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Paris is throwing a free show at the foot of the Eiffel Tower tonight, and the reason has nothing to do with Bastille Da...
05/09/2026

Paris is throwing a free show at the foot of the Eiffel Tower tonight, and the reason has nothing to do with Bastille Day or New Year's Eve.

Starting at 9 pm, after a military ceremony, the Trocadéro esplanade will fill with 3D projections, lasers, fog, and water jets for a 45-minute sound and light show. Two Navy music groups, the Bagad de Lann-Bihoué and the Musique de la Marine, will perform live on a central stage while the visuals trace four centuries of naval history, from the French Navy's founding in 1626 to its missions today.

The show marks the 400th anniversary of the French Navy, celebrated all year across France. But tonight's date was chosen for a more specific reason: September 5 is the 245th anniversary of the Battle of the Chesapeake, a naval battle the French fleet won against the British in 1781, off the coast of Virginia. That victory kept British reinforcements from reaching General Cornwallis's troops, and it helped clear the way for the French and American win at Yorktown a few weeks later, a turning point in the fight for American independence.

The event is free and open to everyone, and it closes out a full year of Navy anniversary celebrations across the country.

In 1881, Edgar Degas did something no one in the art world had really done before. He took a wax sculpture of a young ba...
05/09/2026

In 1881, Edgar Degas did something no one in the art world had really done before. He took a wax sculpture of a young ballet dancer and dressed her in an actual bodice, an actual tutu, and actual ballet slippers, then topped it with a wig made of real human hair.

The sculpture depicted Marie van Goethem, a 14-year-old dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet who modeled for Degas to earn extra money. He unveiled it at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, the only time in his life he ever displayed a sculpture publicly.

Critics were not kind. One called it "quite simply hideous." Another used the phrase "flower of precocious depravity." The realism unsettled people. Mixing wax, fabric, and human hair blurred a line between sculpture and something closer to a wax museum figure, and made an ordinary working-class girl look uncomfortably present in a room built for fine art.

Degas never exhibited another sculpture in his lifetime. The original wax version now sits in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. After his death, his family had roughly 28 bronze casts made from it, and those are the versions now scattered across major museums worldwide. The Musée d'Orsay holds one of them, cast between 1921 and 1931, complete with its tulle tutu and satin ribbon, most likely the one pictured here.

Even the tutu has its own history. It has been redesigned and debated by conservators for decades, since nobody was entirely sure what Degas originally intended it to look like.

By the early 1800s, Notre-Dame de Paris was falling apart. It had been used as a warehouse and even a saltpeter factory ...
04/09/2026

By the early 1800s, Notre-Dame de Paris was falling apart. It had been used as a warehouse and even a saltpeter factory during the Revolution, its statues smashed, its stained glass replaced with plain panels. By the 1830s, the neglect was so severe that officials seriously discussed tearing it down and reusing the stone.

Victor Hugo, then a young writer, had already spent years campaigning against what he called the "demolishers," people stripping France of its medieval architecture in the name of progress. In 1831, he published Notre-Dame de Paris, a novel set in the cathedral three centuries earlier, in 1482.

The book was not really about romance or Quasimodo, at least not only. Its opening chapters read almost like an architectural plea, describing the cathedral as a "vast symphony in stone" and mourning what neglect had done to it.

It worked. The novel became a sensation, and public opinion shifted. Notre-Dame went from a crumbling relic nobody wanted to save to a symbol of French heritage worth protecting. In 1834, the state created its first Inspectorate of Historical Monuments, and a major restoration began a decade later under the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

Almost two centuries later, when the 2019 fire threatened the same building, Hugo's novel shot back to the top of bestseller lists in France, doing the same work it did the first time.

At 51, rue de Richelieu, in the 1st arrondissement, a bakery pulled fresh bread from its ovens for 202 years straight, l...
04/09/2026

At 51, rue de Richelieu, in the 1st arrondissement, a bakery pulled fresh bread from its ovens for 202 years straight, long enough that Napoleon could have walked through that same door for a loaf.

Baker Claude Esnault took over Boulangerie Au Grand Richelieu in 1969 and ran it for 43 years, turning out around 200 baguettes a day for a neighborhood wedged between the Louvre, the Palais Royal, and the Opera.

Then came the rent. The landlord doubled it, from about 18,000 euros ($23,000) a year to 35,000 euros ($45,000). The building was partly owned by actor Christophe Lambert, and the company holding it negotiated a 310,000 euro ($400,000) payout to buy out Esnault's lease and clear him out.

On December 31, 2012, the ovens went cold for good. A macaron shop moved in temporarily while the space was prepared for a well known pastry chef to take over the ground floor.

Some habits give a visitor away before they even say a word.
04/09/2026

Some habits give a visitor away before they even say a word.

By September 1914, German forces had advanced to within 30 miles of Paris. The French army needed reinforcements at the ...
04/09/2026

By September 1914, German forces had advanced to within 30 miles of Paris. The French army needed reinforcements at the front fast, and the rail network around the city was too disorganized to move them in time.

General Joseph Gallieni, the military governor of Paris, ordered the city's taxis requisitioned instead. Police gathered roughly 600 Renault taxis at Les Invalides on the night of September 6, 1914. Each one could carry five soldiers, four in the back and one beside the driver.

The taxis left in two convoys, one of 350 vehicles at 10pm and another of 250 an hour later, driving with their headlights off and following the taillights of the car ahead. Over the next two days they carried around 6,000 soldiers roughly 30 miles to the front near the Marne River.

It was the first time in history that motor vehicles moved troops into battle. The reinforcements helped hold the line at the First Battle of the Marne, which stopped the German advance on Paris.

When the drivers returned to the city, the French government paid every fare in full, using the meters that had kept running the entire trip. The total came to just over 70,000 francs.

Montmartre's hill is so unstable that Sacré-Coeur needed a second, invisible foundation as large as the building itself ...
04/09/2026

Montmartre's hill is so unstable that Sacré-Coeur needed a second, invisible foundation as large as the building itself before a single visible stone went up.

When construction began in 1875, engineers found that Montmartre was riddled with old gypsum quarries, the same soft rock that had been mined out from underneath the hill for plaster since the Middle Ages. The ground was too weak to carry a basilica this size.

The fix was to sink 83 wells, each 108 feet (33 meters) deep, straight down through the loose rock to solid bedrock. Engineers filled them with concrete and linked them underground with arches, building a hidden second foundation before the visible basilica ever rose above ground.

That foundation work alone cost more than 4 million francs and took months of debate before officials even approved it. It is often said, only half joking, that Sacré-Coeur does not rest on the hill so much as hold it up.

The basilica took nearly 40 years to finish, from 1875 to 1914, and was not consecrated until 1919, delayed by the First World War.

No one has ever actually dug up and exposed those 83 wells the way the image above shows them. That part is a digital illustration built to match the real engineering record, not a photo of an excavation.

(The image above is a digital illustration, not a real excavation.)

The Richelieu wing, the section of the Louvre outlined here, spent over a century as government office space rather than...
03/09/2026

The Richelieu wing, the section of the Louvre outlined here, spent over a century as government office space rather than museum galleries.

France's Finance Ministry moved in after a fire during the Paris Commune destroyed its previous headquarters in 1871. For the next 118 years, the ministry's staff worked inside the Louvre itself, with the minister and family living in private apartments in the wing while the grander rooms hosted official receptions.

That arrangement lasted until 1989, when the ministry relocated to a purpose built building in Bercy, on the eastern edge of Paris. The move was part of French President François Mitterrand's Grand Louvre project, a decade long plan to convert the entire palace into museum space and add the glass pyramid entrance designed by I. M. Pei.

Freeing up the Richelieu wing nearly doubled the Louvre's gallery space. The rooms opened to the public in 1993, and the former minister's private apartments, still decorated much as they were in the 19th century, are now on view as part of the museum itself.

This is the Tour Triangle (Triangle Tower), rising behind the Eiffel Tower at the edge of the 15th arrondissement. Its g...
03/09/2026

This is the Tour Triangle (Triangle Tower), rising behind the Eiffel Tower at the edge of the 15th arrondissement. Its glass skin has now gone up almost entirely, and at sunset the whole structure lights up like it was cast in metal.

The tower reached its full height of 590 feet (180 meters) this past April, making it the third tallest structure in Paris, behind only the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse. It is also the first skyscraper built inside central Paris in 53 years, since the Tour Montparnasse went up in 1973.

Paris brought back its height limit on new buildings a few years ago, so the Tour Triangle will very likely keep that title for a long time. There is not going to be another one like it going up anytime soon.

Work is still underway inside, and the opening has slipped from earlier this year into 2027. When it finally welcomes visitors, the top floor will hold a restaurant and an observation deck looking out over the whole city, Eiffel Tower included.

Photo:

Celine Dion arrived in Paris on Friday, greeted by fans and photographers outside her hotel as she began final preparati...
03/09/2026

Celine Dion arrived in Paris on Friday, greeted by fans and photographers outside her hotel as she began final preparations for her first concert residency in six years.

Her run of shows opens September 12 at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, just west of the city, a venue known until this summer as Paris La Défense Arena. What started as a planned run of 10 dates grew to 16 shows through October 17 after ticket demand far outpaced expectations, with more than 9 million fans entering a lottery just for early access.

This will be Dion's first sustained series of live performances since revealing her diagnosis with stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological condition that forced her off the stage for years.

Her only public appearance since then came in 2024, when she sang Édith Piaf's "Hymne à l'amour" from the Eiffel Tower during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. She has kept the opening song of her September 12 show a secret, and organizers have already added 10 more dates for May 2027, bringing the full residency to 26 concerts in total.

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