Rue de la Liberté

The full story

Along the street stands a house far older than the street itself. At the corner of Rue Bossuet, at the ‘coin du miroir’ (the mirror corner), a well-known meeting point for the people of Dijon, the house with three faces owes its name to its three timber-framed gables. It is the only building of this kind and the oldest preserved along the street. Restored from 2023 to 2025, it was dated by dendrochronology, the study of tree rings in wood: the timber of its two gables on the Rue Bossuet side was felled in 1437-1438, while the third gable dates from 1451. The red of its timber frames reproduces the oldest colour found.

The street itself dates from the 18th century. After the annexation of Franche-Comté, Dijon was no longer a frontier town, and in 1711 it lost its status as a fortified stronghold: the town council could then loosen the town’s tight layout and open new streets. Rue Condé was built between 1721 and 1725 to link the Place Royale to the western gate, which was rebuilt as a triumphal arch from 1786 to 1788. In 1731, the Estates of Burgundy decided to give the palace a grand staircase. Jacques Gabriel built it into the wing on the street, and its vaults still watch over the municipal archives today.

Between Place François-Rude and Place de la Libération runs the arcades section: its 17 buildings are all protected as historic monuments, most of them for their façades and roofs, registered in 1937. Further west, at the corner of Rue Bossuet, a house keeps a bartizan, a small room built jutting out from the corner of the façade, listed as early as 1923.

The street also lived through dark times. During the Occupation, at number 78, Rafaël Jeankélovitch’s fur business was among the Jewish-owned shops that were plundered, that is, taken away from their owners. On 11 September 1944, by contrast, Henri Drouot described in his notes a huge crowd, ‘joyful and solemn’, gathered from Place d’Armes to Place Darcy and singing the Marseillaise. The exact date when the street took the name ‘Rue de la Liberté’ is not established by the sources consulted.

A final transformation: the tram returned to Dijon on 1 September 2012, 51 years after it had disappeared, and from 3 September the street became pedestrian. Since 2018, the City’s ‘Façades Liberté’ scheme has helped owners restore their façades: 21 buildings in a first phase to the west, then the arcades, until April 2027.