History of Paris

Tidbits from the history of the City of Light.

[laclefdescoeurs]

Le pont de l’Archevêché gardé par des troupes durant la Révolution de 1848, Artiste Inconnu

[todayinhistory]

July 28th 1794: Robespierre et al. executed

On this day in 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Georges Couthon and many of their peers were executed by guillotine in Paris. Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon were leading figures in the French Revolution and were radical Jacobins. They served on the Committee of Public Safety, which ruled France during the bloody ‘Reign of Terror’ which saw mass violence and executions of ‘enemies of the revolution’. There was a coup against the Committee on July 27th 1794, which prompted a reactionary movement against the bloody policies of the Reign of Terror. For their role in the violence, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon were executed.

[todayinhistory]

May 28th 1871: Paris Commune falls

On this day in 1871 the Paris Commune fell. The Commune took power in opposition to the conservative royalist National Assembly which was elected in February 1871. Republican Parisians feared the Assembly would restore the monarchy. When government officials tried to remove the cannons of the city’s guards on March 18th the Commune seized power and were elected on March 26th. The Commune enacted socialist policies such as ending support of religion and female suffrage. They adopted a plain red flag as the flag of the Commune. The Commune was brutally repressed by the national government, with 20,000 insurrectionists being killed before the Commune fell on May 28th.

[sarnain]

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[tenlittlebullets]

Nighttime transport of unrecognized bodies from the Morgue to the Gros-Caillou, after the July Revolution of 1830

[historicaltimes]

Omnia Pathé movie theater, Paris, Circa 1906

[whattheendoftheworldlookedlike]

Paris, 1968.

[lostsplendor]

Paris Exposition, Champ de Mars, c. 1900 (by Brooklyn Museum)

[nondescripthistory-deactivated2]

German soldiers march past the Arc de Triomphe after the surrender of Paris, 14 June 1940. Bundes Archiv

[tenlittlebullets]

Charles Marville, photograph of the Rue Mondétour taken from the Rue Rambuteau (former Rue de la Chanverrerie), c.1865.

Charles Marville was the photographer hired by the government of the Second Empire to document all the streets about to be destroyed by the Haussmann demolitions, “to prove that they weren’t worth saving.” By chance or by design, he often achieved the exact opposite goal. And yes, this means there are official photographs of every single street Haussmann destroyed, and it really annoys me that you can’t find decent-resolution scans of all of them in one place anywhere online, not even Gallica. Search for Charles Marville and you get well-documented hi-res images of his most famous photos and unattributed, misattributed, and/or tiny images of the rest.

(The Rue de la Chanverrerie wasn’t among Marville’s photos. It was destroyed in exactly the same year that Daguerre was finally figuring out how to fix photographic images, in the very first of the great Paris urban improvement campaigns, conducted not by Haussmann but by Prefect of the Seine—you guessed it—Rambuteau. The reason given was precisely that the cholera epidemic of 1832 was helped along by the unhygienic conditions in the narrow medieval streets of central Paris.)

[theoddmentemporium]

Le Plessis-Robinson Guinguette

Guingettes were popular drinking establishments in the suburbs of Paris during 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. They were places to eat, get merry, and dance, and perhaps none were more suited to such festivities than the Plessis-Robinson guinguette located in the southwestern suburb of the French capital.

Le Plessis-Robinson was established in 1848 and consisted of a suite of interconnected tree houses. It was named Le Grand Robinson after the tree house in the novel Swiss Family Robinson.

[Sources: Guingette | Le Plessis-Robinson | Images: 1/2/3/5 | 4]

[kaphkas]

Posters used during the Parisian student uprisings of May, 1968

Left to right:

La beauté est dans la rue – the beauty is in the street

Mae 68, debut d’une lutte prolongee – May 68, the beginning of a long struggle

La police s’affiche aux beaux arts, les beaux arts affichent dans la rue – the words are shown in fine art, the fine art shown in the streets

Retour a la normale – go back to normal 

[thegetty]

This dramatic and atmospheric shot of the Panthéon framed by looming silhouetted Parisian buildings renders this photograph less of a architecture documentation and more a study of mood.

The Panthéon, 1924,Eugène Atget, Geltain silver chloride print. J. Paul Getty Museum.

[nondescripthistory-deactivated2]

Wounded soldiers perform arms drills in the Grand Palais. Paris, 1916. MOMA

[lostsplendor]

Maps of Eighteenth Century Paris [Top: Tuileries and Right Bank, Left: Pont Neuf and Left Bank] by Louis Bretaz and Claude Lucas, c. 1739 (via Getty’s Open Content Program)

[katemiddleton]

history meme | [3/10] moments → parisian student riots of 1968

“The Paris student protests of May 1968 are an iconic symbol of countercultural power. At the time, torn up paving stones and improvised barricades echoed the spirit of the 1789 French Revolution. Artists’ posters and radical graffiti were plastered over the city’s walls. Slogans such as ‘the future will only contain what we put into it now’, ‘boredom is counterrevolutionary’ and ‘beneath the paving stones, the beach’ were the rallying cries of the day.”

[lostsplendor]

Champs de Mars, Paris Exposition Universelle c. 1889. Scan via Historic Photos of Paris by Rebecca Schall