The Abbey of Saint-German-des-Prés – the abbey in the meadow

The Abbey of Saint-German-des-Prés – the abbey in the meadow.

The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is one of the oldest churches in Paris. It was constructed in the 6th century.

Located on the Left Bank in the 6th arrondissement, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Church is opposite the Les Deux Magots café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. 

In 542, after waging war in Spain, Childebert I, son of Clovis I, returned to Paris and commissioned the building of the abbey, dedicated to the Holy Cross and Saint Vincent as the Abbaye Sainte-Croix-Saint-Vincent – St. Vincent’s Abbey. He wanted it to be placed where he could see it across the fields from the royal palace on the Ile de a Cité. 

At the time, the Left Bank was prone to flooding, so the church was built in the middle of a meadow (prés). There is no meadow now, as it in the bustling café area of Paris. 

In 558, St. Vincent’s Abbey was completed and dedicated to Germanus, the Bishop of Paris, on 23 December, the very day that Childebert died. Germanus was later canonized and made a saint. Close by the church a monastery was erected. Its abbots had both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over the suburbs of Saint-Germain (lasting until about the year 1670).

By the middle of the 8th century, the abbey was renamed after Saint Germanus (Germain in French) and included the location – the meadow. Hence, it is now known as the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés – the Abbey of Saint Germanus Meadows. 

The abbey was frequently plundered and set on fire by Vikings in the ninth century. The oldest part of the current abbey is the prominent western tower (partly restored and modified), which Abbot Morard built around the year 1000.

It was rebuilt in 1014 and Pope Alexander III re-dedicated it in 1163 to Saint Germain of Paris. The great wall of Paris built during the reign of Philip II of France did not encompass the abbey, leaving the residents to fend for themselves. This also had the effect of splitting the abbey’s holdings into two. Peter of Montereau built a new refectory in around 1239 – he was later the architect of the Sainte Chapelle.  

The abbey church’s west end tower was pierced by a portal, completed in the 12th century, which collapsed in 1604 and was replaced in 1606 by the present classic portal built by Marcel Le Roy. An explosion damaged its cloisters, but the church was spared. The statues in the portal were removed and some were destroyed, and in a fire in 1794 the library vanished in smoke. The abbey church remains as the Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés – a church and not an abbey. 

Louis-César de Bourbon, son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, was an abbot in the abbey. In the 17th century the district of Saint-Germain was among the most desirable on the Left Bank. Therefore, it was a rich Catholic church due to its royal patronage until it was disbanded during the French Revolution.

Philosopher René Descartes is buried in one of the side chapels of the church.

The Paris Opera House – now no opera, just ballet

The Paris Opera House – now no opera, just ballet.

The Paris Opera House is called the Palais Garnier. It is located at the Place de l’Opéra in the 9th arrondissement.

Built from 1861 to 1975 during the reign of Napoleon III, it was first called le nouvel Opéra de Paris – the new Paris Opera. Now it’s not so new, but it is still opulent and grand. It is called Palais Garnier after the architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898). It held opera and ballet events with the Paris Opera Ballet. 

When a new, modern building, called the Opéra Bastille, opened in 1989, the Palais Garnier became the accommodation for the Paris Opera Ballet only, and opera was no longer held there. So, although it is probably the most famous opera house in the world, it is really a ballet house. However, it does hold the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra de Paris– the Paris Opera Library-Museum. So, okay, it’s a little bit of an opera house. 

It is grand at 56 metres (184 feet) high, 155 metres (508 feet) long, and 70 metres (230 feet) wide. 

The architecture includes different styles, from the Baroque to Renaissance. The front view shows Aimé Millet’s Apollo, Poetry and Musicright at the top of the roof. Readers can see other works of Millet (1819-1891) in the Jardin des Tuileries and the Jardin du Luxembourg. 

The two copper-gilded statues on the roof are by Charles-Alphonse-Achille Gumery (1827-1871). L’Harmonie(Harmony) is on the left and La Poésie(Poetry) is on the right. Both are 7.5 metres (25 feet) high, erected in 1869.

Across the top of the columns is a stretch (frieze) of comic and tragic masks. Jean-Baptiste-Jules Klagman (1810-1867) designed the six bronze-gilded masks. 

Below the frieze are four sculptures and between the columns are seven busts of famous musical composers: Italian Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868), French Daniel Francois Esprit Auber (1782-1871), German Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Salzburg/Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Italian Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (1774-1851), German Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), and French Jacques-Francois-Fromental-Élie Halévy (1799-1862). 

The best seasons to visit Paris

The best seasons to visit Paris.

When tourism opens up fully, Paris will be popular once again. People always ask me, ‘When is the best time to visit Paris?” Always, I say. 

But if you are planning a visit, spring and summer are the high seasons: April, May, June, July, and August. Other favourable months are September, October, November and December.

The summer months of June, July and August have sunny temperatures in the range of 13C-28C (55F-82F).

The autumn months of September, October and November have mild temperatures of 7C-18C (45F-65F). 

The winter months of December, January, and February have cold temperatures of 2C-9C (35F-48F). 

The spring months of March, April, and May have mild temperatures of 7C-18C (45F-65F).  

Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris will become an “extraordinary garden”

Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris will become an “extraordinary garden”

The “most beautiful avenue in the world” – the famed Avenue des Champs-Élysées – is not seen as beautiful to many Parisians. They view it as an overcrowded tourist attraction that is now drab and unexciting. 

According to the architects commissioned to revamp the Avenue, out of the estimated 100,000 pedestrians who visit the Avenue each day, about 72% are tourists and 22% work there. That means that only 6% of Parisians visit the Avenue each day.

The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said that plans have been approved to radically transform the Avenue des Champs-Élysées into an “extraordinary garden”.

The €200 million renovation will turn roads into green spaces with more room for pedestrians, and trees planted to improve air quality, while the space for vehicles will be reduced by half.

Environmental and urban planning activists have campaigned for the project for years, arguing that mass retail stores, overpriced cafés, and constant traffic have turned the Avenue into a bland and noisy district shunned by Parisians.

The first stage of the renovation is expected to be completed in time for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, with the remaining work to be carried out by 2030.

Pantheonized in the Paris Pantheon

Pantheonized in the Paris Pantheon.

The Paris Pantheon is the burial place of France’s honoured citizens. To be pantheonised is to be entombed there. Pantheonised is not strictly the correct word, but it seems nouns become verbs these days. The pantheonisations – another verb for the act of being interred – don’t occur very often, but most occurred during Napoleon’s rule during the First French Empire.

There are not a lot of people entombed in the Pantheon – 87 currently (to the end of 2020), mainly men, but also five women. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the novelist who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Miserables (1862) is buried in the Pantheon. So are Voltaire (1694-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), Emile Zola (1840-1902), Pierre Curie (185901906), and Marie Curie (1867-1934). 

There was one pantheonisation in 2020 – on 11 November. It was French author Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980), most noted for his 1949 novel Ceux de 14 (The Men of 1914) and Raboliot (1925). It is not uncommon for people to be interred in the Pantheon years after their death – in fact, it is most common. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), was pantheonised in 2002 – 1932 years after his death.

Located in the Latin Quartier of the 5th arrondissement, it was the first major monument in the city, even before the Eiffel Tower. Its construction started in 1758 under the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713-1780) and it was completed in 1790 by his student, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet (1743-1829).

The domed Gothic-Greek building is designed in the shape of a Greek cross, and is 110 metres (360 feet) long and 84 metres (275 feet) wide. The front façade had Corinthian columns with a triangular pediment, designed by David d’Angers. Its dome is 83 metres (272 feet) high. King Louis XV of France commissioned the building, initially as a church, to honour Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. She led the resistance to the Huns in 451. 

The dome is really three domes that fit within each other. The first and the second dome can be seen from inside the monument, and the third dome is visible from the outside.  

Madame de Pompadour – prestige in the court of the King of France

Madame de Pompadour – her rise to prestige and power in the court of the King of France.

Madame de Pompadour was the long-time mistress of King Louis XV of France. 

Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764) was born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson – often ridiculed because poisson means fish. At the age of nine, a fortune-teller predicted that she would steal the heart of a king. This was a far-fetched notion. She was not from aristocracy. Instead, she was from the bourgeoisie – from the rural boroughs.

In her teens, Jeanne-Antoinette could act, dance, sing, play the clavichord, and paint. She was an enthusiastic gardener and botanist, and collected rare and exotic birds. In fact, she had everything, except good health. She was described by biographer Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) as pretty, although her looks depended on ‘dazzle and expression rather than bone structure.’  She was pretty enough for Monsieur Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d’Etoiles to marry her. 

Financier Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d’Etoiles (1717-1799) married Jeanne-Antoinette in 1741. They had two children; a son in 1741 who died within a year, and a daughter in 1744. Alexandrine-Jeanne, nicknamed Fanfan, died when she was nine years old from a stomach illness. 

Charles-Guillaume and Jeanne-Antoinette lived in a relatively modest place next to the Senart forest. It was in the forest that she ‘stole the heart of a king.’

King Louis XV hunted in the grounds of the forest. And that’s where he saw Jeanne-Antoinette.King Louis (1710-1774) was also known as Louis the Beloved – le Bien-Aimé. He was the King of France from 1715 until his death at the age of 64. His reign of almost 59 years was the second longest of any ruler of France. The longest ruler, for 72 years, was his great-grandfather Louis XIV. 

King Louis XV was married to Marie Leszczynska, the daughter of the deposed King of Poland, when he met Jeanne-Antoinette. He also had a mistress, Marie Anne de Mailly, called Madame de Chateauroux. But Marie Anne died in 1744, so he was looking for someone to replace her. Jeanne-Antoinette instigated the meeting with the king by riding her carriage right in front of the king’s hunting party. Not once, but twice. In February 1945, the king sent her an invitation to attend a masked ball at the Palace of Versailles. 

At the time, the mistress to King Louis XV lived in the king’s palace, and just as Marie Anne did, so did Jeanne-Antoinette, and she officially separated from her husband Charles-Guillaume two months after she moved into the king’s palace in March 1745 – the Palace of Versailles. Hence, she became known as Madame de Pompadour. 

Madame de Pompadour lived in the king’s court for  20 years, becoming the undisputed royal mistress. Her room was directly above the king’s bedroom. As vistors enter the garden of Versailles through the main entrance, they should turn left and count the nine top windows from the north-west corner to locate Madame de Pompadour’s room. 

She was even promoted. King Louis XV gave her the title of Duchess in 1752, and in 1756 she had the position of Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. Historians say that this position was effectively like being the Prime Minister !

Madame de Pompadour was influential in the king’s palace. She was kind to the Queen, but loathsome to the bourgeoisie who resented her rise to power and prestige. The Queen had 10 children, and one survived. Her son Dauphin Louis was born in 1729 and died in 1765 at the age of 36. Madame de Pompadour had no children with King Louis XV.

Madame de Pompadour died in 1764 of tuberculosis at the age of 42. The Queen died in 1768 at the age of 65.

Paris: a well-connected city

Paris: a well-connected city.

A global study on urban planning and street design analyzed the design of city streets to determine the best-connected cities. Paris was ranked as one of the best-connected cities in the world.

Connectivity influences people’s decisions to drive or travel by foot, say authors of the first global analysis of street connectivity. The findings, writes the New Scientist magazine (12 December 2019), could be used by urban planners to design cities with lower climate impacts.

Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University in Canada and Adam Millard-Ball at the University of California, Santa Cruz, assessed the connectivity of street networks in different cities by counting the numbers of intersections, streets radiating off each intersection, dead ends, and loops. They also measured the straightness of the routes between each intersection. They performed this analysis on all 46 million kilometres of the world’s mapped roads.

The results show that cities with grid-like street patterns have the best connectivity. Old European cities like Paris and Vienna scored well – despite their intersections tending to be irregularly spaced and three-way instead of four-way – because they still form highly connected networks.

Cities that have cul-de-sacs, crescents, and dead-ends are the least well-connected because their curvy, dead-end streets create disjointed suburban islands.

Since well-connected streets make it easier to walk, cycle, and access public transport, cities with greater street connectivity tend to have lower rates of car ownership and higher proportions of people walking to work.

This suggests that the way urban planners design urban spaces will have long-lasting impacts on the use of cars and their greenhouse gas emissions, because once streets are laid down, they are essentially “locked in,” says Barrington-Leigh.

“The choice about street connectivity in new developments is one of the largest climate-relevant investments that humankind is making and yet it’s been grossly overlooked,” he says.

Overall, the amount of urban space across the world is set to triple between 2000 and 2030.

Effective street connectivity may also lower climate emissions because it makes it easier for people to come together and share resources, says Barrington-Leigh. “In contrast, if you live in cul-de-sac hell in the suburbs, it’s harder to get anywhere, so you might have a swimming pool in your backyard instead of going to the local public pool, or a home theatre in your basement instead of going to the cinema, or a large freezer because you can’t go shopping as often,” he says.

“Historically, street grids were idealised in Ancient Rome and China because they facilitated efficient transport of people and goods. Cul-de-sacs became popular in America and England in the 20th century when cars made it possible for people to spread out and planners thought they would create safe havens for kids to “play street hockey or run over to their neighbours,” says Barrington-Leigh. 

Examples of Well-Connected Cities (Grid-like Street Patterns)

Adelaide, Alexandria, Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Karachi, Khartoum, Madrid, Marrakech, Montreal, Osaka, Paris, Santiago, Seoul, St Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and Vienna.

Examples of Mid-Range Connected Cities (Irregularly Spaced Streets)

Auckland, London, New York, and Sydney.

Examples of Poorly Connected Cities (Cul-de-Sacs, Crescents, Dead-Ends)

Accra, Bangkok, Belgrade, Cleveland, Gainesville, Guatemala City, Ho Chi Minh City, Houston, Los Angeles, Manchester, Manila, Raleigh, and Tijuana.

Paris on the Brink – an historical account of 1930s Paris

Paris on the Brink – an historical account of 1930s Paris. 

Mary McAuliffe’s 2018 book, Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvado Dali, Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Gide, Sylvia Beach, Leon Blum, and Their Friends is an easy-to-read historical account of Paris. Long title, but it is a well-structured book with chapters that, fortunately, have shorter titles. 

The book begins with ‘End of an Era’ – the ending of the 1920s with the Wall Street Stock Exchange Crash of 1929, sending many Americans in Paris back home.

The 1930s was the decade before the Second World War and the instability of the civil war in Spain. McAuliffe describes Paris as a cultural centre where life goes on amid uncertainty in Europe. There are chapters such as ‘It Could Never Happen Here’ and ‘Navigating a Dangerous World’ as well as ‘Taking Sides’ and ‘Coming Apart.’

There is a cast of characters — real people of the time—from writers Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Satre, and Gertrude Stein to scientist Marie Curie, artist Pablo Picasso, and fashion designer Coco Chanel. 

The last chapter and the epilogue are interesting — they discuss the locations where people scattered to when they evacuated Paris. Some were resistors and some were collaborators. Some stayed ‘out of sight’ in France, while many left the country. Some were interrogated and some were imprisoned. 

Due to the great number of creatives and intellectuals mentioned in this book, they are not discussed in detail – rather, they are the ‘collective creatives.’ The book is more about the time than the fame, and more about the politics than the individual. 

André Malraux, a man of Paris and the world

André Malraux, a man of Paris and the world.

Paris-born André Malraux was a novelist, art theorist, and France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs in the 1960s. He was also described as France’s ‘man of the world’ and ‘ambassador of the world.’ It was said that he was a man of action and a man of literature. 

Georges André Malraux (1901-1976) travelled extensively. He tried to find what was once lost. He wrote of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat ‘lost-city’ ruins and tourist site when Cambodia was a French Protectorate, criticizing the colonial authorities there. He also searched Yemen and Saudi Arabia for the lost city of the Queen of Sheba, and he wrote of the Silk Route across Central Asia.

He had wide interactions with public figures during his time as French Minister of Cultural Affairs. He conversed with the Chinese communist revolutionary Chairman Mao Zedong, and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, as well as other leaders such as French statesman Charles de Gaulle, the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, the first female Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, and American President John F. Kennedy. And writers and artists too, from Ernest Hemingway to Leon Trotsky, Marc Chagall, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Satre, Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Picasso.

What is often forgotten, is that, at home in Paris, he championed a campaign to clean the blackened, polluted building facades to reinvigorate and refresh the capital. 

In 1959 in France, home-owners were required, by law, to clean their sandstone buildings regularly to revive the facades and to spare them from demolition. Vehicle exhaust fumes and other pollutants had formed black crusts on the buildings. Even the British government adopted the idea in the 1960s to clean-up London buildings. Unfortunately, in both Paris and London, the cheaper efforts to clean the buildings often damaged them. As individual home-owners cleaned their buildings at different times using different methods, the previous uniformity of the Parisian buildings was beginning to look patchy and an eyesore on the landscape. 

Nevertheless, the campaign led to an awareness of air pollution and heritage preservation. Now, as in many cities, restoration and cleaning requires government permission for heritage-listed buildings. 

André Malraux established the Malraux Law to safeguard sectors of Paris, initially for Marais in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. The law prohibited the demolition of buildings and promoted the provision of incentives to home-owners to renovate the buildings to their original form. The law was important because it was not the intention to protect individual buildings, but to protect whole sectors and districts in order to retain the ambience of urban communities. 

Malraux had his share of tragedy too. His father suicided; his brothers died in the Second World War; his second wife Josette died while slipping as she boarded a train in 1944 at the age of 34; and his two sons died in a car accident in 1961. Malraux though, lived to be 75 years of age. In 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, his ashes were entombed in the Paris Panthéon. 

Paris bouquinistes: selling second-hand books along the Seine

Paris bouquinistes: selling second-hand books along the Seine.

Along the banks of the river Seine in Paris, the bouquinistes continue to sell second-hand books, just as they have done since the 19thcentury when the city permitted booksellers to have a permanent location.

Closed and locked at night, the typically green boxes sit on top of the parapet along a portion of the Right Bank and the Left Bank of the river Seine — for a length of about three kilometres. Open during the day, the boxes contain books, posters, cards, magazines, comics, prints, stamps, and papers. Their owners can choose when to open, because there are no specific ‘open’ hours – they can be open anytime from sunrise to sunset.

Since 1930, the government set strict regulations about the size, colour, and weight of the bouquiniste boxes. Each bouquiniste has a length of less than 9 metres for which they pay an annual fee to the city. Each box is identical and green. The length is 2 metres and the width is 0.75 metres to enable pedestrian access to the pavement. When open the upper edge of the box should not be more than 2 metres above the ground.

There are about 240 registered bouquinistes with 900 bouquiniste boxes. The bouquinistes of the Seine are now a UNESCO World Heritage site.