Stories: France

Stories connected to France.

• Around the world, collecting plants.Jeanne Baret was an eighteenth-century botanist and explorer. Her travels, including Bougainville’s expeditio…
• A city’s dancing outbreak. An explanation still debated.Accounts describe prolonged dancing in Strasbourg in 1518. Several explanations have been proposed, and claim…
• To learn to fly, she crossed an ocean.Bessie Coleman trained in France and earned her international pilot’s licence in 1921 after facing racial and…
• A postman’s palace, 33 years in the making.French mail carrier Ferdinand Cheval spent 33 years building the Palais idéal in Hauterives, an extraordinary…
• A moving-picture pioneer vanished during a journey.Louis Le Prince, known for early motion-picture work, disappeared in France in 1890. His fate has not been co…
• Messages travelled without wires.Optical telegraphs relayed coded positions of arms or other signals from tower to tower over long distances.
• A public toilet became a national heritage site.Built in 1905, Paris's Lavatory Madeleine is an unusually ornate Art Nouveau underground public toilet. It wa…
• Recorded in two days. Sampled for decades.French band Cortex recorded Troupeau Bleu on July 15 and 16, 1975. Hip-hop producers later drew on its tracks…
• Togo's first Winter Olympians trained elsewhere.Togo made its Winter Olympics debut in 2014 with two women athletes. The tropical country has no snow, and ne…
• Critics said his shows were too theatrical. Then his quiet show was too safe.Alexander McQueen had long been criticized for letting runway spectacle overshadow the clothes. At his restra…
• The film's rough waves? White fabric and plastic bags.The 2021 film A New Old Play follows a Sichuan opera actor's life. Director Qiu Jiongjiong deliberately used…
• The director dubbed the actor's lines. The actor asked for a role in his next feature.Jean-Paul Belmondo could not dub his lines for Godard's short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend because he was…
• The Hangover hung in a Paris club. Van Gogh wondered if it was finished.Toulouse-Lautrec's painting of Suzanne Valadon was among the works permanently displayed at Le Mirliton night…
• A 1358 peace deal offered England roughly a quarter of France.During the Hundred Years' War, the First Treaty of London provided for about a quarter of French territory to…
• She kept returning to the rope. Her last act came at age 76.French performer Madame Saqui continued tightrope work into her seventies. At her last appearance in 1862, ag…
• A portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec. He is cooking in a kitchen.Édouard Vuillard's 1898 painting shows fellow artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec cooking lobster at a country h…
• Cannes gave it a mixed reception. Decades later, opinion shifted.Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me drew a polarized reaction at Cannes in 1992; contemporary reports described bot…
• One artist, two unexpected canvases: a skateboard and a team shirt.Qatari calligrapher Fatma Al Sharshani received two Paris Saint-Germain commissions: a skateboard design in 2…
• A captive king agreed to cede nearly half his country. France refused.In 1359, during the Hundred Years' War, the captive French king John II signed the Second Treaty of London. I…
• Paris seized a novel for immorality. The ban helped make it popular.Prévost's Manon Lescaut appeared in 1731 with unmarried lovers and a descent into crime. In 1733, copies for…
• The same succulent can cover a green roof or go into a soup.Petrosedum forsterianum grows naturally in parts of Europe and North Africa. Its low mat of shoots can be use…
• England and France signed a truce in 1343. Brittany kept fighting.The Truce of Malestroit froze each side's holdings and promised talks toward lasting peace. Neither monarch n…
• Win this bread contest and supply the French president's residence for a year.Paris has held an annual best-baguette competition since 1994. Eligible loaves are judged on qualities includ…
• A punctuation mark for “that was sarcasm”In 1899 French poet Alcanter de Brahm proposed a mark to signal irony. Its shape resembled a small backward-f…
• A lobster’s movement entered a diplomatic disputeIn the early 1960s Brazil and France disputed lobster fishing off Brazil’s coast. Brazil argued that lobsters…
• Peignoir comes from the action of combing hairPeignoir names a long outer garment associated with indoor dressing. It comes from French peigner, to comb, r…
• The name remembers the stationary stancePétanque places boules close to a small target ball. Players throw from a circle with both feet on the ground…
• Throwing shoes into machinery is not the secure etymologySabotage is often explained through workers throwing wooden sabots into machinery. That is an alleged etymolo…
• Satie bought seven identical suitsIn 1895, Erik Satie used proceeds from a small legacy to buy seven identical dun-colored suits. This became t…
• The garden could manufacture its own antiquityGarden follies could imitate ruined abbeys or ancient temples, supplying a romantic structure where no old ru…
• The ha-ha keeps animals out while preserving the viewA ha-ha uses a sunken ditch and steep wall to restrict access, such as keeping grazing livestock out of a gar…
• Anna Coleman Ladd used portrait skills for wartime masksDuring World War I, Anna Coleman Ladd made cosmetic masks for soldiers with facial injuries. She used pre-inj…
• Vaucanson’s flute player had a practical obstacleIn 1737, Jacques de Vaucanson built a life-size flute-playing figure with twelve tunes. Its fingers were not…
• Robert-Houdin’s chest changed the apparent contestRobert-Houdin’s Light and Heavy Chest let a child lift a wooden box before an adult failed to do the same. An…
• Mouchot demonstrated solar-powered ice makingAt the 1878 Paris exhibition, Augustin Mouchot and Abel Pifre displayed an engine using concentrated solar he…
• Sophie Blanchard carried celebration into the skyWhen Napoleon’s son was born, Sophie Blanchard flew over Paris and dropped leaflets announcing the birth. She…
• Giffard’s airship faced a limit imposed by windIn September 1852, Henri Giffard flew his steam-powered airship about twenty-seven kilometres from Paris. It…
• An iron plate could pass heat through the wallIn parts of southern Belgium and adjacent France and Luxembourg, iron plates behind kitchen fireplaces radiat…
• Nancy Wake recalled a long ride for communicationsAfter her wartime team lost its radio and codes, Nancy Wake recalled borrowing a bicycle to reach another rad…
• Canelé builds its contrast into a small shapeBordeaux’s canelé is a small fluted cylindrical pastry flavoured with rum and vanilla. It has a dark, thick c…
• Dutrieu’s bicycle acts already left the groundBelgian cyclist Hélène Dutrieu moved from racing to stunt performance. In 1903 she rode a vertical loop and d…
• A puzzle jug makes drinking into a challengePuzzle jugs have perforated necks that prevent a conventional drink without spilling. A hidden tube supplies…
• A jacquemart makes the clock’s action visibleA jacquemart is a mechanised wooden or metal figure that strikes a bell with a hammer. Often positioned on a…
• Marchand wished he had noticed the warning cardIn January 2017, 105-year-old Robert Marchand cycled 22.547 kilometres in an hour. Afterwards he said he coul…
• A bergère became a wheeled study chairThe French bergère is an upholstered armchair with enclosed sides. Charles Darwin modified one with wheels to…
• Rejected by the race, she crossed the ChannelA Channel swimming competition rejected Florence Chadwick in 1950 because she was not well known. She organis…
• The fake tanks were only partly hiddenIn World War II, the US Ghost Army used inflatable vehicles to suggest the presence of troops. Some concealme…
• The victory vase was too heavy for the galleryA marble urn originally intended for Napoleon passed to Britain after his defeat and was carved to celebrate…
• The space cat received her name after returningA cat designated C341 survived a French suborbital flight from Algeria on 18 October 1963. The media named he…
• The proposed telegraph used snailsIn France in 1850, Benoit claimed that previously mated snails could communicate at a distance. His apparatus…
• A nineteenth-century machine sent signatures over wiresCaselli’s pantelegraph was an early facsimile device for sending handwriting and drawings over telegraph line…
• The gold boxes reached Paris with lead insideOn 15 May 1855, gold bound for France was stolen from a train in England and replaced with lead. The boxes co…
• Fuel for a 1907 motoring race travelled by camelThe 1907 Peking-to-Paris race relied on fuel stations arranged along its route. Camels carried supplies ahead…
• An animal painter sought police permission to wear trousersNineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur visited livestock markets to study animals. She preferred trou…
• Rescued on a railway station floorIn January 1943, Alan Magee was thrown from a damaged American bomber over France with an unusable parachute.…
• War scares at home, a toast on the groundIn 1898, French and British-Egyptian forces met at Fashoda, in present-day South Sudan. Their colonial rivalr…
• Opera by telephone in 1890Paris’s théâtrophone became a service in 1890, sending theatre and opera performances over telephone connecti…
• A machine for stockings dates to 1589William Lee invented the stocking frame in England in 1589. It imitated hand-knitting movements. Early versio…
• An artist fills damaged walls with LegoJan Vormann’s Dispatchwork uses colourful Lego bricks to fill gaps in urban walls. A dull damaged patch becom…
• Even fire and furs could not stop her shiveringEurope suffered an exceptionally cold winter in 1708–1709. The Duchess of Orléans described shivering and bar…
• A rhinoceros inspired wigs in eighteenth-century ParisClara, an Indian rhinoceros, arrived in Rotterdam in 1741 and was exhibited across Europe. In Paris in 1749 s…
• A dressmaker built containers for studying sea lifeJeanne Villepreux-Power worked in sewing and embroidery in Paris, including a royal wedding gown. After movin…
• A dyer’s knowledge helped him make identity papersAs a young man in France, Adolfo Kaminsky worked in a dye shop and became interested in colour chemistry. Dur…