Does it matter? In many cases, no—you buy your ticket (mostly online these days) and visit. But it’s worth knowing which monuments are operated by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN), the Center for National Monuments, since a pass called Passion Monuments allows for unlimited visits to most of them for a full year for only 45€. (Passion Monuments doesn’t mean that the monuments have passion but that the holder is passionate about visiting them.)

Tasked by the Ministry of Culture and Communication with “conserving, restoring and maintaining the monuments and collections under its responsibility,” the CMN oversees nearly 100 monuments throughout France, 80 of which can be visited with the Passion Monuments pass.

For monument-minded residents and others available to provide an address in France, Passion Monuments is a must-have that will likely pay for itself several times over. There’s also a psychological benefit of having such a pass since you will find yourself revisiting monuments of which you’d previously thought “been-there-done-that” and visiting others that aren’t otherwise on your cultural radar. Not to mention that now you don’t have to buy a ticket when you accompany visiting friends to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

Forty-five euros is about the cost of entering just four monuments. In Paris, the pass covers such (re)visitable monuments as the Arc de Triomphe, the Conciergerie, the Pantheon and the Sainte-Chapelle, as well as the notable newcomer Hôtel de la Marine (entrance for which alone is 17€). In the Paris region, use the pass as an invitation to yourself to visit the suburban sights Saint Denis Basilica-Cathedral and the castle of Vincennes, both easily accessible by metro.

No need to be Paris-centric about this. Pick any region and you’ll find major monuments operated by the CMN that are included on the pass: the chateau of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley, the castle of Angers, the abbey of Mont Saint Michel in Normandy, the castle and ramparts of Carcassonne, the Palais du Tau in Reims, the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, the megaliths of Locmariaquer in Brittany, the château d’If off the coast of Marseille, the prehistoric site of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in Dordogne, etc. See the full list here. The list itself will make you want to hit the monumental road.

The pass is officially available to residents of France over the age of 26 but CMN isn’t actually asking for proof of residence but simply that you provide an address in France where they can the card, though you can also pick it up at CMN headquarters. So visitors staying long enough (several weeks? several months?) to get good use from the pass might also wish to purchase one in their own name. After ordering the pass online, your card will be sent by post to that address within four days or can be picked up at the CMN’s headquarters in Paris at the Hôtel de Sully, 62 rue Saint-Antoine in the 4th arrondissement (metro Saint-Paul).

The pass isn’t available to those under 26 years of age for the simple reason that entrance to most of the monuments is free to anyone under 18 and to members of the European Union aged 18 to 25. By over 26 is meant anyone past their 26th birthday, so even 26 + 1 day counts as being over 26.

The pass also gives slightly reduced rates for cultural partners, including the chateaux of Chantilly and Fontainebleau in the Paris regions, the Pinault Collection and the Invalides in Paris, and twenty-some other sights elsewhere in France. Three set days per year you can also invite a guest to join you on your cultural excursion free of charge.

(For visitors to the capital staying for one week or less, the Paris Museum Pass remains the best deal for visiting museums and monuments. Other cities and regions also have local passes that are a good deal.)

Timed reservations are now required for most museums and monuments, and for most of those museums and some of those monuments that’s the cases for Passion Monuments and Paris Museum Pass holders as well. So be sure to verify online for each sight that you plan to visit.

© 2021, Gary Lee Kraut

The post The Must-Have Pass for Those with a Passion for Historical Monuments appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Every year on the third weekend in September France takes part in Europe Heritage Days, two days when historical buildings normally closed to the public are open and cultural assets are put on display. (Other countries may hold the event on other days.) On the occasion of the 27th annual Heritage Days, Sept. 18-19, 2010, France Revisited is posting here, with permission, one point of view on the subject.

Below is an open letter by Pierre Housieaux, president of Paris Historique, an association devoted to the preservation, restoration, and promotion of heritage sites in Paris and beyond. The views put forth in this letter, translated here by GLK, do not represent those of France Revisited. We present them here to give readers a glimpse of one side of an ongoing argument in Paris and wherever there are calls for preservation. Other views are welcome.

“Paris Historique” Rebels Against the Destruction of Certain Center Cities in Europe.
Prague, Budapest, Bucarest and Paris Threatened.

Paris Historique is delighted again this year by the great success that the 27th European Heritage Days will encounter in Ile-de-France [the Paris region] and Paris.

As every year, millions of people who love and are passionate about history, architecture, and secular traditions will take to the paths of our cities, towns, and villages to admire sites and monuments that our associations have the task of preserving, restoring, or simply bringing to life in the taste and rhythm of our time.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I am writing to cry victory or to say that we can be self-satisfied with the results obtained. In 2010, again and often, numerous public and private properties have decided on the destruction or “reconstruction” of numerous jewels that are also worthy of general recognition.

In Paris, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Stuttgart in particular, and throughout Europe in general, sites and entire sections of our cities are disappearing or will soon disappear in favor of irrelevant economic operations, even for petty personal interests.

To cite but a few:

– the Jewish quarter of Budapest,
– entire blocks within historical sections in the heart of Prague,
– the city of Bucarest, where there no longer apply any serious rules of urban planning,
– the demolition of the Stuttgart train station,
– and here in Paris the scandalous destruction of the block (workshops and ship testing tanks in particular) built by the Perret brothers on boulevard Victor [15th arrondissement], the uncertain future—despite reassuring pronouncements—of the Hôtel de la Marine, place de la Concorde, and all the abusive and tolerated renovations of noble mansions in the Marais and in the Faubourg Saint Germain, among others.

We therefore take the opportunity of these days of celebration of our heritage to recall that the situation is degrading and that it is now truly urgent, as in the 1960s at the time of the creation of protected sectors in France, for European public opinion to react and voice its profound disagreement with the current policy or rather non-policy of preserving our memory.

We ask that the European Parliament take up these important matters and vote an exemplary, supranational law taking into account the preservation and highlighting of heritage at a time when the situation, particularly economic, is especially difficult and when too many arguments “of necessity,” all too often random and illegitimate, tend to relegate the defense of national heritage to the background, and even to contest that defense.

Information and an online petition are accessible on the site www.patrimoine-heritage.eu.

We count on your support.

Pierre Housieaux
Président of Paris Historique

Paris Historique, 44-46 rue François Miron, 4th arrondissement, Paris. Metro Saint Paul. Tel. 01 48 87 74 31.

Original letter in French translated by Gary Lee Kraut for exclusive use on France Revisited®.

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A letter protesting the construction of the Eiffel Tower was published in Paris on February 14, 1887, less than three weeks after Gustave Eiffel broke ground on the tower that would far overtake the Washington Monument as the world’s tallest manmade structure.

The letter was signed by dozens of “personalities from the world of arts and letters,” and though many of the signatories were little known or merely fashionable artists of the day, the letter did carry the weight of such respected voices as Charles Gounod (composer of Faust), Charles Garnier (architect of the Paris Opera), and the writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils.

The artists, declaring themselves “passionate about the beauty hitherto intact of Paris,” denounced the planned 300-meter/1000-foot tower as “useless and monstrous,” “a horrendous column of bolted sheet iron.” They claimed that it would “profane” and “dishonor” Paris to have the city government associate itself with “the mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines.”

“Not even commercial America would want it,” they said.

And they were right.

Eiffel’s project was monstrous. The tower would dominate the low, dense skyline of the City of Light, and do so for no other reason than to demonstrate to what heights it was possible with iron and to attract visitors to the World’s Fair of 1889.

They were right that the tower would eclipse Paris’s glorious monuments of decades and centuries past and that the “beauty hitherto intact of Paris” would be changed in ways hitherto unimaginable. They were right that the tower’s stature would command attention to the point of becoming the very symbol of Paris. And how could Paris be Paris if symbolized by a useless pile of iron? Didn’t beauty and history demand that the French capital be represented by religious monuments such as Notre-Dame or Sacré Coeur (then under construction on Montmartre), or by monuments honoring national glory through war, such as the Arc de Triomphe or the Invalides, or at the very least by the Louvre, a monument to both majesty and art?

They were right that commercial America wouldn’t even have wanted something as frivolous and meaningless as a 1000-foot tower in 1887. At the time, Las Vegas had barely heard of the Can-Can! It would be another 110 years before it got an Eiffel Tower.

They were right about Eiffel’s tower being profane.

But they were on the wrong side of history—and progress. And Gustave Eiffel stood clearly on the other side.

Gustave Eiffel

By the time he embarked on the tower, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) was already a successful engineer at the head of an engineering firm of international renown. Bridges and viaducts were his company’s specialty, built in response to enormous growth of railway networks, yet it also designed the metal framework for a variety of structures. In Paris, Eiffel’s company designed the framework for the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs (6th arr.), the synagogue on rue des Tournelles (3rd arr.), and the Bon Marché department store (7th arr.). The company carried out major projects throughout France as well as in Spain, Portugal, Romania, Egypt, Hungary and Latin America. Eiffel’s company also designed the metallic structure that supports the Statue of Liberty.

In 1884 Gustave Eiffel patented plans for a 300-meter/1000-foot tower standing on four pillars 125 meters/410 feet apart, doing so in the names of his collaborators Emile Nourguier and Maurice Koechlin and himself. There was no actual project to build the tower when Nourguier and Koechlin (long-forgotten names) drew up the original plans, though the possibility of such a colossal structure did grasp the imagination. And Eiffel was well aware that the government intended to approve plans for Paris to host a World’s Fair (Exposition universelle) in 1889.

In addition to his engineering skills and the reputation of his company, Eiffel was a wise businessman who knew how to play politics, deal with financial institutions, communicate with the press, take risks, and get things done. He knew how to convince the organizers of the Fair that his tower was just the thing that was needed to draw attention to the event and demonstrate the industrial potential of the host nation.

In 1886, the organizers launched a competition for plans to built a 300-meter tower, mostly of iron, with a square base 125 meters wide. It was obviously rigged to allow Eiffel to build his tower.

The Eiffel Tower, as it was soon called, was completed on time and within budget in 2 years, 2 months, 5 days. Though practical solutions needed to be found along the way, particularly in preparing the foundations on the pillars on the sandy Seine side of the structure, Eiffel wasn’t a man to embark on a project he wasn’t sure would succeed. In response to complaints from distant neighbors, his company assumed all risks of the tower falling during construction.

Great Heights

In 1884, the Washington Monument had topped out at 600 feet and become the world’s highest manmade structure. Five years later, the Eiffel Tower, reaching 1023, took over as number one. It wasn’t height alone that set the two apart, but, just as importantly, weight. The Washington Monument made for a fine monument of masonry, but weighing in at 90,000 tons, it was a construction of the past. The future was in metal and alloys. The iron of the Eiffel Tower weighed in at a mere 7,300 tons, so light for its size that if placed in a box large enough to enclose the tower it would float at sea (hard to imagine but give it a bit of thought anyway). It remained the highest manmade structure from 1889 until 1930, when the Chrysler Building in New York briefly took over the mantle at 1046 feet.

The organizers of the World’s Fair of 1889 had requested that the tower be built only with French materials, but when it came to creating the elevators no French company was experienced enough to take the risk of an elevator that would cover the variably inclined middle portion. Therefore the American elevator company Otis was invited to construct the hydraulic elevators running from the base to the second level.

Also, the original plans called for no decorative elements, but in the end a decorative trim was added in the form of small arches beneath the first level, and just above the arches were placed the names of 72 French scientists famous for their role in scientific advancements from 1789 to 1889.

Even without decoration, Eiffel had argued in his response to the protest letter in February 1887, “the Tower will have her own beauty.” “Her curves…will give a great impression of strength and beauty.” (A tower is a feminine noun in French; the Eiffel Tower is therefore also known as la Dame de Fer, the Iron Lady.) “Furthermore,” he wrote, “the colossal has an attraction, its own charm, to which ordinary theories of art are hardly applicable.”

The skyscraper was born.

© Gary Lee Kraut

The post The Eiffel Tower: A Star Is Born appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

La dentelle sophistiquée de la dame la plus visitée de Paris…. et mon pied.

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This lion is a small replica of a monumental sculpture by Bartholdi, the sculptor who created the Statue of Liberty: “Liberty Lighting the World.”

The Lion, made in Belfort, a town in the east of France, represents the heroic resistance of Colonel Denfert Rochereau during the siege of the town by Prussians in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

Place Denfert Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement, though empty in this photo, is no foreigner to crowds since it’s the point of departure of many demonstrations and parades in Paris.

I like this square for its lion, its paving stones, its entrance to the Catacombs, the boulevards extending out from here, and its proximity to rue Daguerre, a street named for one of the inventers of photography.

It’s early morning. In a moment the streetlights are going to turn off.

Ce lion est une réplique miniature d’une sculpture monumentale de Bartholdi (le sculpteur entre autres de la Statue de la liberté : « La liberté éclairant le monde ») faite à Belfort pour représenter la résistance héroïque du colonel Denfert Rochereau au siège de la ville par les Prussiens en 1870. Cette place parisienne du 14e arrondissement connaît la foule car elle est le point de départ de bon nombre de manifestations ou défilés parisiens.

J’aime cette place pour son lion, ses pavés, son entrée des Catacombes, les boulevards qui en partent, la proximité de la rue Daguerre…

Ici, au petit matin. Dans un instant, l’éclairage public va s’éteindre.

The post Va-nu-pieds: Le Lion de Belfort, Place Denfert Rochereau appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

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“April in Paris” has a particularly American ring to it. So for those Americans unable to get to Paris this month because of airport closings due to the erupting volcano in Iceland, Va-nu-pieds, the barefoot photographer went out on a photo shoot with Paris’s Ladies Liberty in a France Revisited exclusive.

Here’s Lady Liberty just beyond the Eiffel Tower on Ile aux Cygnes.

Here’s Lady Liberty in the Luxembourg Garden.

The post Va-nu-pieds: April in Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

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At the center of the great, battered square the Spirit of the Bastille takes flight in the Paris sky. Should we follow him?

Au centre de cette grande place défoncée, le Génie de la Bastille s’envole dans le ciel de Paris. On le suit?

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