Arrondissement 9
Numbers: 6, 9, 25
In 1817 under the Restoration the Rue Ferrand (after the landowner on which it was built in 1777) was renamed the Rue Laval after the 71-year-old aristocrat Abbess of Montmartre (Marie-Louise de Laval-Montmorency) executed on July 24 1794. In 1887 it took its present name to honour the composer and music teacher Victor Massé who had died three years earlier.
In the 1920s and 1930s, No. 6 housed the People’s Bookshop (Librairie Populaire) run by the Communist Party. You could buy not just books and pamphlets there, but also busts of great people, badges, red flags and also red liberty caps (Phrygian bonnets).
No. 9 was a key address for French socialists. On April 11 1918 Léon Blum, Jean Longuet and Paul Faure published the first daily issue of the evening paper, Le Populaire, from there.
After the majority of the French Socialists voted in 1920 to affiliate to the Communist Third International, the Populaire became the principal offices of the SFIO Socialist Party.
Close to Montmartre several artists had workshops and/or lived in the road. Edouard Manet had studied at Thomas Couture’s workshop at No. 23 in 1850. Pierre Bonnard lived at No. 18 in 1890. During his second stay in Paris Vincent van Gogh lived with his brother at No. 25 in March 1886. Berthe Weill had a gallery at that address too, where in 1901 she held a joint exhibition of paintings by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse. This was also where Diego Rivera opened his first solo exhibition on April 21 1914.
Maurice Ravel also lived in the street between 1880 and 1886 at No. 29, while Edgar Degas lived at No 37 from 1890 to 1912 with his workshop in the attic.
