If you have ever visited Paris during the month of August, you’ll have noticed many businesses are closed with signs like the ones above. You wonder why they would close in prime tourist season? Let’s go back in time, and you will understand.
Paid annual leave was established in France after the “Front Populaire” won the 1936 elections. From two weeks per year the duration rose to four weeks in 1968. (It’s now five weeks.) Coupled with a reduced-price “annual leave” train ticket, this extended the possibility to vacation by the sea beyond the upper classes who’d enjoyed this privilege since the 19th century.
School holidays were originally meant to leave children free to help their parents with the harvest and the vintage. However, with more and more parents working salaried job instead of the fields, and the rising prosperity level following World War II, the dates were gradually moved forward to start at the beginning of July.
Factories got into the habit of slowing production in August, the hottest month of the year, often obliging their workers to take their paid leave during that time, with a domino effect on suppliers and other businesses, as well as the workers’ spouses.
The long and short of it, and despite a recent tendency to fragment the annual leave into smaller parcels, August remains the favorite time for the French to go on vacation.
A few years back, my friend Sarah Elzas (check out her work) who works for the radio, did a piece on the subject titled “France is fermée” for which she interviewed me among others. Listen to it here:
In addition to the 14 lines of the Paris subway, the Métro (from Métropolitain), several lines of RER commuter transit trains cross the city and serve the suburbs. They allow you to reach Versailles and its royal palace, Disneyland, the Stade de France, and Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport. Paris has several recent tram lines running along the city limits or serving the outskirts, as well as many bus routes crisscrossing the city. Despite a growing number of bus lanes, buses still get stuck in traffic a lot and are not a good means of transport to get from point A to point B – unless you are there for the ride, and not the destination.
The easiest way to get from point A to a point B that is too far to walk (I assume you are here to see things) is the metro. Nowhere in Paris are you more than 500m from one of the over 300 metro stations.
The only stations not connected to the métro/RER network are the bottom and top stations of the Montmartre Funicular.
Do you speak French? At least enough to count to ten? Then you will know that neuf means nine. But don’t jump to the conclusion that the Pont Neuf was the ninth bridge crossing the Seine river. In fact the Pont Neuf Is the oldest existing bridge of the 36 that cross the Seine within the city limits today. Even back in 1578 when its construction began (after lengthy interruptions, it was finished in 1603), it was not the ninth bridge. Neuf, in fact, also means new, which it obviously was when it was built. But why name this particular bridge the “new bridge”? The difference between this new bridge and the others was that it was built of stone and without any houses, thus allowing Parisians to look at the river flowing below, which was impossible to do from the other bridges. It is hard for us to imagine what “normal bridges” meant to Parisians back in those days, for today there are no bridges with houses on them in Paris. However, if you look at other parts of Europe, you can find the occasional stone bridge bearing houses, such as Pulteney Bridge in Bath, UK (18th century), the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy (14th century), or the Pont de Rohan in Landerneau, Brittany (16th century).
Houses on the wooden bridges would have looked somewhat like these.
The New Bridge in Paris was an immediate success because it was both large (no houses) and you could look at the river below (no houses). It became a place for commerce, gathering, celebrating, meeting for all levels of society. When 12 countries of the European Union first adopted the Euro as their currency on January 1st, 2002, the Pont Neuf with its 12 arches was chosen to symbolize this important passage.
Paris, is not only a city, but also one of the 95 departments that make up mainland France. Long after the last stone wall around the city came down, the city and department limits of Paris are marked by a more modern barrier. It is the ring road called the Boulevard Périphérique, or as locals say, le Périph’, 35km long and 35m wide, built between 1956 and 1973, that now separates Paris from its suburbs, la banlieue.
Within these city limits, the Seine river, flowing in an inversed U-shape through the city, splits Paris into a Right Bank (to the north) and a Left Bank (to the south). The Right Bank houses the business districts, the Champs Élysées, the Louvre, and Montmartre, while the Left Bank is home to the Latin Quarter with the Sorbonne University, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Eiffel Tower.
Administratively, Paris is split up into 20 districts, arrondissements, that each have their own town hall and their own mayor. They are numbered from 1 to 20, spiraling outward from the center like a snail’s shell. The Louvre is in the first district, Notre Dame in the fourth, the Sorbonne in the fifth, the Eiffel Tower in the seventh, the Champs Élysées in the eighth, the Opéra Garnier in the ninth, and so on.
If you want to know in which arrondissement you are, just look at a street sign!
The woods Bois de Boulogne to the west and Bois de Vincennes to the east, while outside the snail shell and the Périph’, belong to the city of Paris.
The business district of La Défense, on the western end of the prolongation of the Champs Élysées, on the other hand, does not. It is located in the department Hauts-de-Seine.
Fun fact about the districts: When the city grew beyond its then 12 districts in 1860, the rich western parts of the city (now the 6th district) didn’t want to become number 13. Beyond the obvious superstition, there was another reason: At the time, the expression “getting married at the town hall of the 13th district” meant living together “in sin”, as there was no 13th district with a town hall to get married in. The rich people of the west did not wish to be associated with such a repugnant idea.
In the English-speaking world, the French national holiday on July14 is called Bastille Day. There’s the Place de la Bastille in Paris, too, but what exactly is or was the Bastille?
At first, the Bastille was a small two-towered châtelet built in the 14th century at the eastern city gate Porte Sainte Antoine, as part of the Charles V city wall. Later, King Charles V decided to enlarge it to an urban fortress by raising the two towers and adding six more. This fort was meant to defend the Porte Saint-Antoine and the eastern Paris city walls. It could also protect the king in the case of a popular revolt since it protected the road linking the king’s residence at the Hôtel Sant Pol to the château de Vincennes.
Château de Vincennes
Under later kings, the fortress served various purposes: Louis XI used it as prison, Francois 1er as a weapons depot, and Henri IV as a safe for the royal treasures. It was used more and more as a prison, especially during periods of unrest but it was Cardinal Richelieu who officially transformed it into a state prison. One of its famous inmates was the man in the iron mask (1698-1703). As prisons go, the Bastille was a more comfortable one, for people of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. They ate the same food as the governor, the prison cells had large rooms, they could bring a servant, correspond with people on the outside and receive visits. From the end of the 17th century on, the Bastille also included less comfortable premises for common prisoners. They lived off charity, were sometimes in chains, and slept on straw that was changed once a month. When a new prisoner arrived, a bell was rung. The neighboring shops closed and the guards covered their faces so as not to see the face of the new prisoner. Between 1661 and 1789, one out of six inmates was imprisoned for writing of some sort or other (printer, bookseller, peddler, or writer of satirical or defamatory books,). Given the number of prison cells, the Bastille could accommodate 45 prisoners at the most, but there were about 60 at one time under Louis XIV.
On July 14, 1789, the Bastille held only 7 prisoners whose incarceration conditions were quite loose. The people of Paris had taken the Invalides for weapons and cannons. They stormed the Bastille in search of powder and ammunition, and also freed the seven prisoners. The storming of the Bastille thus marked the beginning of the French Revolution and has become its symbol. Starting the very next day, the Bastille was knocked down by a private businessman who sold part of the Bastille stones as souvenirs (carved into the shape of the Bastille). One of them can be seen in the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the city of Paris. The demolition lasted until 1806. Part of the material was used to build the Pont Louis XVI, now Pont de la Concorde, the bridge linking the Place de la Concorde to the Assemblée nationale (Lower House of Parliament).
Pont de la Concorde
Below Concorde Bridge – the stones from the Bastille
If you are looking for remains of the Bastille, there is one of the eight towers (the Tour de la Liberté, where the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned) in the nearby park square Henri-Galli.
remains of Bastille Tower at square Henri-Galli, Paris 4e
Part of the counterscarp wall can be found on the platform of the metro 5 in the station Bastille.
The Storming of the Bastille is commemorated on July 14 since 1880, day of the national holiday.
Today, in the place of the Bastille fortress, stands the July Column, commemorating the 1830 Revolution that saw the fall of King Charles X and the beginning of the Monarchie de Juillet, the July Monarchy. The marble base of the column contains a funerary gallery in which rest two large sarcophagi (13m x 2m) containing the remains of the martyrs of the 1830 Revolution and the 1848 Revolution. (Yes, France saw a lot of revolutions.) However, they are not alone! There are some Egyptian mummies in there, too. These mummies were brought back from Egypt 50 years earlier by scholars who had followed Napoleon during the Egyptian Campaign. They were deteriorating in a room of the National Library and were buried in the garden next to it, right where after the July 1830 revolts the bodies of the rioters were buried. That’s how the mummies got mixed up with the martyrs when they were exhumed in a hurry and ended up under the July Column with them.
Place de la Bastille with the July Column and the opera house in the background
Paris has six main train stations (gares), all of which are terminus stations – no rail line cuts through Paris. (RER commuter transit trains and metro subway trains run mostly underground through the city.) On the Right Bank, the Gare du Nord serves northern France, London (with the Eurostar), Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. The Gare de l’Est just a stone’s throw away, serves the east of France and southern Germany. The Gare de Lyon serves a vast area from Mulhouse to Perpignan, thus including Switzerland, Italy and the entire Mediterranean coast. On the Left Bank, the Gare d’Austerlitz serves inland destinations along the line Paris-Orléans-Limoges-Toulouse. The Gare Montparnasse serves the entire Atlantic coast up to and including Brittany, and back on the Right Bank, the Gare Saint Lazare serves Normandy.
The two main Paris airports are Orly to the south and Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle to the north of the city.
A is the first letter of the Latin alphabet, which makes it a logical starting point for a blog titled “Letters From Paris (And Other Missives)”. Coincidentally, the most famous landmark of Paris also looks like the letter A.
So let the Eiffel Tower be my first letter from Paris. There will be more, and there will be other missives, as my title promises. I have lived in Paris for almost twenty years now, and my husband is a born-and-bred Parisian and a history buff to boot. Some time ago, a Canadian friend’s college-aged son was in town, and we treated him to a 13km unstructured history walk through parts of the Right Bank. This city is full of bits and pieces of history, even more fascinating for a North American, where a good part of man-made sights are a few hundred years old at the most. Should I give you a chronological tour of Paris, go back to the pre-Roman conquest settlement on the river islands? Or should I start with some basic Paris geography? I’ll do neither, but instead stick to my A as in Eiffel Tower and begin with a few fun facts on the Iron Lady, la Dame de Fer, as she (in French, a tower is female) is lovingly called.
Did you know that…
if you laid the Eiffel Tower down, it would just fit onto the Mars Field behind it?
the Eiffel Tower does not sit astride over a street (as I mistakenly thought up until my first visit)?
you can climb up to the second floor in the staircase in one of the pillars, and that the steps are numbered?
