etc.

[198] From 1800 until the commune's annexation to Paris, its population grew rapidly, rising from 800 to over 40,000, despite a sharp reduction in its territory due to the construction of railroads and related facilities at the beginning of the second half of the century.

[201] Émile Zola set the action of his novel L'Assommoir in the Goutte d'Or district, describing La Chapelle as a "suburb of Paris", whose "stinking environment" he wanted to "paint".

Although, at the time, it was in fact a separate commune, whose life was more rural than faubourienne,[101] it nonetheless retained the allure of a village, but with "dark corners, black with damp and filth".

The street originally continued as far as today's rue d'Aubervilliers, but its eastern section was removed with the construction of the Chemins de Fer du Nord railway line.