Akila Apart City 
It is a crossroads with no particular grace, cut by boulevard Saint-Germain, with a métro entrance and some terraces. Three mornings a week a market sets up. Under the stalls lie eight centuries that nothing marks.
Where the name comes from
Two explanations circulate. The first reads it as a contraction of "maître Albert", Albertus Magnus, Dominican and master of theology, said to have taught here in the thirteenth century before an audience too large for any hall. The second, more prosaic, takes it from an abbot or a landowner.
The first has historical plausibility on its side: the square really was a place of open-air teaching. In the thirteenth century the University had no buildings, masters hired rooms or taught outdoors, and place Maubert was one of the places where that happened, along with nearby rue du Fouarre.
A neighbouring street is still called rue Maître-Albert.
The pyres
From the sixteenth century the square served as a place of execution. Not like the Grève, where common criminals died: Maubert specialised in those condemned for heresy and for forbidden books. The nearness of the University and its printers had much to do with it.
The best known is Étienne Dolet, printer, humanist and translator, burned here in 1546 along with his books, for atheism. He was thirty-seven. His offence lay in translations judged heterodox and in the company of suspect authors.
A statue was raised to him on the square at the end of the nineteenth century by freethinkers who made him a martyr of thought. It was melted down under the Occupation, like many Paris bronzes, and never replaced. So there is nothing on the square today to recall what happened there.
The poorest quarter in Paris
From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century the lanes around the square were among the unhealthiest in the capital. Lodging houses, rag-pickers, sleep merchants: the Maubert quarter had so bad a name that it appears in every nineteenth-century account of Paris poverty.
Haussmann drove boulevard Saint-Germain through it in the 1860s, which gutted the old fabric and cleaned up part of the area. Demolition continued into the 1930s, and whole blocks of medieval streets disappeared.
What remains lies in a few streets north of the square: rue Maître-Albert, rue des Grands-Degrés, rue de Bièvre, narrow and crooked, giving an idea of the whole.
The market
Today it is a neighbourhood market, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. It is small, expensive in places, and excellent: cheesemongers, market gardeners, a fishmonger, a rotisserie, producers. Not a curiosity market, but the one where residents shop.
Saturday morning is also the best time to watch the quarter: academics, families and retired people of the 5th, with nothing touristic about the atmosphere.
Around it a few old businesses hold on: a bookshop, an ironmonger, cafés that open at six.
Two steps away
- Rue de Bièvre, running down to the Seine: it follows an old arm of the vanished river.
- Rue Maître-Albert and rue des Grands-Degrés, two of the few intact medieval streets in the quarter.
- The Collège des Bernardins, rue de Poissy, five minutes away: a thirteenth-century Cistercian building, long a fire station, restored in 2008, whose vaulted nave is one of the finest civil Gothic spaces in Paris.
- The quays and Notre-Dame, three minutes north.
Frequently asked questions
What days is the Maubert market held?
Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. Saturday is the busiest.
Who was Étienne Dolet?
A printer and humanist burned on place Maubert in 1546 for heresy, along with his books. A statue to him once stood on the square; it was melted down during the Occupation.
Why Maubert?
The commonest explanation reads it as a contraction of 'maître Albert', Albertus Magnus, said to have taught on the square in the thirteenth century. A nearby street still bears his name.
Are there medieval streets left around the square?
A few to the north: rue Maître-Albert, rue des Grands-Degrés and rue de Bièvre, narrow and winding, spared by the cutting of boulevard Saint-Germain.