The best clubs in Paris, from Le Palace to Rex Club

Before the clubs closed: Le Palace and Les Bains Douches.

Le Palace opened on 1 March 1978 in a former theatre on rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. Fabrice Emaer, who already ran Le Sept and Pimm's, stripped the seating out of the old music hall and turned it into a discotheque built for spectacle rather than just dancing: theme nights, drag performance and a stage where DJ Guy Cuevas set the tone. It was sometimes called the biggest club in Europe at the time. Emaer fell ill in 1982 and died in 1983, and the club never found the same footing afterward.

Les Bains Douches opened the same year, in December 1978, a few streets away at 7 rue du Bourg-l'Abbé. The building started in 1885 as Les Bains Guerbois, a private bathhouse. Two friends leased the fading building and hired a then-unknown designer, Philippe Starck, who built a black-and-white checkerboard dance floor into the old bath. It became the closest thing Paris had to Studio 54: David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol all passed through it, and a young David Guetta played some of his first sets there before he had a career outside the city. Structural problems closed the club in 2010. It reopened in 2015 as a boutique hotel that keeps the checkerboard floor as a piece of the building's own history rather than a working dance floor.

Neither club left a working room behind. What Paris kept instead was Rex Club.

Rex Club: the room that gave Paris techno a home.

Rex Club opened in 1988 in the basement of the Grand Rex cinema at 5 boulevard Poissonnière, right as acid house was reaching France from Chicago and Manchester. It had run as a disco, rock and new wave room before that, but 1988 is the year the venue's own history and the trade press both mark as the start of its life as an electronic club. It became a base for French techno and house through the 1990s and 2000s, and marked its 35th anniversary in 2023 with a photobook covering the room's own history.

Rex Club is still the clearest answer to what a Paris techno club sounds like: a low room, a sound system the venue has kept investing in over decades, and a booking policy that has stayed closer to techno and house than most of the clubs around it.

French pop and French electronic music have always sat closer together than the genre labels suggest. Mylène Farmer's Dégénération, produced with Laurent Boutonnat, is one of the clearest examples: a mainstream single built on a driving electronic pulse.

The best clubs in Paris now.

Ask for the best night clubs in Paris and most current guides point to the same handful of rooms. These are the best clubs in Paris that are open now, drawn from the venues that repeat across Resident Advisor's, Time Out's and Do It In Paris's own current guides, plus Rex Club's own history above.

Opening hours, door policy and programming change too often to print here. Check each club's own listings or its Resident Advisor page for the week you are going.

Where to go: the 11th arrondissement and Canal Saint-Martin.

Paris clubbing splits into two walkable clusters rather than one strip. The 11th arrondissement, around Oberkampf, Bastille and rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, is the main bar-hopping route before a club, with Badaboum sitting inside it. The 10th arrondissement, around Canal Saint-Martin, holds a tighter, quieter cluster, including Essaim and Point Éphémère, and is the easier of the two to cover on foot in one night. Rex Club sits apart from both, closer to the Grands Boulevards.

Hear Paris before you go.

The two closed legends left almost nothing you can hear today. What survives is the room that came after them.

Rex Club's own booking has always leaned toward French producers and the wider European techno and house circuit, which is closer to what this mix draws from than anything filed under French touch. For the clubs open now, the Selector plays a set at random from all 62,824 in the catalogue behind this site, and it is a faster way into a night than reading one more list.