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Origin and history

The Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny, inaugurated in 1935 as a Franco-Muslim hospital, was designed to treat the Maghreb populations of the Paris region. He was led by the Laffont Committee and colonial administrator André-Pierre Godin and served a dual purpose: to provide free care while serving as a police surveillance tool for North Africans, in a context of distrust of post-First World War immigration. Its architecture, signed Maurice Mantout and Léon Azéma, mixes modernism (armed concrete, roof terraces) and neo-Mauresque elements (porch inspired by Bab Mansour el Aleuj, bilingual mosaics), reflecting a desire for cultural adaptation under colonial control.

During World War II, the hospital was requisitioned by the German army in 1940 before being returned to the Vichy regime in 1941. Despite this occupation, it became a place of passive resistance: the staff, including physician Ahmed Somia and pharmacist Alice Rollen, organized clandestine care for resistant and allied airmen, especially in the less supervised tuberculosis service. The resistance structured around secret accommodation and medical falsification, with the complicity of the town hall of Bobigny.

After 1945, the hospital gradually opened up to all patients, losing its exclusive character. In 1978, he was renamed Avicenne in tribute to the Persian doctor, partially erasing his colonial past while retaining classified architectural elements (porch, morgue funeral chapel, facades of the Larrey building, registered in 2006). Today integrated into the University Hospitals Group Paris Seine-Saint-Denis, it combines care, research and teaching, while sheltering a major archaeological site: a Gaulish necropolis of 521 tombs (IIth–I century BC), discovered during preventive excavations in 2002–2003.

The hospital site is partly based on the remains of a Gallic village of artisans (350 BC–110 BC), revealed by excavations in 1992 and 1995. Exhumed objects (fibula, warrior sets, coins) and parasitological analyses showed a relatively healthy population, contrasting with subsequent medieval health conditions. Some of these discoveries were exhibited in the hospital lobby until 2009, highlighting the dialogue between archaeological heritage and medical history.

The Avicenne Hospital embodies several historical strata: a controversial colonial legacy (immigrant surveillance, initial segregation), hybrid architecture, discreet resistance during the war, and a post-colonial reinvention as a university institution. Its adjacent Muslim cemetery, established in 1937 and run by the AP-HP until the 1990s, and its Permanence of Access to Health Care (PASS), perpetuate an expanded social mission, far from its primary vocation.

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