Lindsey Hansen Guide

Vive la culture!!
It's been seven long months that museums and monuments in France have been closed. But as of May 19, things are beginning to reopen (following strict capacity limitations and sanitation guidelines, of course!). It't feels SO GOOD to have the country's cultural lifeblood flowing again!
This past weekend, I got to dip my toes back into guiding during a visit with some fellow guides and CNAM guide-conférencier graduates in one of my favorite places: Provins. (Check in the comments for a little video of the action taken by the always wonderful Anne Picard). In the coming months, as I have the chance to visit more museums and even maybe (fingers crossed!) do some real guiding, I hope to get back to posting more regularly here. Be on the lookout for more little doses of culture, coming soon!

Do you know where you can find this delightful vestige of Paris’ Art Deco past?

It’s the former entrance to the city’s zoo, which is located inside the Parc de Vincennes, the large park at the southeast edge of Paris.

The Parc zoologique du bois de Vincennes was opened to the public in 1934, right at the height of the Art Deco craze in architecture. But the first plans for the zoo were much older. As early as the 1860s, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, zoologist and director of Paris’ Natural History Museum, dreamed of creating a zoo with the specific aim of studying animal behaviors. Saint-Hilaire would never get to see dream come to fruition, though. It would take another 70 years before a temporary zoo would be set up in conjunction with the 1931 World’s Fair, and another 3 years to turn that temporary space into a permanent one.

Since its inauguration in 1934, the zoo has been known for its emblematic Grand Rocher, the 65-meter (213-foot)-tall artificial mountain at its center. This enigmatic bit of fake nature is visible from long distances, even today.

By the early 2000s, the zoo had fallen into disrepair, and the Grand Rocher posed a major safety hazard as bits of it had begun to crumble and fall down. The zoo was closed for repairs in 2008 and reopened to the public after significant renovation efforts in 2014.

This beautiful bit of Art Deco kitsch no longer serves as an entrance into the park, but I’m so glad they decided to restore and preserve it. It’s such a joy to stumble upon stunning vestiges of Paris’ past like this, often in the most unexpected places. And it’s a great reminder of how important it is to always keep your eyes peeled when you’re walking around Paris. You never know what treasures are waiting for you just around the bend!

Night and day. Or, the delightful Neo-Gothic drama of the Basilique Sainte-Clothilde.

Constructed from 1846-1857, this beauty is France’s *first* Neo-Gothic (aka Gothic Revival) church.

Beginning in the late 18th century, many European countries, including England and Germany, and a bit later France, began reinvesting in Gothic architecture. The style had become outmoded beginning in the 15th century as the Italian Renaissance and later the Neoclassical styles privileged the architecture of classical antiquity over “barbaric” medieval designs (the term Gothic was actually coined by Italian art critic Vasari, who lobbed it as an insult at the style of the “barbaric” Goths from the north). But in the 19th century, the Romantic movements in art and literature began to celebrate the “romantic ruins” of Gothic buildings. And then, a growing tide of nationalism motivated England and Germany to claim the Gothic style as “theirs.”

But any medievalist can tell you that the Gothic style was a *French* invention. And throughout the Middle Ages, the style was called the “opus francigenum,” or “French Work.”

France entered into the Romantic reinvestment in Gothic art in the mid-19th century with the publication of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The novel reignited popular interest in Gothic masterpieces like Notre-Dame de Paris and spurred Violet-le-Duc’s extensive restoration campaigns of Gothic buildings throughout France. And at the same time that these restorations were going on, new churches based on old models were built, beginning with this stunner in the 7th arrondissement.

Want to know how to tell a “real” medieval building from a revival one? There are two major tells that are easy to spot. First, look to the towers. If they’re perfectly identical like this, there’s a good chance it’s revival (true Gothic buildings rarely have matching towers). And second, is all the lines of the stone are perfectly crisp, there’s a good chance it’s 19th century.

Do you know of any other Neo-Gothic beauties around Paris? Or in France more broadly?