While Paris’s seasonal crop of exhibitions, theater and music clamors for attention, the numerous national and religious cultural centers of Paris yield their fruit year-round to lesser fanfare.

These centers welcome members and outside visitors to diverse programming of a more intimate or confidential kind, bringing to Paris glimpses great and small of nations and of religions.

Some of the centers and institutes listed below are worth a visit even without attending a particular event since they occupy notable or historical buildings or attractive settings in their own right: for example, the Swedish Cultural Center has a peaceable tearoom in his historic building and courtyard in the Marais, while the Collège des Bernadins (a Catholic cultural center) occupies a historical building of the 13th century across the river from Notre-Dame.

Here to start are six institutions that reveal the diversity of these cultural centers

1. Irish Cultural Center
5 rue des Irlandais, 5th arrondissement
The Irish Cultural Center, located two blocks south of the Pantheon, grew out of the Collège des Irlandais, a Catholic seminary for Irish students. A community of Irish students and clergymen officially gathered on the Left Bank in 1578 as they sought refuge for training and education of Catholicism, then restricted back home. Irish colleges (seminaries) were then set up in various Catholic or Catholic-friendly countries of Europe; about 30 existed in continental Europe by the end of the 18th century, with the community in Paris being the largest. The students moved into the location of what is now Irish Cultural Center in 1775. Later extensions include a chapel dedicated to Saint Patrick, which still holds Sunday mass open to the public, and a library of old books and manuscripts, many dating from the 15th to 18th centuries, visited only by special permission. A modern library on the ground floor is open to the public.

La Fondation Irlandaise (The Irish Foundation), comprised of French and Irish members, has managed the Collège des Irlandais since a decree by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805. The street the center is on was renamed for the Irish two years later, though the complex has also served other functions over the years. In 1945 it briefly served as a refuge for displace persons claiming or requesting American nationality. From 1945 to 1997 it was used as a Polish seminary. Returned to the Irish, now financed by the Irish government, and no longer a religious center despite the presence of the chapel, the Irish Cultural Center reopened as such in 2002. The center promotes various aspects of culture emanating from the island, including music, poetry, literature and film. The center also has housing for 45 students, artists and writers.

2. British Council 
9-11 rue de Constantine, 7th arrondissement
The British have an extensive educational and cultural network throughout the world in the form of the British Council, “an executive non-departmental public body, a public corporation (in accounting terms) and a charity” promoting all things British. The British Council in Paris is of most interest to English-speakers residing or visiting the city for its occasional speaking events involving prestigious figures in the fields of the film, literature and the performing arts. The British Council is also heavily involved in efforts to promote the English language through courses and to promote British science, culture and arts through cooperative programs.

3. Swedish Institute
11 rue Payenne, 3rd arrondissement.
This is Sweden’s only foreign official cultural center in any country. From the historical mansion that it has occupied in the Marais since 1971 (making it one of the first such mansions to be restored in the district), the Swedish Institute organizes exhibitions, concerts, encounters with writers, projects of films, theater and debates on questions of culture, science and society. Swedish classes are also available.

Even without an exhibition the Swedish Institute makes for an appealing stop in the Marais for its café/lunch room, open noon to 6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Swedish bread, pastries, soup and sandwiches.

4. Collège des Bernardins, a Catholic cultural center. 
20 rue de Poissy, 5th arrondissement
Before considering its contemporary use, it’s worth noting that the Collège des Bernadins, owned and operated by the Catholic Diocese of Paris, is of exceptional architectural value for its 230-foot-long (70-meter-long) 13th-century “nave” that originally served as living space and educational center for Cistercian monks (also known as Bernardins after Saint Bernard who helped develop the order).

In the absence of special events in the nave, entrance is free and open to the public. It’s located on the Left Bank just one street back from the river across from Notre-Dame. Its gardens, in fact, once spread to the riverbank.

Construction of the Collège des Bernardins was part of the development of centers of learning (which at the time meant a theological education) on the Left Bank are that is now the 5th arrondissement. The origins of the Sorbonne, founded by Robert de Sorbon, also date from this period of the 13th century. The area would eventually become known as the Latin Quarter since the education of these and other institutions was in Latin.

The Collège des Bernadins declined in the second half of the 18th century and, during the revolution, lost its religious function when seized from the Church as national property. It was first transformed into a prison and then used as a fire station for 150 years beginning in 1845.

Purchased by the Diocese of Paris in 2001, a vast project of restoration and enhancement was then undertaken (costing 52 million euros, including 14 million in public funding) to create a center “dedicated to hopes and questions of our society and their encounter with Christian wisdom.” The center reopened in 2008. According to the center’s administrators, no public funding is used for its operating expenses.

The mixed-use center holds exhibits, performances and musical events, provides classrooms for theological and biblical education through the Cathedral School, and organizes conferences and lectures that bring together a political, artistic and academic intelligentsia to discuss numerous themes as vast and varied as biomedical ethics, economics, and relations between Judaism and Christianity.  Events take place in the nave or in the comfortable 240-seat auditorium that has been added beneath the eves.

5. Polish Institute
31 rue Jean Goujon, 8th arrondissement.
As with many of the national institutes and centers on this list, the Polish institute is a window to the nation’s contemporary artistic and intellectual culture and has the mission of promoting the national culture and influence while favoring international cultural exchanges with the host country. The Polish Institute excels in this form of cultural diplomacy in Paris through its programming that presents intellectual and artistic and historical views and voices from Poland.

6. Arab Institute
1 rue des Fossées-Saint-Bernard, 5th arrondissement.
The Arab Institute, Institut du Monde Arabe, opened in 1987 on the left bank of the Seine with a mission of presenting to the public Islamic-Arab culture from its origins to today. It therefore presents and representing a region (ignoring Israel), a religion and the diverse cultures of Arab countries.

Financed by France with contributions by Arab states, the institute has three main goals: to make the French aware of the Arab world, to favor cultural exchanges and to reinforce France-Arab cooperation.

The Lebanese restaurant at the top of the building has a delicious view of Notre-Dame, the Seine and the rooftops of Paris. The building was designed by group of architects led by French architect Jean Nouvel.

Map showing location of the six institutions described above

An extended and non-exhaustive list of other cultural centers and institutes in Paris

The names of organizations representing non-English-language countries have been translated into English for the purposes of this article.

7. Algerian Cultural Center, rue de la Croix-Nivert, 15th arr.
8. Bulgarian Cultural Institute, rue de la Boétie, 8th arr.
9. Canadian Cultural Center, 5 rue de Constantine, 7th arr.
10. Cervantes Institute of Paris (Spanish cultural center) , 7 rue Quentin Bauchart, 8th arr.
11. Cultural Center of China in Paris, boulevard de la Tour Maubourg, 7th arr.
12. Danish House, 142 avenue des Champs-Elysées, 8th arr.
13. Dutch Institute, 121 rue de Lille, 7th arr.
14. Egyptian Cultural Center, 11 boulevard Saint-Michel, 5th arr.
15. Finnish Institute, 60 rue des Ecoles, 5th arr.
16. Goethe Institute (German Cultural Center), 17 avenue d’Iéna, 16th arr.
17. Greek Cultural Center, 23 rue Galilée, 16th arr.
18. Hungarian Institute of Paris, 92 rue Bonaparte, 6th arr.
19. Italian Cultural Institute, 73 rue de Grenelle, 7th arr.
20. Japanese Cultural Center, 101 bis quai Branly, 15th arr.
21. Korean Cultural Center, 2 avenue d’Iéna, 16th arr.
22. Kurdish Institute of Paris, 106 rue La Fayette, 10th arr.
23. Latin American House, 217 boulevard Saint-Germain, 7th arr.
24. Mexican Cultural Center, 119 rue Vieille du Temple, 3rd arr.
25. Romanian Cultural Institute, 1 rue de l’Exposition, 7th arr.
26. Russian Center for Science and Culture, 61 rue Boissière, 16th arr.
27. Swiss Cultural Center, 32-38 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 3rd arr.
28. Cultural Center of Taiwan in Paris, 78 rue de l’Université, 7th arr.
29. Cultural Center of Vietnam in Paris, 19-19bis rue Albert, 13th arr.

There used to be an American Center in Paris, but it went broke in 1996.

The association Forum des Instituts Culturels Etrangers à Paris (FICEP) bring together 46 foreign and regional cultural institutes in the capital. For more information on FICEP, which celebrates Foreign Culures Week in Paris from Sept. 23 to Oct. 2 this year, see www.ficep.info.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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* * *

After nearly 20 years of travel writing in France, I’m happy to say that there are plenty of notable towns and villages and landscapes I’ve never visited. Why happy? Because after all these years I still get to feel the sense of discovery and adventure that comes with exploring someplace for the first time.

Annabel Simms has been at it a long time, too, long enough to have ventured well off the tourist trails but still within quick reach of the world’s number one tourist destination city. The result of those wanderings is “An Hour From Paris,” an outstanding, intensely practical, open-your-eyes guide to lesser known towns and villages within an easy train ride of Paris. First published in 2002, the book’s fully revised second edition is now available.

In 20 destinations/chapters, half of which are little known, Simms describes in nearly obsessive detail unhurried walking tours that will make even oft-return travelers and residents feel like first-time wanderers. As a bone to first-time visitors, a brief twenty-first chapter entitled “On the Tourist Trail” mentions well-known sights such as Versailles, Giverny, and Fontainebleau.

he selection of destinations testifies to both the persistence of small-town and village life just outside the doors of Paris and Simms’ own sense of the pleasure of traveling near yet far. Or as she says of the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, “it offers maximum dépaysement (change of scene) for minimum effort.”

Testing the book in Poissy

I decided that the best way to judge the book’s worth was to make some minimum effort myself one sunny day and follow in the author’s footsteps in search of maximum dépaysement. So I took the suburb train RER A line 30-minutes northwest to the Seine-side town of Poissy.

I chose the book’s “Poissy” chapter, which also includes the neighboring villages of Villennes and Médard, because I’d never been there before and because even Ms. Simms is cautious about Poissy, calling it “a modest place, familiar to most Parisians only as the name of a terminus on the RER line service the northwestern suburbs.” I figured that if the author could create a stimulating walking tour from a place that apparently held such little promise then “An Hour from Paris” must have many secrets to tell.

I more or less faithfully followed in Simms’ footsteps, doing so quite easily thanks to the book’s excellent maps and the author’s flawless instructions. In Poissy I discovered the church Collégiale Notre Dame, which has remnants of the baptismal font where Louis IX was baptized in 1214 and a colorful Renaissance “Entombment of Christ.” The walk through the courtyard of the Poissy Toy Museum (which I didn’t enter but where Ms. Simms clearly enjoyed herself) was enchanting. I saw the Villa Savoye, which was designed by Le Corbusier in 1929. To the contemporary eye the villa may resemble a small generic office building near a strip mall, but it was once considered a wondrous example of chic avant-garde eurotrash. One needn’t have a particular interest in any of these three sights to enjoy the diversity of the walk, a walk that’s far enough off the beaten track that the villa now stands across the street from a low-income housing project while the Toy Museum is across the street from a high-security prison.

I’d been in Poissy for less than two hours but already my walk was full of discreet, worthwhile, and varied sights and scenery. That’s when the real dépaysement began.

The author’s guidance now took me into greenery and out of Poissy on a Seine-side walk to the villages of Villennes then Médard. I was led, by suggestion or opportunity, to stand on a bridge overlooking a branch of the Seine, to “stroll down a private, peaceful and pretty, [that] leads past houses whose gardens stretch to the water’s edge,” to admire a hedge of firethorns in full bloom, to sit in a café in front of “the striking 11th-century church,” to visit the house that Zola bought in 1878 and where he lived “for about eight months of the year until his death 24 years later,” and to “make a nostalgic detour to reach the river,” where I sat above the riverbank in restaurant-café that is “the only source of food and drink in Médan and is open sporadically, depending on the whim of the owners, a retired couple.”

I don’t know if I’d call that last detour nostalgic, but my afternoon in Ms. Simms’ footsteps was entirely delightful, full of discovery, and leisurely paced, especially since that retired couple’s “whim” corresponded with my own. (See how I followed in her footsteps.)

Getting to know the GPS lady

In text and in maps “An Hour From Paris” gets you exactly where you need to go to enjoy the particular area under exploration. Simms’ writing is impeccably clear. Hers is the voice of your GPS. But this GPS lady isn’t satisfied with staying in the background. Occasionally, out of the blue, she will let you know that she is not simply working by satellite but has actually been here.

Here, for example, is a delicious line from a description of the village of Andrésy: “… continue along the river as far as the Rue de Trélan. There is a little jetty with an electric bell to the right which you press to summon the small speedboat opposite…There is a little riverside garden in which you can eat outside in the summer (where I saw a red squirrel) and the tiled floor, lace curtains framing the river and the old-fashioned oak furniture make for a cosy retreat inside.”

I just love that red squirrel that scampered into the text. It’s as though you’re driving down the highway and the GPS lady, after so accurately telling you to turn left, bear right, and continue straight for 2 miles, suddenly whispers, “Look, there’s a deer!”

Such asides are infrequent, once or twice per chapter, but after coming across several of them I found myself wondering who this GPS lady really is. The author’s bio simply states “Annabel Simms is a Londoner who has lived in Paris since 1991. She is a freelance writer and English teacher.” However, little by little, often subtly, perhaps unintentionally, the GPS lady reveals herself to be more than the unerring voice of practicality.

Annabel Simms is at times:

• a proper Englishwoman: “It invariably has a calming effect on the nerves.”
• an intrepid traveler: “The gate is to stop cars, not pedestrians, so if it is closed simply scramble up the railway embankment around it and down on the other side.”
• a wistful observer: “The atmosphere is remote and mysterious… even on a sunny day when children are playing on the lawn.”
• a what-the-hell participant: “I expected to be bored, but was fascinated and ended up pressing buttons to make the trains move and trying out a 19th-century fortune-teller’s board, remarkable accurate in its prediction.” (That’s at the aforementioned Poissy Toy Museum. What, I wonder, did the fortune-teller’s board so accurately predict?)
• a frustrated naturalist: “You could continue along the river instead of crossing the main road at this point, but although the walk is quiet and very pretty (I saw yellow irises growing by the water and a friend reports seeing a green woodpecker there) the gate through to the car park further on is sometimes locked and you have to continue for another half-kilometre before you can cross the road.” (Don’t you just love those irises and the gratuitous green woodpecker?)
• a slumming aristocrat: “It’s always fun to take a ferry, especially when it is free, but I must confess that I found the ‘parc naturel’ a trifle disappointing.”
• a writer with an obsession for detail: “Take the Rue Dr Plichon on the right, which becomes Rue du Moulin. It leads down to the river and the main footbridge to the islands. Turn right into the Chemin du Bras du Chapitre and follow the riverside path until you come to no. 13 just past the corner of the Rue Robert Legeay.”
• and an urbanite longing for solitude: “The great attraction of a visit to Champs is the fact that… few people actually stop off there…”
• hungry for nature: “However, it is very easy to get lost in the wilder, un-signposted paths between Maison de Sylvie and the Hameau, although you might see a deer bounding past, as I did.”
• and oh so glad to be out of the city: “As very few visitors seem to know about the existence of this station, your detour will bring you into contact with local people who treat you with a warmth you can only dream of in Paris.”

Most guidebooks these days are simply spiritless attempts to find a marketing niche or to promote an attitude, but “An Hour From Paris” appears to come straight from the heart of the its author. For all its GPS-like practicality, the voice behind this book is that of an inquisitive and quirky traveler who truly wishes us well in our soft adventures in suburban Paris. To judge from my visit to Poissy (I saw a magpie there), that voice is well worth following.

An Hour from Paris by Annabel Simms.

© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut

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I picked Poissy from the 20 destinations in the book because I’d never been there and because even Ms. Simms is cautious about it, calling Poissy “a modest place, familiar to most Parisians only as the name of a terminus on the RER line service the northwestern suburbs.” I figured that if the author could design a worthwhile walking tour out of a place that apparently held such little promise then “An Hour from Paris” must be full of discovery.

“An Hour From Paris” is an intensely practical guide that one is unlikely to read front to back. But I’d enjoyed reading it that way for its quirky mix of practical information, GPS-like directions, and odd asides that seem ever so gently, and in a British way, to say “I was here.”

Here, for example, is one of my favorite passages from a description of the village of Andrésy: “… continue along the river as far as the Rue de Trélan. There is a little jetty with an electric bell to the right which you press to summon the small speedboat opposite…There is a little riverside garden in which you can eat outside in the summer (where I saw a red squirrel) and the tiled floor, lace curtains framing the river and the old-fashioned oak furniture make for a cosy retreat inside.” I just love that red squirrel that scampered into the text.

I’ll discuss the quirks of the text further in the actual review to appear next month. I’m using today’s blog not to review but to illustrate the visit outlined by Ms. Simms that I more or less faithfully followed—quite easily, I should add, thanks to the book’s excellent maps and the author’s unwavering eye for detail. I did not, however, enter the various museums that she mentioned along the way, though I did stop to photograph the cat, above left, near the entrance to Poissy’s Toy Museum (where I saw a magpie). The fact that the museum is across the street from a major prison for hardened criminals tells you that you are indeed well of the beaten track in these parts.

The spire of Collégiale Notre Dame, the church were King Louis IX was baptized in 1214 (remnants of the baptismal font are there), appears in the photo above with the cat. Here below is a colorful Renaissance “Entombment of Christ” found in that church.

I made a detour from Ms. Simms’ outline to buy a sandwich in town then returned to her trail to visit the Villa Savoye, photo right, designed by Le Corbusier in 1929. To the contemporary eye the villa resembles a generic office building near a strip mall, but when it was completed in the early 1930s it was a wondrous example of chic avant-garde eurotrash that few people would have wanted to live in. It’s in a little park across the street from a low-income housing project.

I already knew how detail-oriented Ms. Simms is from reading the book, but I realized when following her route that in addition to wanting to say “I was here” she also wants to encourage readers to look for details, whether, when heading downstream to Villennes, you’re standing on a bridge overlooking a branch of the Seine (below left) or “strolling down a private, peaceful and pretty, [that] leads past houses whose gardens stretch to the water’s edge” (below right)

or admiring a hedge of firethorns in full bloom (having asked a local what they are then looked up the translation back home)

or sitting in front of “the striking 11th-century church.”

A mile further upstream, at Médan, there’s another church, and a small private chateau, and the house that Zola bought in 1878 and where he lived “for about eight months of the year until his death 24 years later.”

You can then “make a nostalgic detour to reach the river by turning left” and have a seat by the river at Plaisirs d’Eté, “the only source of food and drink in Médan [which] is open sporadically, depending on the whim of the owners, a retired couple.” I don’t know if I’d call the detour nostalgic, but it was certainly delightful, especially since the retired couple’s whim to open coincided with my own to go.

An enjoyable day of discovery indeed! I’m looking forward to following in Ms. Simms’ footsteps in other town and villages where I’d never thought of setting foot.

Click here for my complete review of Annabel Simms’ An Hour From Paris.

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