Paris Panthéon restoration

This video is called Panthéon, Paris.

From The Art Newspaper:

Facelift for Panthéon, Paris’s grande dame

Building that has become an expression of national pride to undergo a €100m restoration lasting ten years—but funding is still to be found

By Claudia Barbieri Childs

Published online: 21 March 2013

One of the largest restoration projects in Europe is due to begin this August in the French capital. The Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the French body responsible for caring for state monuments, is preparing for a ten-year, €100m programme to restore the Panthéon, an 18th-century building that has become an expression of national pride. During the first phase, the structure will be covered in scaffolding with awnings featuring work by a yet-to-be-selected contemporary artist.

Classical beauty

The building was conceived by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot as a church dedicated to Geneviève, a patron saint of Paris. But the 1789 revolution swept away the old order a year before the building was completed, and in 1791, the National Constituent Assembly ordained its rededication as the temple of the new republican nation. Despite being repurposed many times in the 19th century, the Panthéon has become the final resting place of some of the great and the good of French culture, science and national identity, including Rousseau, Zola, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Malraux, Marie Curie, the socialist hero Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, a symbol of the French Resistance.

The architectural style of the building, which boasts an 82m-high dome, may not be original, but its method of construction is. Soufflot was one of the first to use a skeleton of iron bars set into the masonry, which enabled him to create a building that was the tallest in Paris until it was outdone in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel’s all-metal tower.

Although the use of iron reinforcement was a major step forward in architectural engineering, it is also one of the major reasons for the Panthéon’s current sorry state. A leaking roof has rusted the ironwork, causing it to swell and to split the stone cladding.

In the first phase of restoration work, which will take 18 months and cost an estimated €19m, the lantern, the cupola and the colonnade that supports the base of the dome will be rejointed, and replaced with new stone and ironwork where necessary. The dome’s lead roofing will also be replaced. Where possible, the original ironwork will be stabilised and treated to prevent further decay. The glasswork of the dome and the lantern will be replaced to improve the interior lighting.

Subsequent phases will restore the Grecian peristyle, the vaults, the interior and external walls and the stone platform on which the building rests.

Funding challenge

During the first stage, the dome and its colonnade will be enveloped in freestanding scaffolding that will be a piece of monumental engineering in its own right; piling 17m deep will support a 37m-high, 315-tonne base. However grand the Panthéon and its restoration, though, these are hard times. In a move that represents a major departure for France, funding for the project will come not only from the state and the usual institutional philanthropists but also, it is hoped, from an online crowd-funding appeal. So far, the appeal has raised only €57,000, but donations will be taken until 6 May.

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Horse meat scandal previous history

When, in 1870-71, German troops besieged Paris, horse meat was the only meat available in the city (after elephants had been killed).

From the Alpha Galileo site:

Horsemeat Food Scandal Has History

19 February 2013 Taylor & Francis

Publication title: Horsemeat as Human Food in France
Author: Daniel Gade
Publication type: Other

Recently, headlines have been focused on stories of horsemeat being found in supermarket meat products world-wide. Numerous reports have been filed including a recall on Findus beef lasagna products, which are distributed to the main UK supermarkets. With all of this commotion, one may question the root of this epidemic and seek knowledge in the use of horsemeat as human food.

History of this rising issue appears in Ecology of Food and Nutrition (Volume 5, Issue 1, published by Taylor & Francis). In this article, titled Horsemeat as Human Food in France, Daniel Gade explores the acceptance of horsemeat as an appealing food for humans in France. Due to a food shortage crisis, resistance to hippophagy evolved making France the horseflesh center of the Western world by 1910.

Access the article Horsemeat as Human Food in France FREE for a limited time:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03670244.1976.9990440

USA: Many Europeans are fretting these days over horse meat, and whether it might have adulterated their shepherd’s pie. Over here, it’s all about the red snapper: here.

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French painter Manet London exhibition

By Christine Lindey in Britain:

Manet: Portraying Life

Royal Academy, London W1

Saturday 09 February 2013

Edouard Manet‘s portraits defied convention by conveying the essence of his subjects through the act of painting itself,

The invention of photography in 1839 had a momentous impact on art, not least on portraiture.

Previously most portraits had depicted the ruling class but now the petit bourgeois and professional classes had likenesses of themselves. But this partial democratisation gave renewed social status to painted portraits and as the bourgeoisie gained in size and power so grew the demand.

By the early 1860s when Edouard Manet (1832-1883) reached artistic maturity, most artists saw portrait painting as a tedious but necessary means of survival as they aspired to the elevated heights of history painting.

So why did Manet, a man of independent means, bother to paint portraits? And why should we pay £15 to look at his depictions of people with most of whom we have no connection or knowledge? Because his portraits transgress their subject’s identity and many are not purely portraits anyway.

Manet answered the poet-critic Charles Baudelaire‘s call for artists to distill permanent and heroic beauty from the evanescent spectacle of contemporary urban life. A republican and a realist, Manet was impatient with the hypocrisies of the Second Empire. Challenging its aesthetic and social expectations by which philosophical and moral ideas were communicated through biblical, historical or mythological narratives, Manet painted non-narrative representations of the everyday on a grand scale.

His passion was for people. Making the most of his privileged gender and wealth, he strolled through the boulevards, parks and cafes of Haussmann’s Paris observing details of dress, gesture and comportment in the fast-changing city’s public places where social classes intermingled.

Painting directly from models or friends and family posed in the studio, he recreated his vivid impressions of modernity.

Manet often portrayed people to characterise social “types,” whether commissioned or not, and entertainers and their clients in the leisured classes feature large. The Street Singer depicts a life-size, itinerant busker emerging from a bar clutching her guitar while The Artist: Marcelin Desboutin shows the subject in scruffy clothes. His bushy beard and long hair protruding from a battered hat typifies a bohemian.

The Amazon typifies Madame Saguez, a shop keeper’s daughter, as an elegant horse woman, the newly fashionable bourgeois pastime in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.

Only occasionally did Manet use the traditional portrait convention of identifying a sitter’s social role through attributes – the writer Emile Zola is pictured at a book-laden desk and the painter Eva Gonzalez at her easel, palette in hand.

Manet understood that conveying modernity was as much a matter of form as of subject. Realising that speed characterised modern times he echoed this by working quickly and spontaneously to retain the freshness of his initial responses.

Leaving hands or parts of the background seemingly unfinished imply previous and potentially imminent mobility of hands, bodies and facial expressions.

When most artists vied with photography to reproduce detailed illusions of their subjects Manet welcomed the medium as a liberator from such laboured, glass-like finish. He replaced the academician’s modulated half tones, glazes and repressed brush marks with stark tonal contrasts and broad, visible brushstrokes, while unmodulated areas of colour and visible outlines stressed the flatness of the canvas.

To contemporaries such audacious lack of finish signified professional incompetence. Exposing the materials and processes of his craft was a revolutionary act which asserted that the “how” of painting was as important as the “what” in conveying meaning.

Manet’s paintings impart his pleasure in manipulating wet paint to convey the physiognomy and character of his sitters.

Observing his subject intensely, he then outlined the curve of a cheek, the pleats of a dress, the swirl of a hat with swift and accurately judged sweeps of the paint-laden brush.

With similar boldness he made sharp transitions of tone. In his portrait of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, the velvety black of hat, eye and necktie contrast with the pale creaminess of nose and cheek

The exhibition would have worked better as a smaller and more rigorously defined one in the Royal Academy’s upstairs galleries. Its main spaces are padded out by closing two rooms, filling another with reference material and, oddly, giving the medium-sized Music In The Tuileries Gardens a room to itself despite its being a crowd scene rather than a portrait.

Some of the captions give distracting and overly detailed information about the portraits’ sitters but they also provide interesting explanations about patronage and the social significance of dress and settings.

If working now Manet would depict people wearing jeans, hoodies and trainers in coffee shops and shopping malls. Extracting beauty from the commonplace, Manet’s paintings express and transgress his own times.

This is a chance to see originals gathered from all over the world by a giant of Modernism whose works are so supremely visual that no printed or digital reproduction can do them justice. Go if you can.

Runs until April 14. Box office: (020) 7300 8000.

See also here.

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Urban foxes in Paris

This video from England is about young foxes playing in London.

From Discovery News:

Foxes Run Wild in Paris: DNews Nugget

by Christina Reed

Tue Nov 27, 2012 05:52 AM ET

In the 1990s, the city of lights exterminated all their foxes in an anti-rabies campaign. Now about 15 wild foxes have returned to the streets of Paris, where an estimated 40 to 70 pounds of leftover food per person is thrown away each year, according to Food Industry Minister Guillaume Garot.

The foxes are taking advantage of the leftover food trash, and have skipped the forested parks along the borders of the city in favor of the more touristic and restaurant-lined gardens in the center, such as Jardin du Luxembourg. Philippe Jacob, head of the newly set up Parisian Biodiversity Observatory, said their return was an encouraging sign of a healthy ecosystem. About 10,000 foxes are said to inhabit London.

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French president Hollande acknowledges 1961 massacre of Algerians

This is a French video on the 1961 massacre of Algerians. It says about itself:

Commemoration and demonstration for the victims of the massacre of Algerians in Paris on the 17th of October 1961.

By Antoine Lerougetel and Alex Lantier in France:

French president Hollande acknowledges 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris

29 October 2012

On the 51st anniversary of the police massacre of hundreds of unarmed Algerian protesters in Paris, French Socialist Party (PS) president François Hollande offered the first official recognition by the French government that the massacre actually occurred.

His brief communiqué stated: “On October 17, 1961, Algerians who were demonstrating for the right to independence were killed in an act of bloody repression. The Republic recognizes lucidly these facts. Fifty-one years after the tragedy, I pay tribute to the memory of the victims.”

The massacre took place during Algeria’s war for independence against France, when the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) called a peaceful protest in Paris against a curfew for “Muslim Algerians” imposed by then-President Charles de Gaulle. Some 30,000 Algerians marched. They were attacked by police under the orders of Paris prefect Maurice Papon, a former official in France’s fascist Vichy regime who played a major role in the deportation of Jews to Nazi Germany during World War II.

Large numbers of Algerian demonstrators, who had come to a peaceful protest with their entire families, were murdered–shot, drowned in the Seine River, or beaten to death. The exact number of victims is unknown, as police archives have not been made public, a key demand of victims’ relatives and survivors of the massacre. Historian Jean-Luc Einodi, who wrote La Bataille de Paris (The Battle of Paris) about the massacre, estimates the death toll at 250, though Papon’s absurd tally of 3 dead and 64 wounded still stands as the French state’s official toll. (French filmmaker Alain Tasma made a moving film in 2005, Nuit noire (October 17, 1961), about the incident.)

Police arrested 11,538 demonstrators and detained them in locations throughout Paris, including the Vél D’Hiv cycling stadium–where, 19 years before, Paris police under the orders of René Bousquet had detained thousands of Jews before sending them to Nazi death camps.

President Francois Hollande has acknowledged the brutality of France’s colonisation of Algeria, but stopped short of a full apology: here.

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Paris Commune after 140 years

This video says about itself:

Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris 1871), 2000.

See also here.

This video from Yale University in the USA is called The Paris Commune and Its Legacy.

By Daniel Payne:

A flame that can’t be extinguished

Friday 27 May 2011

They take the past seriously in Paris.

Even as cars and vans were weaving in and out of the narrow road and the rain was falling steadily on the queues outside, those waiting to be let into the Hotel de Ville’s exhibition on the Commune continued to line up patiently.

And as the throng of visitors slowly filed into the hallway ushers barked “Silence, please!” as some of the curious entrants immediately started chatting amid the warm and dry surroundings of the exhibition.

It’s proved hugely popular, attracting over 50,000 visitors in its first seven weeks.

The two-month expo at the French capital’s “city hall” has been marking 140 years since the short life of the Paris Commune of 1871.

This was the momentous decision by the city’s left-wing authority effectively to declare independence from the rest of the country.

This owed as much to indignation at France’s performance and defeat in the war against the newly formed German empire as to the worsening conditions for industrial workers.

Inside the exhibition there’s something for everyone – newspaper cuttings, diary entries, copies of actual proclamations by the Commune and even sketches of dead bodies by Edouard Manet.

The impressionist painter was one of the highest-profile supporters of the Commune, albeit a cautious and critical one.

In its two-month life the Commune, which was fully democratically elected by all its citizens, passed a raft of progressive and far-reaching laws aimed at improving the lives of its mostly industrial-working population.

Among its reforms were the separation of church and state, pensions for widows and children of dead soldiers and measures to boost workers self-management.

The problem with such high-minded idealism was that it flew in the face of the wishes of the centre-right French government, led by Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers.

On his orders the government had decamped to Versailles rather than take on the Commune when it was declared on March 18 1871.

While the Commune issued declarations and proclamations – and argued with itself – Thiers mobilised an army to crush it, and did so bloodily in the last week of May, killing over 20,000 people in the process.

It’s worth pointing out that those running the Commune were themselves no angels.

Before they were brutally quelled in what became known as La Semaine Sanglante – Bloody Week – they executed hostages including the archbishop of Paris in retaliation for the French government’s refusal to release their own leader Pierre-Auguste Blanqui.

The first day of the Commune was marked by the horrific lynching of two generals who had served in the Franco-Prussian War.

“It was the most destructive event in the city’s history,” says Pierre Casselle, the Hotel de Ville’s head librarian. “Paris’s monuments didn’t suffer so much during any of the country’s wars.”

There have even been similar Commune 140-themed events in other French towns.

In St Pierre des Corps, near Tours a local historian has set up a public exhibition of his own, displaying various documents, sources and memorabilia from the event.

Some of it is quite shocking.

In one framed drawing a young boy is shown in front of a barn door while a firing squad prepares to shoot him.

According to the story behind the image, the boy asked the soldiers permission to go and tell his mother first.

They allowed him to do so, then he returned and they shot him as planned.

But while the popularity of occasions surrounding the events of 140 years ago is undeniable, the controversy over what it all represents continues.

Popular historian Jacques Rougerie is among those in France who feels the story of the Commune has been whitewashed. “The Paris Commune was an example of full democracy,” he said in a 2008 interview. “Deputies were elected by the people and could be dismissed by the people at any time. In modern France we are governed by a political class that doesn’t serve the interests of the people.”

Patrick Fonteneau, the organiser of the St Pierre exhibition, feels what the history books concentrate on is quite telling: “They tend to talk more about the deaths of hostages and the destruction of monuments than they do about the reasons why the Commune was set up.”

Yet Pierre Casselle takes a different view: “There has been criticism of history teaching in schools and colleges in France from almost everyone for many years,” he says. “Changes in the school curriculum have led to entire pages of French history disappearing or reappearing, but I don’t think the Commune has particularly suffered because of this.”

The legacy of the Commune resonated far beyond the shores of France.

Marx and Lenin studied the events closely throughout their lives.

Marx thought the Communards should have seized the Banque Nationale instead of asking it politely for money, while Lenin, Stalin and Mao reckoned the Commune died because it failed to match the savagery of its enemies – an opinion that was to have lethal consequences for millions of people in the years to come.

Nonetheless, where the Commune succeeded was inspiring generations of people in the belief that they could collectively take control of their lives and change things for the better.

Whatever you think about it, the Paris Commune was to all intents and purposes an actual realisation of the ideal aspired to by Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg just eight years before – government of the people, by the people, for the people.

It also arguably bequeathed to the left in France a self-confidence and eloquence rarely seen in Britain.

The weekend before the St Pierre des Corps exhibition was set up, a mass rally was held in Tours, attended by supporters of various trade unions and the Socialist Party.

Banners and speeches railed against the policies of President Sarkozy and offered a six-point programme aimed at getting France more speedily out of recession, before the protesters launched unashamedly into a rendition of the Internationale.

Perhaps the last word belongs to another great impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. No friend of the Commune – he narrowly escaped death at the hands of a gang of some of their armed supporters – he once said: “They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame that never dies.”

It’s a fair bet that no amount of leadership squabbles or sex scandals can douse that flame.

Women in the Paris Commune: here.