Once, in a passing chat with the concierge in my Paris apartment building, I learned that a tenant—who had lived in my unit for decades—was a mistress of the great singer and actor Jacques Brel. He called on this woman in the early 1970s at her apartment in northeast Paris, in the old Quartier du Combat, and took her out on the town. Where did they go? The concierge couldn’t say. Once they left the building, they were beyond her realm.
These charming tête-à-têtes are vanishing with the decline of the concierge profession. Concierges, or gardiennes, have long guarded the grand Haussmann buildings of Paris. Mostly women and often gimlet-eyed, they were fixtures of city life, immortalized by artists such as Jean Béraud and Gustave Caillebotte, who painted them sweeping doorsteps or peering from their ground-floor apartments. The novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac depicted them in his literary series “La Comédie Humaine” (1827–1848) as meddling figures, privy to their tenants’ secrets. In the 20th century, municipal authorities began awarding concierges for their dedication to maintaining buildings and serving tenants with unwavering vigilance.
But their numbers have dwindled over the last few decades due to cost cutting, waning interest in the profession, and new buildings with state-of-the-art security systems. In 1984, Paris had 70,000 concierges; today, there are just 38,000.
It’s a loss that threatens the very fabric of city life. Unlike porters in London or doormen in New York, concierges trace their origins to the 12th-century guards of the Palais de la Cité, which was a royal residence at the time and is now the judicial center of France. Back then, the role was prestigious and reserved for noblemen. Over time, as the aristocracy’s influence waned and urbanization took hold, the position evolved into that of building caretaker—guardian of a château or city mansion—who lived in gatehouse called a conciergerie.
Modern concierges emerged in the 1830s. No longer overseeing estates, they had become working-class caretakers, managing apartment buildings. Residents expected them to be on-site at all times, ready to tug at a cord that opened the building doorway. This constant surveillance birthed the caricature of the concierge: the capricious, beady-eyed queen of a small kingdom, aware of every secret and scandal.
They distributed mail, cleaned, took out the trash, and kept watch—all for a pittance and a ground-floor apartment known as la loge.
During the German occupation, their omnipresence made them valuable to both the Gestapo and the French Resistance. In 1993, Sylvain Flaxberg told the Los Angeles Times how his concierge hid him from the Gestapo one night in July 1942. (Later that evening, he watched the officers take his wife and eight-year-old son away; he never saw his family again.) Others were complicit: after the war, at least 73 were tried for denouncing Jews.
By the 1950s and 1960s, their surliness had left an impression on American tourists. In response, the role—and the name—underwent a rebrand. Today, concierges are called gardiennes d’immeuble (building caretakers), shedding their predecessors’ intrusive, cantankerous image.
Though their official duties remain cleaning, distributing mail, and handling trash, many gardiennes do much more. They wash windows atop rickety ladders, fetch kids from school, mediate neighborly disputes, even administer first aid to elderly residents.
Maria Ferreira, who has worked as a gardienne for 30 years, distances herself from the gossiping concierges of the past. “Even when we know something intimate, we are discreet,” she says.
In my building, Lola Fernandes has twice thwarted burglaries—once by cutting power to the ground floor as thieves tried breaking into the cellars. Another time, when a resident collapsed, she checked his pulse. (There wasn’t one.)
Ferreira and Fernandes mourn the decline of their profession. To them, a building without a gardienne is a building without a heart.
In Paris, 25-year-old gardienne and TikTok influencer Emma Demoncheaux is one of the rare young people taking up the profession. Nearly every day, she shares the ins and outs of her life with her 32,000 followers: mopping stairways, receiving packages, and buffing smudges off mirrors, all mixed in with outfit checks.
Yet the trend is clear. These days, when a gardienne retires, her loge stands empty. The fireplace and mezzanine bed—a raised sleeping area within the caretaker’s small apartment—gather dust. In her place, keypad-controlled door systems and steel mailboxes will take over.
What’s more, once the cleaning is handed off to an outside company, the vacuuming will be perfunctory, and no one will ever proudly polish the brass fixtures on the porte cochère doorways.
And as the last concierges disappear, so does the Paris they upheld—of tight-knit buildings, gruff but familiar encounters, and unspoken surveillance, replaced by a world where everyone goes about their own business.
Makana Eyre is a Paris-based American journalist. He is the author of Sing, Memory and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Foreign Policy
