| abstract | - Over time, several city walls of Paris were built :
* a Gaulish enclosure (location unknown)
* a Gallo-Roman wall
* two medieval walls, one of which was the Wall of Philippe Auguste
* the Wall of Charles V, extending on the right bank
* the Louis XIII Wall, extending on the western part of the right bank
* the Wall of the Farmers-General, for tax purposes
* the Thiers wall. Paris was surrounded by walls from ancient times until the twentieth century, except for roughly a century between 1670 (when Louis XIV ordered the demolition of the Louis XIII Wall) and 1785 (when construction began on the Farmers-General Wall). The initial purpose of these walls was to defend the town and protect the inhabitants; later, with the building of the Farmers-General Wall, they also served to assess taxes for goods sold in Paris. The Philippe Auguste Wall marked the first time Paris had really been protected from attack in any substantial way, and allowed the town to both consolidate and expand, frequently to slightly more than could be contained by the existing walls. As Paris grew, new houses were built both inside and outside the wall. With time, each wall would be destroyed and its site built up or transformed into a street or boulevard; a new wall would be built further out, to include both the original city and some more houses, and sometimes gardens or vegetable fields. Only a few traces of these walls survive: a few sections of the Wall of Philippe Auguste, and some pavilions of Claude Nicolas Ledoux which formed part of the Farmers General Wall. However, the walls' influence on modern Paris can be seen in some of its major streets and concentric boulevards:
* The 'Grands boulevards' (main streets), built by replacing the Charles V and Louis XIII Walls;
* The outer boulevards, built in place of the Wall of the Farmers-General;
* The 'boulevards des Maréchaux' (Boulevards of the Marshals, a loop encircling the city consisting of boulevards named for the Marshals of France), built to replace the Thiers Wall;
* The Boulevard périphérique (ring road or beltway), built outside the boulevards des Maréchaux;
* The parallel streets Rue de Cléry and Rue d'Aboukir in the Second Arrondissement mark the route of the Charles V Wall.
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