Arago Medalions

François Arago was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and ardent republican who grew up during the French Revolution. In 1806, at the age of 20, he set out to measure the arc of the Earth’s meridian, or north-south axis, through France. Another goal of his expedition was to determine, by natural law, the exact length of a meter.

Arago succeeded in these as well as a lifetime of scientific endeavors, after an eventful return to Paris: While measuring the meridian on the Spanish border, he was suspected of spying for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. He managed a heroic escape in a Catalan fishing boat that took him to Algiers in Northern Africa. There, he was captured by Corsairs and held for three months. Upon gaining his freedom, he set sail for Marseilles, but a tempestuous northerly wind blew him back to Africa. He finally made it to Marseilles on 21 June 1809, but was forced to endure a lengthy quarantine before embarking for Paris.

Arago’s adventure and achievements are remembered in a 1994 public art installation by Dutch artist, Jan Dibbets. With Hommage à Arago, Dibbets set 135 bronze medallions bearing Arago’s name along the Paris meridian for a distance of 9.2 kms (5.7 miles).

You can still find many of them in Paris today.

Make a day (or a few) hunting for Arago Medallions. Just follow the North-South meridian in the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 9th, 14th and 18th arrondisements.

From Time Traveler Paris Tours: Beware Madame La Guillotine! Coming Soon!

Images:
Portrait of Francois Arago, engraving by Alexandre Vincent Sixdenier (1795-1846) from a painting by Henry Scheffer (1798-1862), c. 1846. Source: The Warner Library (1917) and the Edgar Fahs Smith collection, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Arago Medallion located near the Louvre pyramid, 2005, by Poulpy, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Galettes du Roi - King Cakes - for Epiphany

Every year, on and around 6 January, all over France, people are munching les galettes du roi (king cakes), wonderful round flaky pastries stuffed with frangipane, a creamy almond paste. School kids are sampling them in French classes; families are sharing them for dessert; friends are getting together to eat them with champagne; and everyone is hoping that he or she will become king or queen for the day.

You see, every French galette comes with a tiny ceramic figurine baked right inside. This trinket - called a fève, meaning, bean, due to the fact that once upon a time it was a bean – represents the seed that grows from deep within fertile ground, symbolized by the cake, that will bring about a bountiful harvest in the year to come as well as good fortune for all, especially the person who happens to chomp down on it. Whoever finds the fève in their slice of galette is declared king (or queen) for the day and gets to wear the gold paper crown that comes with the purchase of every French galette du roi.

It would appear, with its links to nature and the harvest and the earth’s seasonal rotations, that this special day in the French calendar is pagan in origin. But today, it marks the Christian celebration of Epiphany, or Twelfth Night: the day, long ago, when three wise men found their way by the light of a very bright star to the makeshift bed of a particular child in a manger in a barn in Bethlehem.

We spent January 6^th at the home of the family-of-boys-dogs-cats-and-Mom with another family of mutual friends. Between the 11 of us, we consumed two large galettes and produced both a king and a queen. Following popular tradition, the youngest child crawled under the table and from there announced, one by one, who would get each slice of galette. He received the last slice. Then, we all ate, slowly, savoring the delectable combination of buttery pastry and hot almond paste available in French boulangeries only one time each year. Eventually, royalty was proclaimed among one of the three mothers present as well as the eldest teenage boy. And toasts to a healthy and prosperous year followed.

If you happen to be in France during the feast of Epiphany, do grab yourself a galette du roi. They come in all sizes – even a single portion. And they are really very, very good!

Images:

Artisanal galette, Gorrk, 3 Janvier 2008, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Brioche of the Magi with candied fruit, typical galette of southeast France, David Monniaux, 2005, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

History of French Haute Cuisine

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the States. As it is a "normal" school and work day here, we won't be cooking or hosting or being hosted. So, I'm reduced to reading about everyone else's dinner plans on Facebook! While missing the tastes and companionship associated with my favorite US holiday, I got to thinking about the history of French Haute Cuisine, or fine dining. I then remembered this little "text box" from my upcoming Time Traveler Paris Tours chapter on the French Revolution: Beware Madame La Guillotine.

Enjoy! And Happy Thanksgiving...

Have you ever wondered why France is so famous for La Haute Cuisine? Well, the answer lies with the French Revolution. You see, prior to the Revolution, the finest chefs in France worked in the grand kitchens of the grandest chateaux of the royal and noble families. When the Revolution began to gather momentum, many royals and nobles fled, leaving their cooks and other kitchen staff without a livelihood. These individuals packed up their former employers' pots and pans and moved to Paris to open restaurants, serving the tastes of the growing numbers of revolutionary bourgeoisie.

One such example is the Grand Véfour, the oldest restaurant in Paris, which has occupied the same Palais Royal location for more than 200 years. Thus, French Haute Cuisine was born, and continues to thrive the world over today. Case in point: It can take up to three months to get a reservation at the Grand Véfour!

Image:
Le Grand Véfour, photo by the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo).

120 Years of the Eiffel Tower Celebrated...Finally!

I spent the month of March, 2009, posting about the Eiffel Tower. It was my way of building up to the 120th birthday of Gustav Eiffel's remarkable Iron Lady. Erected for the 1889 World's Fair and slated to stand for only 20 years, Eiffel's "Grand A over the Champs" continues to survive, and inspire, today. Eiffel first inaugurated the Tower on 31 March 1889, climbing 1710 steps and planting a French flag at her peak to kick off the Fair. Yet the same date in 2009 passed quietly by; the Tower's birthday seemed to come and go unnoticed, save for a summer exhibition of Eiffel's life and work at the Paris Hotel de Ville.

But on 22 October 2009, the Eiffel Tower lit up the sky, compelling Parisians to turn out in droves, every night since, on the Trocadero plaza. The Uber-Mensch (UM) and I caught a sideways view of the show from our apartment balcony a few days later. We scooped up the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and went out to see the 12-minute gift of 400 flashing multi-colored LED spotlights this past weekend.

You have until 31 December 2009 to catch it. Shows are at 8, 9, 10, 11 pm every night. If you can't make it, here's the moment captured on camera by Susan Oubari:

Paris Catacombs Closed Indefinitely!

I know! I know! The most basic blogging tenet is to post regularly and often. And here I am, not even blogging for a year, and I’ve already blown it! But with good reason, readers, with good reason...

For The Time Traveler Tours are, indeed, going live! And I’ve spent the last month up to my eyeballs in administrative preparations such as: designing a logo; building a website; filing for incorporation and trademark rights; laying out the first prototype chapter for use by a group of 13-year-olds set to pilot the tour later this month; etc. It’s all very exciting!

But there’s a rub: One of my three start-up chapters may be stillborn thanks to the work of vandals...

Yesterday was All Saints’ Day in France, a culture whose many holidays and celebrations do not include Halloween. So I agreed to take the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and a few of her North American compatriots - all pining for the ghoulish festivities back “home” - to the Paris Catacombs for a romp among the once living. Arriving at the entrance at 1, Place Denfert-Rochereau, 14eme, however, we found the doors locked tight. A notice explained that the ossuary had been found vandalized on 20 Sept 2009; bones had been broken and strewn about every 20 meters along the 300-meter length of the tomb.

This is truly an immoral act. The Paris Catacombs are simultaneously a sacred memorial, a historical monument, and a work of public art. Their creation took place over the course of 80 years, beginning in Paris’ pre-revolutionary days (1780s) and continuing throughout the reigns of both Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew, Napoleon III, during the 1860 rebuilding of Paris.

Going back to 1780: Crowded churchyard cemeteries throughout Paris had become so overflowing with dead that killer diseases caused by insects and animals feeding off the rotting human flesh only produced more dead. It was a vicious cycle if there ever was one!

And then there was the stench! The smells emanating from these pestilent graveyards were said to have caused milk to curdle and wine to turn to vinegar. Not good for the dairy farmers and wine makers who came to Paris to sell their wares at the nearby Forum Les Halles, Paris’ main marketplace located right around the corner from the most crowded and offensive graveyard of all: Le Cimetière des Innocents.

Even the dead of Les Innocents seemed to protest. In 1780 they turned over in their graves, breaking through an underground wall and spilling their creepy contents into the basements of neighboring houses. This unleashed a stench so toxic it suffocated the innocent occupants right in their own homes!

It was then that King Louis XVI issued a royal proclamation calling a halt to any further burials within the Paris city limits. But what to do with all those bones and rotting cadavers?

The answer was to remove them - not just from Les Innocents, but from all of Paris' 23 churchyard graves - and to transfer them to the vast network of underground Roman-era rock quarries that lay to the south of the city.

The work went on in for eight decades. Gravediggers dug by day and moved the bones by night, in black-veiled, priest-led processions. The Church declared the former quarry a scared place and gave it an official name: Les Catacombs (the Catacombs), a Roman word meaning ‘underground cemetery’.

At first the bones were just tossed in, helter-skelter in piles of femers, tibias, and craniums. It was Napoleon’s idea to tidy the place up and make it presentable for family members wishing to pay homage to their ancestors. Under his orders, the bones would be stacked and organized in designs to rival their Roman counterparts.

The Paris Catacombs first opened as a public memorial in 1810. Visitors were escorted by torchlight through the narrow tunnels beneath the streets and buildings of Paris so they wouldn’t get lost in the 290km network of underground byways.

Many of the Revolution’s vicitims also found their way to the catacombs, as did the remains of older, forgotten cemeteries dug up during the Haussmannian-building boom of the 1860s.

In all, 6 million former Parisians have been laid to rest within the Catacombs. And for 200 years visitors have marveled at the ossuary sculptures created by Napoleon’s underground workers.

But now, because of the disrespectful and reprehensible actions of idiotic crazies, the sacred historic memorial, no less important to Paris’ past than the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Louvre Museum, or the Eiffel Tower, is off limits to the public... indefinitely.

And, sadly, the Time Traveler Paris Tours itinerary to the Napoleonic Era, featuring the Catacombs and the Montparnasse Cemetery, may be buried before it has had a chance to take its first breath.

***

Time Traveler Tours projected launch date: March 2010.

Images:

Time Traveler Tours logo, copyright 2009, Time Traveler Tours, LLC.

Photo of Catacombs ossuary, http://www.flickr.com/photos/albany_tim/2629170281/sizes/0/.

Engraving, artist unknown, of Le Cimetière des Innocents, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photograph of a Catacombs worker by photographer Félix Nadar, 1870s.

Painting of the Catacombs by Viktor Alexandrovish Hartmann (1834-1873), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The October March of Women, 1789

" In the wee hours of October 6, 1789, a mob of peasant women broke into the Palace of Versailles. They had been encamped outside the chateau since the previous evening, awaiting an audience with my King, Louis XVI (16^th), and his Queen, Marie Antoinette.

The women had come from Paris and they were starving. Their children and their aged, as well, were starving. A terrible storm had wiped out France’s wheat crop that summer. Now the common folk had no bread, their main – and sometimes only – source of food. I followed them from Paris as they struggled to make the 20 kilometer journey on foot, afraid for my King, afraid of the power of the mob. As the women marched, their numbers grew. All along the route, I observed as more women dropped their washing and their brooms and left their children to join the fray. They arrived at Versailles in the thousands, demanding that King Louis and Marie Antoinette save them from their misery. Their hunger had driven them to madness. Waiting through the night for a response from the King had transformed their desperation to fury.

Before dawn, they stormed the Palace through a servants’ entrance. I pushed in amongst them, hoping to reach the King first, to warn him or hide him, I knew not what. But the scene was one of total mayhem. Frantic women rushed in all directions. They ran down gilded corridors, flew up marble staircases, burst through passageways reserved for servants. 'If they refuse to come out', was heard the mob’s collective cry, 'we’ll drag them out!' They searched for the King and Queen, their rage now whipped to a savage frenzy. They killed anyone who got in their way.

Before dawn, the King and Queen were found with their two children and the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, huddled like mice before a gang of hungry cats, still in their bedclothes in the King’s private apartments. They were forced to dress quickly and pressed into waiting carriages bound for Paris, driven there by the mob so that they might bear witness to the misery of their subjects.

They would never see Versailles again.

Some among the women accompanied the king and queen with the severed heads of royal guards held high upon pikes, like tattered, bloody flags. Others stayed behind and shouting, Down with the Monarchy! Down with the King!, they hurried about the chateau, smashing statuary and precious antiques, pilfering what could be carried, seizing foodstuffs from the immense Versailles kitchen: fresh pheasant and duck, salted pork, baskets of vegetables, and bread still baking in the ovens for that morning’s royal meal.

I do not recall the moment I became conscious that I was powerless to save my King. But I do remember being gripped with the urgent imperative to save the King’s Garden. In a flash I knew, without thinking, that I, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu – the fourth member of my family to bear the title, Botanist-in-Chief to the King – was obliged to confront the mob to save the legacy of two centuries of adventurers and natural scientists, even if it meant my death.

The mob’s force was not diminished by its destruction of the chateau interior. The women’s anger only expanded with their ferocity, like a volcano whose vigor has been pent up for too long. And indeed, it did not take long for them to spill out into the Royal Gardens, intent on further rampage.

I was waiting for them. The botanists, master-gardeners, and under-gardeners of the Palace of Versailles were all waiting for them. We faced the mob armed only with the tools of our labors: shovels, spades, sickles and shears meant for pruning dead or dying leaves and branches from flowers and trees. We assembled to defend with our lives our life’s work: the plants and trees which for two hundred years had travelled to us from the far corners of the earth, and which we had so tenderly coaxed to adapt and thrive in the French soil and climate.

A woman with wrath in her eyes stepped out of the crowd. 'Move aside,' she bellowed. 'These gardens belong to the people, now.'

'Madam,' I said, taking a step forward as well. 'These gardens have always belonged to the people. They provide beauty for our pleasure as well as nourishment and medicine for our health. For 120 years, the products of the Versailles gardens have graced the King’s table and cured his ills. Destroy them and you destroy the means by which we may now help you to feed and care for your hungry children.'

An eerie hush fell upon the crowd. All that could be heard was the whisper of the pre-dawn winds through the trees and bushes of the vast gardens of Versailles. I gripped my ax; my heart raced as blood rushed to my pounding temples. It was the longest moment of my life.

Finally, I heard hope rise from deep within the crowd. I heard the words that I knew would save the gardens, the words that would allow me to breathe again. I heard the words that would mean salvation for the botanical wonders of the Versailles Palace.

'Long Live the King’s Garden!' someone shouted. 'Long Live the Garden of Plants!' cried another, changing the name of the garden to make it acceptable to the people. And then it grew, little by little until it was a resounding chorus: 'Vive le Jardin des Plantes! Long Live the Garden of Plants!'

And all at once, the chant shifted again. 'To Paris!' the women cried. And as they retreated, the gardens were flooded with the first light of a new dawn. The inheritance of two centuries of the blood and sweat of French plant hunters, botanists, and gardeners was saved, and it glowed in gratitude to those of us who had defended it."

*****
Excerpted from the Time Traveler Paris Tours: Long Live the King's Garden, by Sarah B. Towle (copyright 2009), expected launch date: March 2010.

Images:
Versailles, the Chateau, exterior facade, views from southwest, Google Earth, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Triumph of the Parisian Army and the People, from http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/230/.

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, nephew of the de Jussieu brothers, Galerie des naturalistes de J. Pizzetta, Ed. Hennuyer, 1893, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

French Huguenots in Berlin

Last week I was in Berlin on a research trip for the Time Traveler Tours (expected launch date: March 2010). While lunching under the trees in lovely Gendarmenmarkt (Soldier’s Market) Square, in the shadow of two curiously-alike domed churches, I learned something I never knew about the history of French-German relations.

In the late 17th century, King Louis XIV outlawed the practice of reformed Christianity, or Protestantism, in France. So, a great number of adherents, derisively called Huguenots by the French, fled to Berlin to make a new home. Here’s what happened:

Protestantism emerged in France in the early 16^th century, inspired by the writings of Jean Calvin. The movement's primary focus was to make the Bible accessible to the masses by translating it into local, or vernacular, languages. Up to that point, Catholic mass was delivered in Latin and understood only by the educated classes. Reformers took issue as well with the heavy reliance on ritual in the Catholic religious practice, believing that this did nothing to help pave the way toward salvation. They preached, instead, that the best expression of faith in God was in leading a simple life based on biblical law. They felt that the Catholic Church had become impure, rife with hypocrisy and corruption, and was, therefore, doomed to fail.

The Roman Catholic Church responded to these criticisms with such fanatic zeal that violent persecution of French Protestants, whom they called Huguenots, became the order of the day. The origin of the name "Huguenot" is not clearly understood today, though we do know it was used as a term of derision. French Protestants, in contrast, called themselves Les Reformés, meaning reformers or reformed.

Tensions between the Catholics and Les Reformés sparked the late 16^th century Wars of Religion whose violent pinnacle came with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. The killing began in Paris, but quickly spread throughout the country. Approximately 70,000 Huguenots were cut down in a mere eight days. Many more fled France in horror of the bloodbath.

In 1598, King Henri IV, a one-time Protestant who turned Catholic upon accepting the French Crown, put a stop to the violence. Striking a balance with the Edict of Nantes, he declared Catholicism the state religion of France, but granted Protestants the right to religious freedom.

Nearly 100 years later, however, in 1685, France’s Sun King (Louis XIV) revoked this freedom with the Edict of Fontainebleau. He forbade the Protestants from leaving the country; but they left quickly and in droves, the memory of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, still heavy on their minds.

It was then that Friedrich Wilhelm, the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, welcomed French Huguenots to Berlin. Though a staunch Calvinist himself, his motivations were not purely altruistic. He had economic objectives as well. He looked to the French Protestants, among them farmers and highly-skilled artisans such as goldsmiths, jewelers, watchmakers and sculptors, to help rebuild his war-ravaged and under-populated country. And that is precisely what they did.

Meanwhile, back in France, the exodus of the Huguenots created a “brain drain” from which that country would take decades to recover. What's more, renewed legalized persecution of Protestants in France greatly damaged Louis XIV’s reputation abroad, especially in England. But intolerance toward Huguenots continued well beyond his reign and into the 18^th century. Indeed, it wasn’t until the French Revolution (1789-99) that Protestants were finally granted full citizenship under the law.

Not long after their arrival in Berlin, Huguenot refugees began work to erect their own church following the design of that which they'd left behind in France. The French Church went up on the same city square as the German Church. The two domed buildings continue to face each other today on the Gendarmenmarkt Square in historic Mitte in what was once East Berlin.

Images:

Gendarmenmarket Square, 2008, by Jhintz, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

"The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre", by François Dubois (1529–1584), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.(1529)

Portrait of Friedrich Wilhelm (1620-1688), the Elector of Brandenburg, by Frans Luycx, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.