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EXPLORE PARIS

Around Trocadéro, the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides
When it comes to town planning on a grand scale there is little to rival the area west of St-Germain-des-Prés, stretching from the 7e into the 16e arrondissement across the river. The sweeping vista from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot on place du Trocadéro across the river to the Eiffel Tower and École Militaire, no doubt familiar to many visitors from countless images and photos, is truly impressive. Equally magnificent is the view from the ornate Pont Alexandre III along the grassy Esplanade to the colossus that is the Hôtel des Invalides . The 7e arrondissement is home to the Assemblée Nationale and has the greatest concentration of ministries, embassies and official residences in Paris. The area's main art gallery, the Musée d'Orsay , is also housed in an impressive and unusual building, a cavernous, decommissioned railway station.

Bastille
Mº Basttille .

The landmark column topped with the gilded "Spirit of Liberty" on place de la Bastille was erected not to commemorate the surrender in 1789 of the notorious prison, but the July Revolution of 1830 that replaced the autocratic Charles X with the "Citizen King" Louis-Philippe. When Louis-Philippe fled in the more significant 1848 Revolution, his throne was burnt beside the column and a new inscription added. Four months later, the workers again took to the streets. All of eastern Paris was barricaded, with the fiercest fighting on rue du Faubourg-St-Antoine. The rebellion was quelled with the usual massacres and deportation of survivors, and it is of course the 1789 Bastille Day, symbol of the end of feudalism in Europe, that France celebrates every year on July 14.

The Bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989 was marked by the inauguration of the Opéra-Bastille , Mitterrand's pet project and subject of the most virulent sequence of rows and resignations. Filling almost the entire block between rues de Lyon, Charenton and Moreau, it has shifted the focus of place de la Bastille, so that the column is no longer the pivotal point; in fact, it's easy to miss it altogether when dazzled by the night-time glare of lights emanating from this "hippopotamus in a bathtub", as one critic dubbed it.

The Opéra's construction destroyed no small amount of low-rent housing, but, as with most speculative developments, the pace of change has been uneven: cobblers and ironmongers still survive alongside cocktail haunts and sushi bars that make up the simultaneously trendy and gritty quartier de la Bastille . Place and rue d'Aligre still have their raucous daily market and, on rue de Lappe , Balajo is one remnant of a very Parisian tradition: the bals musettes , or music halls of 1930s " gai Paris ", frequented between the wars by Edith Piaf, Jean Gabin and Rita Hayworth. It was founded by one Jo de France, who introduced glitter and spectacle into what were then seedy gangster dives, and brought Parisians from the other side of the city to the rue de Lappe lowlife. Nowadays the street is full of fun, trendy bars, full to bursting at the weekend. You'll find art galleries clustered around rue Keller and the adjoining stretch of rue de Charonne ; and indie music shops and gay, lesbian and hippy outfits on rues Keller and des Taillandiers .

Day-trips from Paris
You're unlikely to exhaust the delights of Paris during your stay, but should you feel like a break from the bustle of the city, you'll find a number of attractive destinations within easy reach of the capital. The region that surrounds Paris - known as the Île de France - and the borders of the neighbouring provinces are studded with large-scale châteaux , many set in beautiful grounds. Many have played an integral part in French history - none more so than Versailles , an overwhelming monument to the reign of Louis XIV. On a slightly more intimate scale, Fontainebleau , with its Italianate decoration, is easy to appreciate; and Chantilly has a wonderful collection of Italian paintings and a gorgeous medieval Book of Hours. You can also enjoy the country air by taking a stroll in the gardens, parks and forests that surround the châteaux.

Two of France's most important church buildings can be easily reached from Paris in a day: the awe-inspiring cathedral of Chartres and the basilica of St-Denis , predating Chartres and representing the first breakthrough in Gothic art; it is also the burial place of almost all the French kings.

The River Seine winds northwest out of Paris through some idyllic countryside. In the nineteenth century, it attracted and inspired many artists. The Île de Chatou , an island in the river Seine, was especially popular with artists and has a small museum of Impressionist memorabilia within a riverside restaurant that was once frequented by Monet, Renoir and others. Further west is Monet's beautiful garden at Giverny, the inspiration for all his water-lily canvases.

Eastern Paris
Paris east of the Canal St-Martin is traditionally a working-class area. The main quartiers, Belleville , Ménilmontant and Charonne , were once villages on the fringes of the city, colonized by the rural poor in the nineteenth century. The area developed a reputation as a revolutionary hot-bed, with many inhabitants taking the side of the Commune in 1871. Unfortunately, much of the area these days is characterized by high-rise housing developments, though some charming old villagey streets do remain. The main attractions in these eastern districts are the Père-Lachaise cemetery , the final resting place of many well-known artists and writers, and the Parc deLa Villette , containing a state-of-the-art science museum and many other high-tech attractions.

Grands Boulevards and around
The term "Grands Boulevards" describes the long, broad thoroughfare that stretches from the Madeleine to République then down to the Bastille. The area is home to grandiose financial, cultural and state institutions and is associated with established commerce such as the rag trade and newspapers, plus well-heeled shopping. Many of the area's chic boutiques are to be found in the attractive nineteenth-century shopping arcades or passages , just off the boulevards. Characteristic of a later generation of indoor shopping, major department stores such as Galeries Lafayette congregate nearby in the 9e arrondissement, just north of the Palais Garnier opera house. Catering to the seriously rich, the boutiques at the western end of the 1er, around the church of the Madeleine , and the streets to either side of the Champs-Élysées display the wares of every top couturier, jeweller, art dealer and furnisher. More run-of-the-mill high-street shops can be found around Les Halles , once the site of the city's food market, now an underground RER/métro station and shopping centre.

Hôtel de Ville
South of the Pompidou Centre, rue Renard runs down a large place dominated by the huge, gleaming Hôtel de Ville , the seat of the city's local government. Those opposed to the establishments of kings and emperors created their alternative municipal governments in this building in 1789, 1848 and 1870. The poet Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic here during the working-class revolt of 1848, and Gambetta the Third in 1870. But, with the defeat of the Commune in 1871, the conservatives, in control once again, concluded that the Parisian municipal authority had to go, if order, property, morality and the suppression of the working class were to be maintained. For the next hundred years, Paris was ruled directly by the national government.

Islands
Elegant and calm, the two river islands at the heart of the city, the Île de la Cité and the Île St-Louis , comprise one of the most walkable, enjoyable and romantic sections of Paris.

Left Bank
The Left Bank ( rive gauche ) is synonymous with all things Bohemian, dissident and intellectual. In the first half of the twentieth century, the area's reputation for alternative thought and innovation attracted painters and writers like Picasso, Apollinaire, Breton, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Hemingway, and later, the Existentialist philosophers Camus and Sartre. The quartier was the scene of violent student demonstrations in 1968, leading to widespread unrest and the near-overthrow of the de Gaulle government. Ironically, the very streets from which such revolution sprang are currently home to expensive flats, art galleries, and mod fashion boutiques, and the cafés once frequented by the penniless intellectuals are now filled with the well-educated bourgeois. Over the years, those who question authority and the status quo have decamped to other parts of the city and their place has been filled by the myth-makers of the image industry: designers, politicians, fashion photographers, journalists.

The heart of the Left Bank is the warren of medieval lanes around the boulevards St-Michel and St-Germain , known as the Quartier Latin because, until the Revolution, Latin was the language spoken at the quartier's prestigious university, the Sorbonne .

Louvre
Paris's largest monument is the Louvre , for centuries the site of the French court, and renowned today as one of the world's greatest art galleries. It began life as a fortress, built by Philippe-Auguste in 1200 as a place to store his scrolls, jewels and swords. Charles V was the first French king to actually live there, but it wasn't until the reign of François I, in the mid-sixteenth century, that the foundations of the palace were laid and the fortress demolished. From then on, almost every sovereign added to it. Twice, it came very close to being demolished. The first occasion was under Louis XIV, when Bernini was very nearly hired to redesign the palace. His proposal was to raze it to the ground and start from scratch, but fortunately, he lost the commission. The palace's other close shave came in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Louvre was taken over by artists and squatters; over a hundred different families lived around the cour Carrée. Louis XV's response was to call for its immediate destruction, but he was eventually dissuaded by his officials.

Every alteration and addition up to 1988 created a surprisingly homogeneous building, with a grandeur, symmetry and Frenchness entirely suited to this most historic of Parisian edifices. Then came the most recent addition, made by President Mitterrand as part of his Grand Louvre renovation project - a huge glass pyramid, set bang in the centre of the cour Napoléon. It was an extraordinary leap of daring and imagination. Conceived by the Chinese-born architect Ieoh Ming Pei, it has no connection to its surroundings, save as a symbol of symmetry. Mitterrand also managed to persuade the Finance Ministry to move out of the northern Richelieu wing. Its two courtyards were roofed over in glass and now house the museum's French sculpture and the Objets d'Art collections. A public passageway, the passage Richelieu , linking the cour Napoléon with rue de Rivoli, allows you to look down into these courtyards.

Mitterrand's project also dramatically extended the Louvre underground, with the entrance hall, the Hall Napoléon , beneath the Pyramid, leading into a series of galleries known as the Carrousel du Louvre . Smart shops, restaurants, exhibition and conference spaces fill the vast spaces, and an inverted glass pyramid lets in light from place du Carrousel.

Napoleon's pink marble Arc du Carrousel , just east of place du Carrousel, which originally formed a gateway for the former Palais des Tuileries, has always looked a bit out of place; now it is definitively and forlornly upstaged by the Pyramid.

The Palais du Louvre itself houses four museums : the Musée du Louvre; the Musée de la Mode et du Textile; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs; and the Musée de la Publicité. Each has been revamped under the Grand Louvre project, and each is an important collection in its own right, but the most renowned by far - and the reason to come to Paris for many of its visitors - is the mighty Musée du Louvre .

Marais
Having largely escaped the depredations of modern development, as well as the heavy-handed attentions of Baron Haussmann, the Marais , comprising most of the 3e and 4e arrondissements, remains one of the most seductive districts of Paris - old, secluded, as lively and lighthearted by night as it is by day. Through the middle, dividing it in two, roughly north and south, runs the lengthy rue de Rivoli and its continuation rue St-Antoine, which leads to the Bastille. South of this line is the quartier St-Paul-St-Gervais, the riverside, the Arsenal, and the Île St-Louis. In the more heterogeneous and eclectic north are most of the Marais' shops and museums, the elegant place des Vosges, Jewish quarter, quartier du Temple, and rue des Francs-Bourgeois , the main lateral street of the northern part of the Marais, which also forms the boundary between the 3e and 4e arrondissements.

Originally, the area was little more than a riverside swamp ( marais ). However, in the thirteenth century, the Knights Templar settled in its northern section, now known as the quartier du Temple , and began to drain the land. It became a magnet for the aristocracy in the early 1600s after the construction of the place des Vosges - or place Royale, as it was then known - by Henri IV in 1605. This golden era was relatively short-lived, however, as the aristocracy began to move away after the king took his court to Versailles in the latter part of the seventeenth century, leaving their mansions to the trading classes, who were in turn displaced during the Revolution. Thereafter, the masses moved in, the mansions were transformed into decaying multi-occupied slum tenements and the streets degenerated into unserviced squalor - and stayed that way until the 1960s.

Since then, gentrification has proceeded apace, and the quartier is now known for its exclusivity, sophistication, and artsy leanings. It's also the neighbourhood of choice for gay Parisians, who are to be credited with bringing both business and style to the area. Renovated mansions, their intimate cobbled courtyards hidden behind magnificent portes cochères (huge double carriage gates), have become museums, libraries, offices and chic flats, flanked by chichi boutiques, ethnic grocers, and crowded cafés, bars and restaurants.

Montmartre and Pigalle
One of Paris's most romantic quartiers, Montmartre embraces much of the largely petit-bourgeois and working-class 18e arrondissement, as well the somewhat less respectable Pigalle district on the northern edge of the 9e arrondissement. The heart of the quartier is the Butte Montmartre , at 130m the highest point in Paris. It's crowned by the white domes of Sacré-Coeur , a stone's throw away from the picturesque place du Tertre , whose crowds of pavement artists perpetuate a well-founded Montmartre cliché. The quartier's artistic associations go back to the nineteenth century, when artists such as Renoir, Picasso, Braque and Dufy colonized the steep, winding streets of the Butte. The streets and stairways retain something of the area's former village atmosphere - Montmartre was only included in the Parisian city limits in 1860 - and have formed a backdrop to many a sepia-romantic image.

The quiet, residential area south of Pigalle is also rich in artistic connections and harbours a couple of distinctive museums displaying work by former artist residents. The past also lives on at the St-Ouen flea market , on the northern edge of the 18e arrondissement.

Montparnasse and the southern arrondissements
In the eighteenth century, the pile of earth excavated from the Denfert-Rochereau quarries, on what is now the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard Raspail, was named Mont Parnasse (Mount Parnassus) by drunken students, who liked to declaim poetry from the top of it. The area, today Montparnasse , stretching from the railway station to the Observatoire, was to keep its associations with art, bohemia and intellectualism, attracting the likes of Verlaine and Baudelaire in the nineteenth century, and Trotsky, Picasso, Man Ray, Chagall, Hemingway, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth. They frequented the brasseries on the boulevard du Montparnasse , and many of them found their final resting-place in the Montparnasse cemetery , just south of the boulevard. Casting its shadow over the whole area is the skyscraping black Tour Montparnasse . Full of offices, and located between the train station and a large shopping centre, it forms a pivotal point for much of the activity in Montparnasse today.

The Montparnasse quartier divides the lands of the well-heeled opinion-formers and power-brokers of St-Germain and the 7e from the amorphous populations of the three southern arrondissements , the 13e, 14e and 15e. Unsightly, modern constructions have scarred some parts of this southern side of the city, but new spaces have also opened up, and some of the smaller-scale developments are delightful. Some pockets have been allowed to evolve in a happily patchy way - Pernety and Plaisance in the 14e, the rue du Commerce in the 15e, and the Butte-aux-Cailles quartier in the 13e. These are genuinely pleasant places to explore, well off the tourist track.

Pompidou Centre
Daily except Tues 11am-9pm; ¬4.57, includes entry to the Atelier Brancusi but not special exhibitions; Mº Rambuteau & Mº Hôtel-de-Ville .

When it opened in 1977, the Pompidou Centre caused a sensation on account of its radical design. In order to maximize indoor gallery space, architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had placed all infrastructure, including utility pipes and escalator tubes, on the exterior, giving the building its bizarre inside-out look. The Centre's closure in 1997 for extensive renovation led sceptics to grumble that the young architects had been overly ambitious, but the structure has weathered two years of internal renovations with aplomb. Newly outfitted with slick lighting, gleaming polished concrete floors, a stylish café and an expensive rooftop restaurant, the Centre shines after its much needed update. Sadly, the escalator rides, complete with fabulous views of the city, are no longer free; access to them now requires purchasing a ticket to the Musée.


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A good place from which to admire theexterior of the Pompidou Centre is the Café Beaubourg .
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Quartier Beaubourg
Mº Rambuteau & Mº Hôtel-de-Ville .

The cluster of streets surrounding the Pompidou Centre constitutes the Quartier Beaubourg . Beside the Pompidou Centre is place Igor Stravinsky with its Stravinsky fountain made up of colourful moving sculptures and squirting fountains designed by Jean Tinguely and Niki de St-Phalle. Beneath it lies IRCAM (Institut de la Recherche et de la Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a research centre for contemporary music founded by the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. Its overground extension is by Renzo Piano, one of the architects of the Pompidou Centre.

North of rue Aubry-le-Boucher on the narrow, picturesque rue Quincampoix is a concentration of small commercial art galleries , where you can browse to your heart's content for free.

Just north of the Pompidou Centre, an impressive collection of dolls is displayed at the Musée de la Poupée (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; ¬4.57; Mº Rambuteau), hidden on impasse Berthaud, running off rue Beaubourg. Children especially will love the finely detailed tiny irons, sewing machines and other minuscule accessories.

Tuileries and Champs-Élysées
The avenue des Champs-Élysées is part of Paris's monumental axis, La Voie Triomphale, which runs in a dead-straight line from the Louvre along the central alley of the Tuileries gardens, across place de la Concorde and through the Arc de Triomphe , finally ending up at La Défense. Its nine-kilometre length is punctuated by grandiose constructions erected over the centuries by kings and emperors, presidents and corporations, each a monumental gesture aimed at promoting French power and prestige.

Western Paris
Paris's well-manicured western arrondissements, the 16e and 17e, are commonly referred to as the Beaux Quartiers . The 16e is aristocratic and rich, and the 17e - or at least the southern part of it - middleclass and rich, both embodying the conservative nineteenth-century values of the affluent. The northern half of the 16e, towards place Victor-Hugo and place de l'Étoile, is leafy and distinctly metropolitan in character. The southern part, around the old villages of Auteuil and Passy , has an almost provincial air, with its tight knot of streets and pockets of activity amid residential calm. It's a pleasant area to stroll around and has some interesting architecture, including buildings by Hector Guimard, designer of the swirly green Art Nouveau métro stations, and Le Corbusier and Mallet-Stevens, architects of the first "Cubist" buildings. One of the highlights of the area is the Musée Marmottan with its marvellous collection of late Monets. Just behind the museum lies the Bois de Boulogne , which runs all the way down the west side of the 16e. Further west, beyond the city limits, gleams the modern purpose-built commercial district of La Défense , dominated by the enormous Grande Arche .
 

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