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Frédéric Bofinger, an Alsatian innkeeper originally from the Colmar area, opened a modest restaurant near Place de la Ba...
25/08/2026

Frédéric Bofinger, an Alsatian innkeeper originally from the Colmar area, opened a modest restaurant near Place de la Bastille in 1864. He installed a beer engine, letting customers order it fresh from the tap instead of only in bottles.

Draught beer had not been served anywhere in Paris before this. Some accounts date the innovation to the restaurant's opening in 1864 itself, others specifically to 1870, but either way, Bofinger is generally credited as the first to bring keg beer to the city.

The brasserie's now-famous decor, the domed stained-glass ceiling, oak paneling, and Art Nouveau ironwork, came later, added during a major expansion between 1919 and 1921 under architect Léon Legay.

Bofinger has stayed in business at the same address on rue de la Bastille for over 160 years, and its choucroute (sauerkraut) remains one of its best-known dishes today.

In the spring of 1918, Notre-Dame was bracing for a threat no cathedral had ever faced before: a German cannon that coul...
24/08/2026

In the spring of 1918, Notre-Dame was bracing for a threat no cathedral had ever faced before: a German cannon that could hit Paris from 75 miles (120 kilometers) away.

It was called the Paris Gun. Fired from behind German lines that were still more than 60 miles from the city, it struck Paris more than 300 times between March and August of 1918. Parisians did not even know what was hitting them at first. Some thought a zeppelin was dropping bombs from the edge of the atmosphere.

Notre-Dame had already had one close call. In 1914, German shells set part of its scaffolding on fire. This time, clergy and conservators were not taking chances. The stained glass windows were removed and stored away. Statues and stonework were packed behind sandbags.

That same year, American troops were arriving in France by the hundreds of thousands, part of the more than one million who would serve there before the armistice. Many passed through Paris on their way to the front, and some would have seen the cathedral exactly like this: wrapped, braced, and waiting out a war.

Notre-Dame outlasted two world wars, then nearly lost everything to a fire in 2019. It reopened in December 2024, fully restored.

This is Montmartre in the 1880s. That timber structure is scaffolding for the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, whose first stone ...
24/08/2026

This is Montmartre in the 1880s. That timber structure is scaffolding for the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, whose first stone was laid in June 1875. That same year, sculptor Auguste Bartholdi and a team of craftsmen in a Paris workshop began building the Statue of Liberty. Two of the most photographed monuments in the world, one destined for a New York harbor, rising in the same city at the same time.

Getting stone to the top of this hill was its own engineering job. A construction funicular started hauling blocks up the slope as early as 1875, on tracks close to the ones running up the hill on the right of this photo. Once the cars reached the top, horses took over and pulled the stone the rest of the way to the stonecutters.

The funicular visitors ride today did not exist yet. That one opened in 1900, twenty five years after this cable was already moving building material, not tourists.

Down on the street, Montmartre still looked like a village. Vendors sold from a cart under a canvas awning, women wore long aprons over their dresses, and cobblestones ran straight into open hillside. Sacré-Cœur was not finished until 1914, and not consecrated until 1919.

The basilica still stands at the top of that hill, and the funicular still climbs it, just for a very different reason now.

Marie Curie began at the Sorbonne as a student, arriving from Warsaw in 1891 with barely enough money to survive on. She...
24/08/2026

Marie Curie began at the Sorbonne as a student, arriving from Warsaw in 1891 with barely enough money to survive on. She graduated first in her class in physics in 1893 and earned a second degree in mathematics the following year.

She met Pierre Curie in a lab that same year. Together they discovered polonium and radium and shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel. Pierre was given a physics chair at the Sorbonne in 1904.

On April 19, 1906, Pierre was struck and killed by a horse-drawn cart crossing a Paris street. A month later, the university offered his position to Marie rather than leave it vacant. She accepted, becoming the first woman ever appointed professor at the Sorbonne, after roughly 650 years of the university's existence.

She gave her first lecture that November to a packed amphitheater. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, becoming the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

In the summer of 1876, Renoir rented two rooms and an old stable at 12 rue Cortot in Montmartre, drawn there by the ligh...
24/08/2026

In the summer of 1876, Renoir rented two rooms and an old stable at 12 rue Cortot in Montmartre, drawn there by the light and by how close it sat to the Moulin de la Galette, where he was working on another painting at the same time.

He set up his easel in the courtyard behind the house and painted The Swing, using his brother Edmond, a young Montmartre model named Jeanne Samary, and fellow painter Norbert Goeneutte as his subjects. Both paintings were shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877.

The house is now the Musée de Montmartre. In 2012, the garden was redesigned specifically to match the paintings Renoir made there, using the compositions themselves as a reference for where to plant which trees.

The Swing now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, a short walk downhill from the courtyard where it was painted.

24/08/2026

Would you feel comfortable letting your daughter travel to Paris solo, or does that make you nervous?

This crowd filled Place de la Concorde on the day Paris celebrated its freedom in August 1944.Look at the vehicles movin...
23/08/2026

This crowd filled Place de la Concorde on the day Paris celebrated its freedom in August 1944.

Look at the vehicles moving through the square. Most of what you see rolling past was American. The French 2nd Armored Division, the unit that led the liberation of Paris, fought with about 250 tanks, and nearly all of them were American M4 Shermans and M10 tank destroyers. The rifles, the trucks, even the radios came from the United States. General Philippe Leclerc commanded the division and its soldiers were French through and through, but almost everything they fought with was built across the Atlantic.

Behind the crowd stands the Luxor Obelisk, 75 feet (23 meters) tall and more than 3,300 years old. Egypt gave it to France in 1836, and it has stood on this exact spot through a revolution, an occupation, and this one unforgettable week when Paris came back to life.

The Eiffel Tower rises in the distance, visible from the same square where a stunned and joyful crowd once gathered to watch their capital breathe again.

𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗿𝗲-𝗗𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲. 𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝟮𝟵 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.Lining the nave and the choir are 29 side chapels, and in the Middl...
23/08/2026

𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗿𝗲-𝗗𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲. 𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝟮𝟵 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.

Lining the nave and the choir are 29 side chapels, and in the Middle Ages, each one had an owner. Wealthy families and powerful guilds paid to have their own chapel consecrated inside the cathedral. In return, they got a private altar, a dedicated chaplain saying mass for their family, and a permanent burial spot inside the church. It is the medieval version of putting your family name on a building back home, except this one has lasted 700 years.

For centuries, most of these chapels sat under a thick layer of soot and grime, their painted ceilings barely visible. The 2019 fire, as devastating as it was, led to a full cleaning of the interior. Restorers uncovered gilded stars, painted saints, and murals that had not been fully seen in generations. The Chapel of Saint Marcel came back so vivid that some conservators compared its colors to the Sistine Chapel.

Today, all 29 chapels are open again, each with its own art, its own patron saint, and its own story from the families who paid for it centuries ago.

Stohrer opened on rue Montorgueil in 1730, making it the oldest pastry shop in Paris. Nicolas Stohrer had trained as pas...
23/08/2026

Stohrer opened on rue Montorgueil in 1730, making it the oldest pastry shop in Paris. Nicolas Stohrer had trained as pastry chef to Stanislas Leszczynski, the exiled King of Poland, and followed the king's daughter, Marie Leszczynska, to the French court when she married Louis XV. Five years later, he opened his own shop.

The shop looked far plainer in 1730. What visitors see today, the gilded ceilings, painted murals, and chandeliers, dates to a renovation around 1864, credited to the studio of Paul Baudry, the same artist who decorated the grand foyer of the Palais Garnier a few years later.

Stohrer also claims to be the birthplace of the baba au rhum. The story goes that Stohrer soaked a dry Polish kouglof cake in sweetened wine to fix its texture, and the pastry eventually evolved into the rum-soaked version the shop still sells today.

The building is now a listed French historic monument. It has stayed on the same street, at the same address, for close to 300 years.

Before it was a royal garden, this spot on the Seine was an industrial zone. Medieval tile works, tuileries in French, c...
23/08/2026

Before it was a royal garden, this spot on the Seine was an industrial zone. Medieval tile works, tuileries in French, covered the land, producing roofing tiles for Paris.

In 1564, Queen Catherine de Medici bought the site and had the tile factories cleared to build a new palace for herself, the Tuileries Palace. She commissioned an Italian-style garden to go with it, homesick for the gardens of her native Florence.

A century later, in 1664, Louis XIV had the whole garden redesigned by André Le Nôtre, the same landscape architect who built the gardens at Versailles. His layout, with its long central axis and geometric parterres, is still what visitors walk through today.

The palace itself did not survive. It was burned down during the Paris Commune uprising in 1871 and fully demolished by 1883. The garden simply kept its name.

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