Formerly located on the Place du Vieux-Marché, in the building that is now the Natural History Museum, the courthouse was established along the Boulevard de Strasbourg in 1876. Its Parisian architect, Jules Bourdais, was inspired by the western facade of the Paris courthouse to create the one in Le Havre in a neo-Greek style. On either side of the staircase, two stone lions once adorned the facade; these were replaced after the Second World War by bronze statues of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Casimir Delavigne, 18th-century literary figures from Le Havre.
