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onjour!
We could not resist the pleasure of taking you on a leisurely walk down one of the most beautiful
avenues in the world: the Champs-Elysées.
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Paris and the Champs Elysées
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The Historic Axis
It all began with the will of an ambitious king, Louis XIV, to modernize the urban layout of
Paris. He commissioned the first plans for a perfectly straight road that was to stretch from
the Palace of the Louvre all the way to the Castle of St-Germain. France was then the first
nation in the West, and required its capital city to have a prestigious central royal road,
baptized the "Grand-Cours". Up until the reign of Louis XVI, the view along this axis ended
at the Chaillot Hill, now the Place de l'Etoile. Today, this prominent historic axis remains
unique in the world. Seven and a half miles long, it runs from the Louvre, through the Tuileries
Gardens, up the Champs-Elysées to the Place de l'Etoile (where the Arch of Triumph stands),
then down Avenue de la Grande Armée which becomes Avenue de Neuilly before ending at the Great
Arch of La Défense, the area right at the outskirts of Paris city limits. This grand center
line road has always been and continues to be the setting for the important events that take
place in the capital city.
Place de la Concorde
With a total surface area of about 904,170 square feet, the Place de la Concorde is today the
largest and probably the most famous square in Paris. Construction of this octagonal square
began in 1748. While it was built to receive an equestrian statue of King Louis XV, the actual
underlying goal was to develop the huge wasteland that separated the Tuileries Gardens from the
Champs-Elysées. Place Louis XV was finished in 1763, and was the setting of some tragic events
in the following years. First, in 1770, a fireworks display in honor of the marriage of
Marie-Antoinette to the heir apparent, the future King Louis XVI, resulted in a terrible stampede
that cost the lives of 132 spectators. A few years later, re-baptized Place de la Révolution,
it was used as an execution site where a guillotine replaced the royal statue. More than 1,000
people were beheaded there, including Louis XVI, in January 1793, and Marie-Antoinette, in October
1793. The noted revolutionaries Danton and Robespierre were later to meet the same fate, as they
became the victims of their own fanaticism. This infamous setting was given the new name “Place
de la Concorde” under the Directoire regime (1795-99). In 1836, King Louis-Philippe erected one
of two existing obelisks from the temple of Luxor, at the center of the square. He had received
the 3,300-year-old, 75-ft tall, 254-ton monument as a gift from Pasha Muhammad-Ali, the Viceroy
of Egypt. It took no less than 4 years to transport this column from Egypt to Paris!
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| Recipe
for December 2001 |
Yule Log |
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Cooking SOS ! If you
run into trouble with one of our recipes, send
an SOS e-mail to 911@francemonthly.com |
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Gabriel's Colonnades |
To respect the perspective and not alter the front of the river Seine, it was decided that only the
north part of the Place de la Concorde square would be closed off, by two buildings with splendid
facades doted with identical colonnades, similar to those found at the Louvre. These two magnificent
stuctures housed alternately four townhouses in the first one, including the now internationally
famous Hotel de Crillon, and the ministry of the Navy in the second one. It was in one of these
townhouses, the Hotel de Coislin - 4, place de la Concorde - that the friendship treaty was signed
in 1778, whereby France officially recognized the independence of the 13 states that made up the
United States of America at the time. One of the signatories was none other than Benjamin Franklin,
then a delegate from Pennsylvania.
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The Champs-Elysées
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Until the 18th century, the Champs-Elysées were in the countryside, in a swampy region covered
with bushes. The adjacent streets were nothing more than obscure alleyways shared by garden sheds
and seedy dance halls. In 1667, King Louis XIV commissioned the famous landscape architect André
le Nôtre to design a promenade lined with elm trees, in the midst of the fields and marshes. Le
Nôtre, who was also the mastermind behind the gardens at Versailles, created a road aligned with
the axis of the Tuileries Gardens that he had also designed. This embellished and extended the view,
all the way to the traffic circle now known as the “Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées”. In 1700, the
Duke D'Antin had a bridge built to prolong the avenue to the Chaillot Hill (today the Place de
l'Etoile). In 1774, the Marquis of Marigny carried out excavation work to widen the avenue all
the way to the Porte Maillot and the Neuilly Bridge. It wasn’t until 1828 that further improvements
were carried out on the Champs-Elysées with the addition of sidewalks, frontage roads, and more
than 1,000 gaslights. Little by little, cafés and restaurants opened on the avenue, along with
concert halls and theatres.
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The Chaillot Hill, or Hill of the Etoile
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In 1730, this hill was already called the "Etoile de Chaillot" (Star of Chaillot) because the roads
crossed it in the shape of a star. In 1854, five roads were drawn: the road from Paris to Neuilly
(today, the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and the Avenue de la Grande Armée), the “Chemins de Ronde”
(named after the old rampart walks, now the Avenues Kléber and Wagram) and finally the Avenue de
l'Impératrice (Avenue Foch). Three years later, seven more avenues were added bringing the total
to twelve avenues that converge in a rigorously geometric fashion towards the Arc of Triumph. 12
townhouses with perfectly symmetrical architecture were built between these roads. The architect
Hittorff thought the facades of these buildings should not be too imposing so as not to detract
from the magnificence of the Arc of Triumph. However, this was not to the taste of Baron Hausmann
who found these buildings ugly and too low in relation to the monument, and so he had trees planted
in front of them to hide them!
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The Arch of Triumph |
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The search for a monument that would highlight the Place de l'Etoile goes back to Louis XV. Some
pretty far-fetched ideas were proposed, such as the design of a giant elephant with a ballroom and
a theatre! It was Napoleon who, in 1806, decided to erect an arch of triumph to commemorate all his
victories. However, construction was slow and controversial. It took about two years just to set in
place the foundations which had to be 26 ft deep because the limestone soil would not support the
weight of such a structure. The Arch of Triumph was finally inaugurated by Louis-Philippe in 1836.
It stands 164 ft tall, 145 ft wide and weighs 606 tons. Most of the sculptures that adorn the monument
represent the various Napoleonic victories. The most famous one is probably the one sculpted by
Auguste Rodin that evokes "The departure of the Volunteers" also called "The Marseillaise". It
represents the Nation leading the French citizens to battle to fight for their freedom. On the
interior walls, you will find engraved the names of hundreds of generals. This list caused much
anger because some generals were left out, one of whom was Victor Hugo's father. The Arch is also
the resting place of the Unknown Soldier. In January 1921, an anonymous soldier from WWI was buried
under the monument to symbolize the sacrifice of 1, 400, 000 soldiers who died for France during
that war. The Flame of Remembrance of WWI has been burning night and day ever since 1923, and is
rekindled every day at 6.30 pm during a solemn ceremony.
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Potatoes on Avenue de la Grande Armée
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It is on a piece of land situated at the lower end of Avenue de la Grande Armée that a certain
Mr. Parmentier, pharmacist in the Army, chose to experiment with the first potato planting in
France. During the Seven Year War, he was wounded and taken prisoner in Prussia, where he discovered
this root. Up until then, it was completely unknown to the French as an edible food since it had
the bad reputation of causing leprosy. His first harvest was presented to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette
in 1786. Impressed, the King placed a potato flower in his boutonniere and ordered that he be served
a potato dish every day from then on. His courtiers were very quick to follow suit, but it was not
until 1840 that the average French citizen did the same. Mr. Parmentier was a pioneer in matters of
health during the Age of Enlightenment. He strongly advocated better food hygiene for better overall
health. Unable to find efficient ways to preserve meat and dairy products, he was one of the first
to have thought of refrigeration as a means of preservation. He is also the one who pushed for
mandatory smallpox vaccination in France, a legal obligation which wasn’t lifted until 1973.
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A Stroll down the Champs-Elysées
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The next time you are in Paris, or the next time you see a photograph of this magnificent avenue all
lit up, try to imagine that the quintessential "grand avenue" of Paris - the Champs-Elysées, so alive
with lights, shops, nightclubs and traffic- was still in the middle of the countryside at the start
of the 19th century. The writer Stendhal lived on the 4th floor of an apartment building that looked
over the Champs-Elysées, because, as he stated, he was "looking for rural peace and solitude, in the
only area in which it exists in France!". Countess d'Armaille wrote in her memoirs: "In the
Champs-Elysées, the countryside was near us; as soon as we crossed the barrier of the Etoile, the
small roads of the Avenues of St-Cloud and Ternes announced the fields. At the Porte Maillot, you
felt you had gone on a journey."
You may no longer find rural peace while strolling down the Champ-Elysées, but it is a very
pleasurable experience just the same.
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