This interview is excerpted from my book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), described by The New York Times as “a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market”.
Puces Portrait: Jean-Paul Jurquet
Heir to a family of scrap dealers, Jean-Paul has carved out an unlikely niche at Marché Dauphine: dismantling the vaults and archives of the Banque de France.
At Marché Dauphine, Jean-Paul has built his business around one unlikely source: the Banque de France. Since 2006 he has made a specialty of dismantling closed bank branches – their vaults, archive rooms and director’s apartments – salvaging the old safes, bullion boxes, fittings and fine furniture that otherwise might be scrapped. It is, in its way, a return rather than a departure. His great-grandfather arrived from the Aveyron region of France and went into scrap metal, and Jean-Paul grew up in the family business, before moving into antiques in the 1980s, gradually working his way toward finer eighteenth-century pieces. The bank vaults brought him back to his beginnings, but with a new eye. Jean-Paul speaks of his trade less as dealing than as excavation – of exhuming the stories embedded in overlooked places, and of the Puces itself as a barometer for the wider culture, shaped these days as much by real-estate speculation as by any spirit of freedom.
