If you owned a newly-renovated 48-room hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris and wanted to give it a catchy name that would ensure a full house all year round, would you call it “French Theory”? Really? I wouldn’t, but perhaps that just shows my lack of marketing savvy. Of Read More …
The cornerstone for La Grande Mosquée de Paris in the Latin Quarter (5th arrondissement) was laid in October 1922. On the occasion of the centenary, in 2022, the French newspaper Le Monde republished an article from eleven years before, which described the Grand Mosque as “a grandiose and controversial project” Read More …
The French newspaper Le Monde has moved four times in its seventy-eight-year history. Its latest move was in 2020, when the company’s 1,600 employees (at least those who were not working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic) moved into this striking new building at 67-69 avenue Pierre Mendès-France, in the Read More …
The French word Gaîté means cheerfulness or happiness, and this historic theatre was certainly a cheerful place in the middle-to-late 1870s, when several of Jacques Offenbach’s comical operettas were performed here. Offenbach himself was the theatre’s director and impresario for two years, but he was not so happy with the Read More …
The Place de la Bastille is one of several squares in Paris that have been completely rearranged in recent years, to reduce the amount of space devoted to motor traffic and increase the space allotted to pedestrians and cyclists. The July Column, at the center of the square, was previously Read More …
Paris has finally found a good use for its Bourse de Commerce, an impressive circular building that was originally used as a wheat market in the eighteenth century. (I imagine that this was where Balzac’s Père Goriot made his fortune as a wholesale grain dealer during the French Revolution.) François Read More …
One of the big changes in Paris in the last few years has been the proliferation of co-working spaces throughout the city and the nearby suburbs. I have never used any of these co-working spaces, so I can’t speak from personal experience — I’m just trying to figure out what Read More …
Boulevard du Palais This is a Wallace Fountain that I must have walked or cycled past dozens or even hundreds of times over the years, without ever stopping for a closer look — which is perhaps not surprising, since Paris has over a hundred of these ‘large model’ fountains (the Read More …
The Cluny Museum (National Museum of the Middle Ages) in the Latin Quarter of Paris has reopened after being closed for a year and a half. The displays have been totally reorganized and are now mainly in chronological order. Ramps and elevators have been installed to connect the different levels Read More …
After going on an excellent Jewish guided walking tour of the Marais district in the morning, I was ready for some Jewish entertainment in the evening. Fortunately, the historic Théâtre de l’Œuvre, in the 9th arrondissement, was showing a musical called Le Chat du Rabbin (The Rabbi’s Cat). Several years Read More …