Belleville

Belleville (French pronunciation: [blvil]) is a station on Paris Metro Line 2 and Line 11. The station is in the district of Belleville at the corner of the 10th, 11th, 19th and 20th arrondissements.

The station is located at the crossroads formed by Rue de Belleville, Boulevard de la Villette, Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple and Boulevard de Belleville, with the platforms positioned:

on line 2, approximately a north-west / south-east axis under the start of Boulevard de la Villette, between the Couronnes and Colonel Fabien metro stations; on line 11, approximately a northeast / southwest axis under the end of Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, between Goncourt and Pyrénées metro stations.

The station was opened on 31 January 1903 as part of the extension of line 2 from Anvers to Bagnolet (now called Alexandre Dumas). The line 11 platforms opened as part of the original section of the line from Châtelet to Porte des Lilas on 28 April 1935. The station is named after the commune of Belleville that was annexed by Paris in 1860. It was the location of the Barrière de Belleville, a gate built for the collection of taxation as part of the Wall of the Farmers-General; the gate was built between 1784 and 1788 and demolished during the 19th century. Like a third of the stations in the network, between 1974 and 1984, the platforms were modernised in Andreu-Motte style, in orange for line 2 and green for line 11. As part of RATP's Renouveau du métro program, its corridors were renovated on 29 July 2005. In 2015, local elected officials proposed to change the station's name to Belleville–Commune de Paris 1871, commemorating the area as the last redoubt of the Paris Commune. Since 2020, as part of the extension of line 11 to Rosny-sous-Bois, three new entrances have been put into service: no. 7 and no. 9 on 17 September and no. 8 at the end of that year. In 2020, with the COVID-19 crisis, 5,680,933 passengers entered this station, which placed it in twelfth position among metro stations for its use.

Data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).