Paris

The Eiffel Tower is a puddle iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris. Built in 1889, it has become both a global cultural icon of... France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world. The tower is the tallest building in Paris and the most-visited paid monument in the world; millions of people ascend it every year. Named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, the tower was built as the entrance arch to the 1889 World's Fair. The tower stands 324 metres tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to assume the title of the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years, until the Chrysler Building in New York City was built in 1930. However, due to the addition, in 1957, of the antenna atop the Eiffel Tower, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building. Not including broadcast antennas, it is the second-tallest structure in France, after the Millau Viaduct. The tower has three levels for visitors.
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The Panthéon is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the... reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens. It is an early example of neoclassicism, with a façade modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, surmounted by a dome that owes some of its character to Bramante's "Tempietto". Located in the 5th arrondissement on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the Panthéon looks out over all of Paris. Designer Jacques-Germain Soufflot had the intention of combining the lightness and brightness of the gothic cathedral with classical principles, but its role as a mausoleum required the great Gothic windows to be blocked. King Louis XV vowed in 1744 that if he recovered from his illness he would replace the ruined church of the Abbey of St Genevieve with an edifice worthy of the patron saint of Paris. He did recover, and entrusted Abel-François Poisson, marquis de Marigny with the fulfillment of his vow.
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Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité... in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of the Archbishop of Paris, currently André Vingt-Trois. The cathedral treasury houses a reliquary with the purported Crown of Thorns. Notre Dame de Paris is widely considered one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture in France and in Europe, and the naturalism of its sculptures and stained glass are in contrast with earlier Romanesque architecture. The first period of construction from 1163 into 1240s coincided with the musical experiments of the Notre Dame school. Jean de Jandun recognized the cathedral as one of Paris's three most important buildings in his 1323 "Treatise on the Praises of Paris": The cathedral suffered desecration during the radical phase of the French Revolution in the 1790s, when much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed.
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The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris, commonly known as Sacré-Cœur Basilica , is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica, dedicated... to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Paris, France. A popular landmark, the basilica is located at the summit of the butte Montmartre, the highest point in the city. Sacré-Cœur is a double monument, political and cultural, both a national penance for the supposed excesses of the Second Empire and socialist Paris Commune of 1871 crowning its most rebellious neighborhood, and an embodiment of conservative moral order, publicly dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was an increasingly popular vision of a loving and sympathetic Christ. The Sacré-Cœur Basilica was designed by Paul Abadie. Construction began in 1875 and was finished in 1914. It was consecrated after the end of World War I in 1919. The inspiration for Sacré Cœur's design originated in the wake of the division in French society that arose in the decades following French Revolution, between devout Catholics and legitimist royalists on one side, and democrats, secularists, socialists and radicals on the other.
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Claude Barruck Joseph Lelouch is a French film director, writer, cinematographer, actor and producer. Lelouch was born in the 9th arrondissement of... Paris, the son of Charlotte and Simon Lelouch. His father was an Algerian Jew and his mother was a convert to Judaism. His father gave him a camera to give him a fresh start after his failure in the baccalaureat. He started his career with reportage - one of the first to film daily life in the U.S.S.R., the camera hidden under his coat as he made his personal journey. He also filmed sporting events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Tour de France. His first full length film as director, Le Propre de l'homme, was decried by the critics - 'Claude Lelouch, remember this name well, because you will not hear it again' - Cahiers du cinéma said. La Femme Spectacle , following prostitutes, women shopping, going for nose-jobs, was censored for its misogynist tendency. Un homme et une femme changed his fortunes and was met with favour even by the Cahiers group.
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Yo-Yo Ma is a French-American cellist, virtuoso, and orchestral composer. He has received multiple Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 2001... and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Ma is regarded by some as the most famous cellist of the modern age. Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris on October 7, 1955, to Chinese parents and had a musical upbringing. His mother, Marina Lu, was a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a violinist and professor of music at Nanjing National Central University. His family moved to New York when he was five years old. At a very young age, Ma began studying violin, and later viola, before settling on the cello in 1960 at age four. According to Ma, his first choice was the double bass due to its large size, but he compromised and took up cello instead. The child prodigy began performing before audiences at age five, and performed for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was seven. At age eight, he appeared on American television with his sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma, in a concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
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Jean Genet – April 15, 1986 was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in... his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens. Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family who, according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft . After the death of his foster mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple but remained with them less than two years.
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Yves Duteil is a French singer-songwriter. He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine , in 24 July 1949 and is the third child to be born in the family. Duteil... is a noted proponent of the French language, the rights of children and the respect of environment. Duteil is the mayor of Précy-sur-Marne, in Seine et Marne. In 1972, Yves Duteil had first minor hit with a song called "Virages" . Included on his 1974 debut album L'Écritoire, it shares fame with such songs as the title track and from his next album, "J'attends" , "Tisserand", "Les Batignolles" , etc. His 1977 album "Tarentelle", which would become his most classic, included not only his most famous song but also such songs as the title track, "Le Petit Pont de Bois", "Le Mur De La Prison D'En Face" which have all become classics. Duteil's ability to write love-filled, touching lyrics on sweet or catchy melodies have made him a singer much more loved than he is adulated by the public. He is probably not the first one to have achieved to stay outside of the show business spirit while managing to be very popular, after all Hugues Aufray did this too.
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Jérôme Leroy is a film composer, orchestrator and conductor currently living in Los Angeles, California, U.S.. Jérôme Leroy was... born on September 2, 1981, in Paris, France. He was first introduced to music as a young child playing the piano. He started serious study and practice at age five and at age fourteen turned to composition. Leroy attended high school at Lycée Claude Monet in Paris, where he took traditional music history classes with Annick Chartreux, a French conductor and composer, and performed in numerous concerts as a pianist and singer. The growth of the Internet in these years pushed him to keep in touch with new technologies, giving him useful technical skills early on. After having written various chamber pieces in his teens , he applied in 2001 for the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, for which he was awarded the Berklee Entering Student Scholarship.
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Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and actor, who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in... the film And God Created Woman. Vadim was born as Roger Vladimir Plemiannikov in Paris. His Russian father, Igor Nikolaevich Plemiannikov , had immigrated from Ukraine and became a naturalized French citizen, and was a vice consul of France to Egypt. His mother, Marie-Antoinette Ardilouze, was a French actress. Although Vadim lived in luxury in his early youth, the death of his father, in front of Vadim when he was nine, caused the family to return to France, where his mother found work running a hostel in the French Alps which served as a way-station for Jews and other fugitives fleeing Nazi Germany. Vadim became a stage actor at the age of sixteen, after studying journalism and writing at the University of Paris, from which he did not graduate. In 1947, he became assistant to film director Marc Allégret, whom he met while working at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, and for whom he worked on several screenplays.
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