Tag Archives: Paris history

Paris’s treasured attic: Musée Carnavalet

27 Tuesday May 2014

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Located on the Right Bank in the Marais is a museum housing the history of Paris. The exterior with it’s dripping vines, roses and French formal gardens screams “photo op!” Digesting all there is to see in one visit (and it’s free) is almost an impossible feat, but worth a try.

As visitors wander through re-creations of rooms in styles ranging from the 17th to the 20th century, they can follow developments in Parisian interior design, immerse themselves in revolutionary history from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, and also enter into the private lives of famous Parisians, imagining for example, the Marquise de Sévigné at her Chinese laquerwork desk penning her famous letters, or even Marcel Proust in his bedroom, dividing his time between his brass bed and his little table covered in pens, ink and notebook, peruse Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs.

Musee Carnavalet

Georges Fouquet’s jewelry boutique, the Alphonse Mucha collection, primo examples of Art Nouveau, 2,600 paintings, 20,000 drawings, 300,000 engravings and 150,000 photographs, 2,000 modern sculptures and 800 pieces of furniture, thousands of ceramics, and the lavish Art Deco ballroom from the hôtel de Wendel, which was painted in 1925 by José-Maria Sert….exhausting yes, but one of the reasons you’ve come to Paris. It’s essence is here in “old-time”. The Louvre’s second little cousin.

Before your visit, my advice is to bone up on the city’s fascinating history, then tackle the 100 creaky floored rooms in bite sized pieces.

Musee Carnavalet

16 Rue des Francs Bourgeois, 75003 Paris, France
10:00 am – 6:00 pm, closed Mondays
metro St-Paul, Chemin Vert or Rambuteau
Bus lines: 29, 69, 76, 96
http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr

On the No Worries Paris guidebook route.

Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature: a cabinet of curiosities

01 Saturday Jun 2013

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Blink going down the rue des Archives and you’ll miss the sign of this unstodgy private museum where you’ll trip the light fantastic. The ceiling of one room has been covered in owl feathers in a work called The Night of Diana, rooms have names such as Room of the Boar, Salon of the Dogs and Cabinet of the Wolf, an alcove is dedicated to unicorns and a collection of gold dog collars throughout the ages is displayed alongside 17th-century portraits of Louis XIV’s pets. A small white version of the Scottie dog sculpture Puppy by contemporary American ceramic artist Jeff Koons is also part of the mix.

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The museum includes an array of weaponry from the 16th through to the 19th centuries, hundreds of trophies and taxidermied animals from Europe, Africa, Asia and America. These include a polar bear, lion, tiger, cheetah, fox, rhinoceros, bison, water buffalo and many birds. In the Room of Trophies, Le Souillot, a wall-mounted animatronic albino boar head by contemporary French artist Nicolas Darrot, speaks to museum visitors in French. There’s a hunting lodge coziness to the place where guards take pleasure in opening drawers filled with artifacts and children are given special attention.

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It’s been characterized by the Smithsonian magazine as “one of the most rewarding and inventive in Paris.” To quote a visitor: “it all makes you think about hobbies, prestige, the meaning of life, nature, domination, death, social class, art and our relationship to animals and life around us. There is the amazing and the prosaic, jokes and tricks and strange juxtapositions of materials. The stuffed lions and disassembled owls are especially haunting. The gun that shoots around corners is one of the many jokes displayed alongside the rare the beautiful and the serious.”

Duck in some afternoon. The admission is around 6 euros and it’s closed on Mondays. The No Worries Paris guidebook has more for you to see a few doors down.

Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature
60 rue des Archives, 3rd Arrondissement
http://www.chassenature.org/index1.html

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Paris Haute Couture Show: a two-fer

29 Monday Apr 2013

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Visit Paris’s historic City Hall and take in the Paris Haute Couture exhibit in the Salle Saint-Jean which ends July 6. It’s free. About a hundred masterpieces from the Galliera Museum will be showcased: Doucet, Lanvin, Patou, Chanel, Rochas, Jacques Heim, Dior, Gaultier, Lacroix, Alaia, Balenciaga, Gres, Courreges, Schiaparelli, Balmain, Molyneux, Carven to name a few.

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A little history about the elaborate building:

Ever since 1357, the City of Paris’s administration has been located at the same location where the Hôtel de Ville stands today.

1533: King Francis I decided to endow the city with a city hall which would be worthy of Paris, then the largest city of Europe. Building work was not finished until 1628 during the reign of Louis XIII.

1835: on the initiative of Rambuteau, préfet of the Seine département, two wings were added to the main building and were linked to the facade by a gallery, to provide more space for the expanded city government.

1871: The Paris Commune chose the Hôtel de Ville as its headquarters, and as anti-Commune troops approached the building, Communards set fire to the Hotel destroying almost all extant public records from the French Revolutionary period. The blaze swallowed the building from the inside, leaving only an empty stone shell.

1873-1892: Reconstruction of the interior. Some 230 sculptors were commissioned to produce 338 individual figures of famous Parisians on each facade, along with lions and other sculptural features. Rodin produced the figure of the 18th-century mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, finished in 1882

Open every day from 10am to 7pm (except Sundays and bank holidays)
Access:
Hôtel de Ville
Salle Saint-Jean, 5 rue de Lobau, Paris 4th arrondissement
Metro stop: Hôtel de Ville

A visit to Paris’s “Sinister Way”

21 Monday Jan 2013

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Rue Roquette Paris

From the pages of the No Worries Paris guidebook: “The restaurants and bistros amplify on Rue de la Roquette. But in the 17C, Roquette was but a rural road leading to the large domain of a convent of the same name—which derives from a pale yellow flower, “the rocket,” that thrived in the rubble beside the road. At the time of the Revolution and for a century thereafter, Roquette was known as the “Sinister Way,” or “Sorrowful Road.” It connected the prison at Bastille to the new cemetery at Pere Lachaise, passing two other prisons, both a men’s and women’s. Funerals and bawdy public executions by guillotine were frequent. To your right as you reach the Roquette, at #76, is Theatre de La Bastille, where the quarter’s new vibe is apparent in dance and drama performances that warp and create trends.”

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Storming the Bastille

23 Sunday Dec 2012

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Bastille

A lively sidewalk scene is guaranteed at Place de la Bastille, but the only reminder of the infamous prison is a 160-foot bronze column, the Colonne de Juilliet. The spire was erected 31 years after the Revolution, to commemorate the Revolution of 1830—when the reign of Charles X ended and the advent of France’s “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe began. Names of the some 500 people who died in the revolution are etched in the bronze. Atop the column is a 16-foot gilded figure, “The Spirit of Freedom,” looking sprite, balanced on one foot, winged, and holding a torch. Hundreds of people are buried beneath the column, from the 1830 revolution and from yet another uprising in 1848. Mostly traffic storms it now. Watch it crossing on bicycle or on foot.

The other Josephine

03 Monday Sep 2012

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Josephine Baker sashayed onto a Paris stage during the 1920s with a comic, yet sensual appeal that took Europe by storm. Famous for barely-there dresses and no-holds-barred dance routines, her exotic beauty generated nicknames “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.” Admirers bestowed a plethora of gifts, including diamonds and cars, and she received approximately 1,500 marriage proposals. She starred in La Folie du Jour at the Follies-Bergère Theater. Her jaw-dropping performance, including a costume of 16 bananas strung into a skirt, cemented her celebrity status. She maintained energetic performances and a celebrity status for 50 years until her death in 1975.

See her dance

Paris “A” List: Notre Dame

13 Friday Jul 2012

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Napoleon had plans to demolish Norte Dame cathedral shortly after 1804 when he took the royal crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowned himself emperor in the shadow of the great church. The general felt the ediface a monstrosity, built over six centuries at the hands of numerous architects. But author Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) later proclaimed the church a “symphony of stone” and his sentiments won the day. Numerous touches have been added in the nearly two centuries since Hugo’s days, mainly under the direction of 19C genius Eugene Violet le Duc, including the 300-foot-high steeple and the three portals of the entrance (west) facade.

With myriad integrated details inside and out, Notre Dame indeed contains the notes and overall bombast of a great musical work. Entrance to the cathedral is free, although a fee is charged to climb the 230-foot north tower to the belfry and walk among the gargoyles. In the parvis (plaza) in front is Point Zero, a bronze star imbedded in flagstone, from which all distances in France are measured. The site of Notre Dame on Ile de la Cite was also the location for the stronghold of the Parisii, the tribe of boatmen dating from around 300 BC, who were displaced by Julius Caesar and the Romans in 54 BC. In recent years, remnants from the Roman’s 3C city of Lutetia (as they called Paris) were discovered 200 feet below ground in the parvis. The parking lot has become a museum, Crypte Archelologique, just one of the bonus attractions that surround the cathedral. See page 38 of No Worries Paris for more photos and info.