13 rue de la Paix is the Paris address most closely associated with Cartier. The rue de la Paix, running from the Place Vendôme to the Place de l'Opéra, had been one of the French capital's most prestigious luxury streets since the nineteenth century, and Cartier's salon there placed the house at the centre of Parisian jewellery and watchmaking. Mellerio dits Meller, the Italian-origin jewellery house with royal warrants stretching back to the First Empire, had been on the street since 1815; Boucheron had moved to the adjacent Place Vendôme in 1893, and Chaumet would follow to 12 Place Vendôme in 1907. When Cartier arrived at number 13 in 1899, it joined the highest concentration of luxury jewellers in the world on a street barely 230 metres long.
Louis-François Cartier founded the business in 1847 at 29 rue Montorgueil, and the firm moved address more than once as it grew. The move to the rue de la Paix came in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and it was from this address that Louis Cartier shaped the house's creative identity in the early twentieth century, working with designers including Charles Jacqueau and Jeanne Toussaint, and directing the innovations in jewellery and watchmaking that built Cartier's international reputation.
The Paris address remained the creative and administrative heart of the firm through the years covered by The Cartiers. During the German occupation of Paris in the Second World War, the premises at 13 rue de la Paix were among the locations where the tensions of that period were felt, and from which Pierre Lemarchand's caged bird brooch, placed in the window in 1942, made its quiet statement.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 2 (“Louis, 1898–1919”) and ch. 9 (“The World at War, 1939–1944”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 22, 23 et al.
- Wikipedia: 13 rue de la Paix
