Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [34]
By the end of the 18th century, choreographers such as Jean-Georges Noverre had become more important than the musicians, poets and the dancers themselves. In the early 19th century, romantic ballets, such as Giselle and Les Sylphides, were better attended than the opera. For 10 years from 1945 Roland Petit created such innovative ballets as Turangalila, with music by Olivier Messiaen, and Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. Maurice Béjart shocked his audiences with his Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (which was danced in black in 1955), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) and Le Marteau sans Maître, with music by Pierre Boulez.
Today French dance seems to be moving in a new, more personal direction with such performers as Maguy Marin, Laurent Hilaire and Aurélie Dupont. Choreographers include the likes of Odile Duboc, Caroline Marcadé, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Jean-François Duroure, Boris Charmatz and, perhaps the most interesting and visible of modern French choreographers, Philippe Decoufflé.
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ARCHITECTURE
Parisians have never been as intransigent as, say, Londoners in accepting changes to their cityscape, nor as unshocked by the new as New Yorkers appear to be. But then Paris never had as great a fire as London did in 1666, which offered architects a tabula rasa on which to redesign and build a modern city, or the green field that was New York in the late 18th century.
It took disease, clogged streets, an antiquated sewage system, a lack of open spaces and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to drag Paris out of the Middle Ages into a modern world, and few town planners anywhere in the world have had as great an impact on the city of their birth as he did on his.
Haussmann’s 19th-century transformation of Paris was a huge undertaking – Parisians endured years of ‘flying dust, noise, and falling plaster and beams’, as one contemporary observer wrote; entire areas of the city (eg the labyrinthine Île de la Cité) were razed and hundreds of thousands of (mostly poor) people displaced. Even worse – or better, depending on your outlook – it brought to a head the vieux (old) Paris versus nouveau (new) Paris, a debate in which writer Victor Hugo played a key role and which continues to this day Click here.
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GALLO-ROMAN
Traces of Roman Paris can be seen in the residential foundations and dwellings in the Crypte Archéologique Click here under the square in front of Notre Dame; in the partially reconstructed Arènes de Lutèce Click here; and in the frigidarium (cooling room) and other remains of Roman baths dating from around AD 200 at the Musée National du Moyen Age.
The Musée National du Moyen Age also contains the so-called Pillier des Nautes (Boatsmen’s Pillar), one of the most valuable legacies of the Gallo-Roman period. It is a 2.5m-high monument dedicated to Jupiter and was erected by the boatmen’s guild during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37) on the Île de la Cité. The boat remains the symbol of Paris, and the city’s Latin motto is ‘Fluctuat Nec Mergitur’ (Tosses but Does Not Sink).
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MEROVINGIAN & CAROLINGIAN
Although quite a few churches were built in Paris during the Merovingian and Carolingian periods (6th to 10th centuries), very little of them remain.
When the Merovingian ruler Clovis I made Paris his seat in the early 6th century, he established an abbey dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul on the south bank of the Seine. All that remains of this once great abbey (later named in honour of Paris