1. I am part of that weird generation that had a cell phone while still in Middle School but also still remembers stopping people in the street to ask for the time. And while these days, most people in Paris (like in the rest of the world) don’t need to ask – after all, we all have our phones permanently stapled to our hands – if you just look up in Paris, it’s pretty easy to tell the time even without a phone.
Here’s one great example: the clock face on the front of the Musée d’Orsay, formerly the Orsay train station. It competes for the status of best-known clock in Paris with only one other.
2. The clock face on the Gare de Lyon train station is perhaps the most famous in Paris; it’s the tallest in the world, aside from Big Ben, at 67 meters in height. It stopped after a 1999 storm and was only put back in working order in 2005; since then, it is synchronized, not by its old-fashioned mechanism dating to the late 19th century, but by radio transmission from France Inter.
3. You don’t have to go to a train station for a glimpse of a beautiful clock; this clock face is on the façade of the Institut de France. Visible from the Louvre and the famous Pont des Arts, the building is home to the Académie Française, which has been tasked since 1687 with the production of an official dictionary of the French language. It’s still going.
4. The ornate Eglise de la Trinité is relatively modern by Parisian standards: built in 1867, the imposing church boasts a beautiful bell tower inscribed with a portion of the appropriately time-adjacent psalm 62: Deus meus, ad te de luce vigilo, which means “My God, to thee do I watch at break of day.”
5. Paris’ covered passages also boast some pretty beautiful clocks, like this one in the Passage des Panoramas.