Europe > France > Ile-de-France > Paris > Articles > The Paris Flea Markets

One of the clichés of Paris is that it is the world HQ of chic shopping. Personally, my own experience is limited to blowing my loose change on a runny Camembert en route for the airport. But then I can't personally vouch for Paris as a city of lovers, either, although my hackles have certainly risen along the Rue St Denis. A city of dog poo, of bump-parking and of porno promenades, perhaps. But Paris is different things to different people, and when, on my umpteenth visit the other day, a friend was banging on about Paris being the city for markets... frankly, I harrumphed.

Well, the days were too fine for the Louvre - arguably the world's best rotten-weather shelter - but too dour for the Champs Elyées (grossly over-rated) and the Tuileries (overwhelmingly under-planted). I may be one of the world's worst shoppers, but even I can recognise ideal conditions for flea markets.

Unlike Britain, where shopping is now concentrated in big sheds on the bypass, France is still a nation of markets. Paris has no fewer than 84, three of which are rather more famous than the others - and located on the bypass par excellence, the peripherique.

The biggest of the three by a clear margin is that at Clignancourt (Saturday to Monday, Metro: Pte de Clignancourt and follow the crowds), more officially known as the Puces de St Ouen. This is not a market - it is a town of markets, complete with smart neighbourhoods and slums, with shanty-shacks and elegant market halls, and with a visiting population of some 200,000 every weekend.

Some of the Clignancourt markets are quite distinctive. In Marche Vernaison the stalls are proper shops packed with plunder of chateaux and auberges: chandeliers and chaises longues, a snarling boar's head and a gorgeous gilded goose -"your mother would love that big duck" said a loud American voice. Here every stall-holder has a poodle, and there are no prices on anything. Across the road in Marche Dauphine - a galleried market hall complete with a fountain and our own red telephone boxes - ladies dressed by Moshino read Proust or Stendhal amongst paintings and tapestries.

Marche Serpette specialises in the paraphernalia of more recent times, as announced by a GI jeep complete with guitar and gatling gun - for sale separately or as a set - standing outside. Behind Serpette is the most atmospheric: Marche Paul Bert, with stalls largely in the open, and their owners sitting down to wine and sardines at 9 o'clock in the morning (ah but, they said, for them this was le lunch, having risen very early to drive in from the countryside and do the serious deals at dawn). There are gems in the junk: a rocking rabbit, a samurai sword, a Thai buddha, a set of bagpipes, two spiral staircases, the wheels of a Peugeot 504...

Clinging to the side of the peripherique are the more modern stalls, with all the usual mass-produced market merchandise: CDs and T-shirts, boots and biros. Here, in Marche Malik, T-Rex and denim throb together, and you can get 10 pairs of spectacles for 1,000FF.

The further you penetrate the fleamarket, the rougher it becomes: in a street of metal workers - Rue Jean-Henri Fabre - a gent in a waistcoat was twinkling at me one minute and the next he was spitting Arabic invective at a long-armed pickpocket. He must have swapped his twinkles for the mother of all curses, because the youth dropped his wallet and loped off, smiling a sickly, frightened smile.

Just round the next corner was a shambling crowd, with a strange, underhand feeling of novice pickpockets on a day trip, or even a swarm of dope pushers with no clients. In fact their shuffle focused on small piles of personal possessions on the tarmac, like girls disco-dancing in slow motion around their handbags. Absorption into the crowd transformed me, unawares, from innocent tourist into walking supermarket. A man approached: how much for the camera? he asked. I'd got as far as pricing my boxer shorts, when suddenly this cobweb of recycling was blown away: two gendarmes had come round the corner, and the crowd simply melted into the traffic.

On the opposite side of Paris the market at Porte de Vanves (Saturday and Sunday, Metro: Pte de Vanves, then walk east on Ave Marc Sangnier) is more a grand car-boot sale for Parisians, stretching a mile or so along a wide pavement, then spreading out into Ave Georges Lafenestre. The atmosphere is laid back, the merchandise more domestic. There's quality amongst the junk rather than junk amongst the quality, as at Clignancourt. A couple of Italian girls were buying berets of the Marine Nationale; a man with old clothes piled on trestle tables was encouraging his customers to "fouillez, messieurs-dames, fouillez" - dig, you blighters, dig.

The market at Porte de Montreuil in the east of the city (Saturday to Monday, Metro: Pte de Montreuil then walk across the peripherique) is largely junk: larger than Vanves but smaller than Clignancourt, this is the bottom of the recycling pyramid. Most of the official sales are in a triangular tented city, but the tentacles of junk reach up Rue Etienne Marcel. Piles on the pavement are mainstream business here. Remember that set of Peugeot wheels at the back of Clignancourt? Here you'd have to assemble your own wheels from piles of valves, tyres, rims and hub caps. And if Vanves has cleared the Parisians' attics, then Montreuil has been digging in their rubbish bins.

But what Montreuil might lack in quality produce it more than makes up for in a snapshot of Parisian ethnicity: Arabs and Algerians, Vietnamese and Sudanese gather here at dawn to haggle over a tricyle with no pedals in French with few verbs, and all in the same city as Galeries Lafayette. Want an old brown woolly lampshade, sold by a Tibetan in a baseball cap? Or even several dozen copies of Bridge Over Troubled Water on vinyl? Then Montreuil's your paradise.

True to form, I came away from my weekend without buying a dickybird - but grabbed my usual runny Camembert on the way to the airport. However with a bit more preparation - a van and a few thousand francs - then I feel I could have broken the habit of a lifetime.

• More from Andrew Eames

Recommended hotels in Paris