The Place de la Bastille, used as a state prison from the 17th century, is a square in Paris, where the Bastille prison stood until the 'Storming of the Bastille'. The storming of the Bastille on July 14th 1789 signalled the beginning of the French Revolution. The future emperor Napoleon I had the place laid out in 1803. A railway station was built there in 1859. The station was razed in 1984 to allow construction of a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille.

The road off the upper end of the Île Saint-Louis leads to on the Right Bank. From the river to the Place de la Bastille runs a canal, the Arsenal Basin, which formerly supplied water to the moat around the Bastille fortress. At the Place de la Bastille the waterway goes underground for almost 1 mile (1.6 km) and then emerges to form the Saint-Martin Canal, which, with its bridges and locks and its barges sailing slowly down the centre of city streets, comprises one of the least-known and most picturesque sections of Paris.