Thiers wall
The Boulevards of the Marshals occupy the route of the former "Rue Militaire", built and owned by the French military and running on the inside of the fortified Thiers wall, completed around 1840. In 1859, the military engineering service gave conditional control of the "Rue Militaire" and Thiers wall to the Paris city council. The expansion of the land area of Paris in 1860, by annexing bordering communities, created a situation where everything within the Thiers wall was Paris and everything without was not. The large berm immediately outside the wall and its dry moat led to a profound disruption and complication of the synergistic relationship between Paris and its suburbs.