Life in 19th Century Paris
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Beneath the gaslit streets of nineteenth-century Paris, beneath the clatter of carriages over cobblestones and the cries of marchands ambulants, lay another city altogether — silent, cold, and made entirely of bones. The Paris catacombs were not ancient in the way visitors sometimes imagined: they were a creation of modernity, a bureaucratic solution to a […]
The street is deafening. It roars and jostles and reeks of horses and coffee and coal smoke. Then — a flash of black. A woman, tall, in deep mourning, lifting the hem of her skirt with one gloved hand as she crosses the boulevard. Agile, noble, with a leg like a statue. She meets your […]
Every June, the Bois de Boulogne lost its mind. Not gradually. All at once. The Grand Prix de Paris — France’s most glamorous, most crowded, most hotly anticipated racing event — was, officially, a horse race. The horses ran. The horses were timed. A horse won. But if you think that is what the 150,000 […]
In 1886, the French government faced a delightful problem. The centenary of the Revolution was approaching, and Paris — host of four world’s fairs already — needed to outdo itself entirely. A competition was launched for a centrepiece that would announce France’s industrial genius to every nation on Earth. The winning design had to be, […]
Every first of April, something quietly absurd overtakes the French. People creep behind unsuspecting victims, armed with paper cutouts. A shout rings out — Poisson d’avril! — and the target discovers a fish taped to their back. It is a tradition so cheerfully specific, so stubbornly French, that it deserves more than a footnote in […]
Long before digital filters, AI generators, or sophisticated editing suites, photographers were already bending reality to their will. In the earliest decades of the medium, when photography still carried an aura of scientific truth, artists and tricksters alike discovered how malleable that “truth” could be. With nothing more than scissors, glue, and a sharp eye […]
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In 2026, this blog enters its fifteenth year of existence. From its awkward beginning, it has grown into a repository of 230 posts and over 1,000 illustrations on all aspects of life in 19th-century Paris. It is a well-read blog, no doubt about it. Old posts don’t get buried under new ones. They are read […]
If you were to time-travel to Paris during the Belle Époque with visions of Victorian Christmas splendor dancing in your head—the decorated trees, the stockings hung by the chimney, the carolers in the snow—you’d find yourself in for a rather confusing holiday season. The French, as always, did things their own way, and Christmas in […]
“Is it a man, a womanIs it an angel, a demon?I am the complete beingI exist by myself aloneAnd have resolved the problemOf Plato’s androgynes.” Etienne de Jouy Anyone who opened a novel in 19th-century France would have encountered the name George Sand—a writer so prolific that Balzac himself complained he couldn’t keep up with […]
