32 stories from this place.
Franz Reichelt, an Austrian-born Parisian tailor, designed a wearable parachute suit and obtained permission to test it from the Eiffel Tower — with a dummy. On the morning of 4 February 1912, before Pathé news cameras, he jumped himself. The suit failed and he fell 57 metres to his death.
Read the story →The French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil left home in 1760 to observe the transit of Venus from India. War kept him at sea for the 1761 transit; he waited eight more years for the 1769 one — which a single cloud obscured. He returned after eleven and a half years to find himself declared dead, his wife remarried, and his estate divided.
Read the story →Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script on 22 September 1822 — the famous *Lettre à M. Dacier*. He had been working on the problem for fourteen years. He reportedly fainted on the day of the breakthrough and was bedridden for five days. He died ten years later, aged 41.
Read the story →Émile Zola's letter J'Accuse...! appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, naming seven French Army officers and accusing them of the deliberate frame-up of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The print run was 300,000 copies — ten times the paper's normal sale. Zola was convicted of libel within a month and fled to England. The letter is conventionally the founding document of the modern public intellectual.
Read the story →Émilie du Châtelet's French translation and mathematical commentary on Newton's *Principia* was completed in summer 1749 while she was carrying a fourth child at age 42. She finished the manuscript at Lunéville on 1 September 1749, gave birth on 4 September, and died of puerperal fever on 10 September. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, remained the standard French Newton until the 20th century.
Read the story →A Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille fortress prison on 14 July 1789. Bernard-René de Launay surrendered after the outer gates fell. The crowd released seven inmates and killed the governor. The date became the French national holiday in 1880.
Read the story →Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911. She died of aplastic anaemia at 66 in 1934 — a substantial direct consequence of forty years of unprotected exposure to the radium and polonium she had isolated. Her laboratory notebooks remain radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
Read the story →Margaretha Geertruida Zelle — performing as Mata Hari — was a 41-year-old Dutch exotic dancer convicted of espionage for Germany by a French court martial in July 1917 and executed by firing squad at Vincennes on 15 October 1917. The post-war access to the French and German intelligence archives substantially weakens the original espionage case against her.
Read the story →The Paris Commune ruled the French capital from 18 March to 28 May 1871. It was established after the Franco-Prussian War defeat and the bourgeois Versailles government's attempt to disarm Paris. The Versailles army retook the city in the Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week") of 21-28 May 1871, killing approximately 10,000-15,000 Communards in street fighting and executions.
Read the story →The Reign of Terror ran from 5 September 1793 to 27 July 1794. The Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre executed about 17,000 people for political offences. About 10,000 more died in prison without sentence. Robespierre himself was guillotined on 28 July 1794.
Read the story →Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been convicted of treason on 22 December 1894. His public military degradation took place at the École Militaire in Paris on the morning of 5 January 1895 in front of approximately 4,000 spectators. His epaulettes were torn off, his sabre broken, his uniform stripes cut. The watching crowd shouted antisemitic slogans. He shouted that he was innocent.
Read the story →Marguerite Steinheil was 39 years old and the principal mistress of French President Félix Faure when Faure suffered a fatal stroke during a sexual encounter at the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899. Ten years later she was tried for the murder of her husband and mother and was acquitted.
Read the story →A Paris roofing contractor named Henri Buronfosse reportedly confessed on his deathbed in 1927 that he and an unnamed accomplice had deliberately blocked the chimney of Émile Zola's apartment on the night of 28 September 1902, causing the carbon-monoxide poisoning that killed the novelist. The confession was relayed through a Catholic priest and was not published until 1953.
Read the story →Tycho Brahe wore a metal prosthetic nose for the entire adult portion of his life after losing the original to a student duel in 1566. The Renaissance prosthetics tradition that produced his nose was a substantial European craft specialism that survived from the 15th to the 19th century before being substantively replaced by 20th-century plastic surgery.
Read the story →Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was the German military attaché at the Paris embassy from 1891 to 1897. The bordereau — the handwritten memorandum that produced the original 1894 Dreyfus treason conviction — had been retrieved from his embassy wastepaper basket by the French intelligence service through its routine cleaning-staff espionage operation. He spent the rest of his life refusing to comment.
Read the story →Alexandrine Zola was sleeping next to Émile when the chimney filled their Paris bedroom with carbon monoxide on the night of 28 September 1902. She woke up. He did not. She lived another twenty-three years, becoming the principal custodian of his literary estate and an unexpectedly forceful figure in the post-Affair Dreyfusard movement.
Read the story →Anatole France delivered the funeral oration for Émile Zola at Montmartre Cemetery on 5 October 1902. His phrase that Zola had been "a moment of the human conscience" became one of the most quoted lines in French public memory. France was effectively shunned by the antisemitic faction of the Académie française for the next decade.
Read the story →When Émile Zola's remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908, the journalist Louis Grégori shot Alfred Dreyfus twice in the arm at point-blank range. Both bullets struck. Dreyfus survived. Grégori was acquitted by a Parisian jury three months later.
Read the story →While [Alfred Dreyfus was held in solitary confinement on Devil's Island](/articles/dreyfus-devils-island), his wife Lucie wrote to him every week and waited months for replies. Most of her letters were heavily censored by the colonial administration before they reached him. Most of his were censored before they reached her. They corresponded for almost five years across a 7,000-kilometre gap without knowing whether the other was still alive.
Read the story →Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s and 1680s. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699. The subsequent thirty-year priority war split the European mathematical community along Newtonian-British and Leibnizian-Continental lines and substantially retarded British mathematics for the next century.
Read the story →Alfred Lacroix arrived on Martinique six weeks after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée had killed thirty thousand people. He spent the next four years on the island reconstructing exactly what had happened. The science of volcanology, more or less, is what he found.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →Georges Picquart was the head of French Army intelligence in 1896 when he realised that the wrong man had been convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island. His superiors ordered him to keep quiet. He refused, was framed for forgery, and was imprisoned. Twelve years later he became Minister of War.
Read the story →In June 1783 a 27-kilometre fissure opened in southern Iceland and erupted for eight months. It killed about a fifth of Iceland's population. The sulphur cloud killed an estimated 23,000 in England. The crop failures it caused across Europe fed directly into the French Revolution of 1789.
Read the story →Madeleine Lévy was the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus. She worked with the French Resistance, was arrested by the Lyon Gestapo in November 1943, was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, and died of typhus there in January 1944. She was 25.
Read the story →Alfred Dreyfus spent four years and seven months in solitary confinement on a small island off French Guiana. He was the only prisoner. His guards were forbidden to speak to him. He kept a diary and survived.
Read the story →Émile Zola was found dead in his Paris bedroom on the morning of 29 September 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a smoking fire. The chimney was blocked. A bricklayer's deathbed confession decades later named the man who had blocked it.
Read the story →A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →Isabella of France crossed the Channel with fifteen hundred soldiers in 1326, deposed her husband, and ruled England with her lover. Her son removed her at seventeen.
Read the story →A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.
Read the story →Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
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