Do we really know those places and monuments that
have been silent witnesses of famous events and people?
These tours revitalize history with an immersive experience.
Let’s explore the places of the Saint Germain district where the pages rich in events of the French Revolution were written …
We shall start near the Procope, the landmark of the Philosophers and then of the Revolutionaries and tremble under the “light freshness” of the guillotine and discover “The Friend of the People”, Marat’s journal that will set the “street” on fire! Enter the Club des Cordeliers and dive into the bath of revolutionary Terror, bloody clashes between Montagnards and Girondins, rivalries between Jacobins and Cordeliers, between Danton and Robespierre! Shudder at the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday and climb up to the “Pantheon”, the sacred temple of revolutionary mysticism! Get off at the Maison Nationale de Sûreté, the “Luxembourg” turned prison and go through “the Odéon”, the Théâtre Egalité, former French Theater! Say hello to Olympe de Gouges, the feminist voice of the Revolution and admire the Temple of the Supreme Being, formerly Saint-Sulpice Church! End your journey at the ruins of the Abbey of Saint-Germain, the epicenter of the “September massacres” 92.
The Ancien Régime was no more!
One of the flagship subjects of Paris historians, available in the Blue Lion collection with this audio guide in French for a memorable experience.
Castel Sant’Angelo, one of the most emblematic monuments of Rome. Its history is strongly intertwined with that of the Eternal City and marks some of its most significant events.
This audio guide in Italian leads you to the discovery of one of the most symbolic monuments of the city. Dominating the panorama of Rome with its imposing size, it was built on the right bank of the Tiber, near the Vatican, by the will of Hadrian who had it built as a dynastic mausoleum of the imperial family.
Erected therefore as a burial place with a strong symbolic value, the building was soon abandoned and reused as a refuge by the Roman population, constantly threatened by ferocious invaders.
It was thus adapted to a fortress and then transformed into a real castle surrounded by walls with bastions at the four corners. Over the course of about four centuries, new structures superimposed on the pre-existing ones, distorting them, modifying them and sometimes erasing them, in a process of transformations which interpenetrated one into the other without interruption, up to the most recent epoch.
The mighty structure of Castel Sant’Angelo, which has since immemorial time the reputation of the “impregnable fortress” of Rome, frequented by popes in every situation of threat, is therefore in reality a multifaceted and complex organism, of which the structures of the primitive imperial mausoleum, the subsequent defensive apparatus and the later residential nucleus, consisting of the ensemble of the papal apartments, the chapel, the warehouses and the prisons.
Strolling inside and looking out from its terraces will be for us not only an aesthetic but also and above all historical experience that will allow us to partially relive the centuries-old, sometimes cruel, fascinating and intrigued history of Rome.
By fleeing his creditors, Balzac finds a place that inspires him to write. He will complete his Human Comedy here.
In 1840 Honoré de Balzac left Paris Saint Germain to settle in Passy, which was not then a district of Paris. He wants to flee his creditors and put himself out of the reach of the judicial officers. He occupies an apartment on the ground floor of this building overlooking Rue Raynouard. It was here that the author of the Human Comedy experienced his most prolific period and that he finally acquired the notoriety and success so sought after. The house has been transformed into a museum and houses a library, the archives of Balzac and Théophile Gauthier as well as portraits of the author and his entourage and objects from his daily life.
Follow in the footsteps of the great 19th-century writer with this audio guide from the Blue Lion collection, enriched with images and text.
Travel through Paris to find Balzac: the writer is indissolubly linked to the capital.
But where did he actually live? And what are the quarters of his characters such as Eugène de Rastignac and Père Goriot? Discovering the intimate life of the characters in “La Comédie humaine” and their creator in the places they frequented, such is the purpose of this multimedia guide. The author, Jean-Christophe Sarrot, accompanies us in the two districts that make up Balzacian Paris, the Marais, place of the novelist’s adolescence, and Saint Germain, where Balzac, in search of success, even created businesses in the ‘editing.
He was the first French writer to put Paris at the center of his stories. Through the novels of “La Comédie humaine”, Balzac paints a picture of a city in full mutation and a time in turmoil that he himself lived: the Restoration and the July Monarchy. His characters are born from the city or are transformed by it, and transform it in turn.
Victor Hugo is Paris. Who knows better all its nooks and alleys, in which he brings the characters of “Les Misérables” to life?
Blue Lion Guides offers two “Hugo in Paris” tours. The great poet undoubtedly had an eternal regret: that of not having been born in Paris, the city of his heart. Paris was to become for him the beacon of Humanity: “In the twentieth century, there will be an extraordinary nation […] This nation will have Paris as its capital, and will not be called France; it will be called Europe. It will be called Europe in the twentieth century, and in the following centuries, even more transfigured, it will be called Humanity ”.
The first route of this audio guide is a trip to the heart of the Paris of the youth of Victor Hugo, and its center is the Jardin du Luxembourg. It goes from rue des Feuillantines (You must remember the green Feuillantines…) to rue du Dragon, passing through place Saint-Sulpice. The second course is centered on the period of the July Monarchy, a period of irresistible rise for Hugo.
Discovering esoteric Paris: the first route takes you through the Temple district to the whole of Saint Jacques.
Among all the readings that can be done in the city of Paris, there is obviously the esoteric reading, a category that no large human concentration can do without.
This is what authenticated spiritual masters such as Gilles Corrozet, Éliphas Lévi, Papus, Fulcanelli, René Guénon, Jean Phaure as well as some of the most prestigious writers and poets of the 19th and 20th centuries did (Honoré de Balzac, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, André Queneau) and even more recently, successful novelists such as Umberto Eco or Dan Brown, whose Da Vinci Code has been the worldwide success that has been knows.
This audio guide will lead you to the discovery of the secret spiritual doctrines from which so many men of letters and beyond draw their inspiration.
In the Founding Fathers’ Footsteps… Paris was central to the American Revolution. Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and John Paul Jones were here!
Written by three American authors and guides living in Paris, this audio guide walks through the main spots of the Revolution-era American presence on Paris’s left bank. From the statue of Jefferson in front of the Hôtel de Salm, which inspired the design of Monticello, to the Hôtel de York, where the Treaty of Paris was signed, reaching the Luxembourg Palace, where Thomas Paine was imprisoned, and among stories of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones and Lafayette, this multimedia immersive tour evokes the great events that contributed to American independence and the people (American and French) who made them happen.
Inspiring and repulsive, the capital so hated by Rousseau has gradually established itself as an ambiguous place that marked his work.
For Rousseau, “the man of nature”, Paris has never been a very popular place to live. When he arrived there for the first time in 1731, his preconceptions of a flamboyant and sumptuous capital were quickly put to the test. Rousseau is disillusioned with the foul neighborhoods and the behavior of the men who live there. Disappointed, he will draw in his writings an unflattering portrait of Paris in which he reduces the magnificence of the city to a place where social miseries and vices are concentrated. Source of inspiration and disgust, the capital will nourish its work and allow him to make a name for itself. It is in Paris itself that we invite you to follow in the footsteps of the famous writer and philosopher, through this audio guide and its’ two walks.
If the Marais district has many facets to offer, it is undeniably one of the cradles of the invention of the Parisian mansion …
City of art in Paris, the Marais now appeals to lovers of history and architecture who like to get lost in the winding streets of this preserved district. Through its fabulous mansions which reveal themselves at the bend of a street, behind a gate, a courtyard or a garden, we invite you to discover and understand the way of life of its first inhabitants, nobles and courtiers from the 16th century to the end of the Ancien Régime. Here architects, sculptors, painters and decorators were able to combine their forces to imprint in the city the marks of the prestige of their sponsors. During a walk, immerse yourself in the history of one of the oldest districts of Paris, walk in the footsteps of the lords who erected these sumptuous buildings, and relive the intrigues that inhabited this setting,today one of the most beautiful pages in the art history of the capital.
The orthonormal landmark of the French Revolution
“The Revolution has for monument… emptiness. The Champ de Mars, this sand [at the time when Michelet wrote, it was a racecourse], as flat as Arabia… this is the only monument it has left ”. This is how the professor at the Collège de France prefaces the first volume of his History of the Revolution in 1847. Forty years later, on this void, another begins to rise: a pylon like all the other hollows and openwork, and like them without any figurative intention, but devoid of any utility, abstract, pure interweaving of lines but nevertheless, in its construction, “the highest monument on the globe”, and the only modern, the only contemporary, in one word: revolutionary! We will walk through this orthonormal landmark of the Revolution: on the abscissa, on the Champ de Mars, the capital Revolution of 1789; on the y-axis, mounting the Eiffel Tower, the industrial, technical, scientific revolution, its worthy heiress a hundred years later.
Over its bustling streets, cafes and theaters, the district of Montparnasse tells us the story of the literary and artistic Bohemia.
Montparnasse is one of those magical places, like Montmartre and the Marais, which embodies the Paris of the Parisians. This is where intellectuals meet, in cafes by day and in brasseries by night, for the heated discussions around painting, writing and film have never ceased. From the end of the 19th century, artists and their models, writers, poets, not to say their minds, gave their identity to these places. Today we cannot go through them without mentioning Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Beauvoir, Sartre, Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Joséphine Baker, Godard and so many others. We invite you to follow them as they meet and inspire them, to share their daily lives for a few hours, and to meet the places that made them vibrate …
Through this two-itineraries guide, we set off to discover what was, for more than a century, one of the most important artistic centers of the capital.
From the right bank to the left bank, nearly 700 years of theater history are revealed through the streets of the capital …
What link can there exist between a clerk of the Parliament of Paris in the 15th century and the Boulevard du Crime, between the vicar of the parish of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles and Molière, between a medieval fair juggler and the principal of a a college under the Renaissance, between the illustrious Odeon theater and the equally legendary Café de la Gare? Love of the stage and the theater! In each era, men and women driven by the same passion have given the Parisian theater its letters of nobility. From historical events to tasty anecdotes, this guide will take you behind the scenes of the tumultuous history of the theater which, even today, presents two faces: on the one hand the institutional theater, theater of the kings, which benefited from the protection of the clergy or the state, and on the other the private theater, this street theater which had to learn to juggle perpetually with the rules and sometimes even the laws.
Since the late 12th century, the Louvre plays a prominent role in the history of Paris, as in the country’s history.
Associated with the heart of power for more than 800 years, its walls have witnessed many events, happy, unhappy, important or anecdotal, all of which, in their own way, participate in the great History. In the salons of the old King’s apartment, the academies sat for more than a century, abandoned wings were inhabited by the greatest artists of their time, and some rooms of the museum are still attached to the presence of ‘an important scientist …
Throughout the two walks, first in the Old Town and then the New Town, you will see evidence of the earlier deprivation and then of the subsequent intellectual and cultural explosion of the city. There is no doubt that the Scottish Enlightenment was cradled, nurtured and reached its zenith in Edinburgh, where a veritable storm of intellectual fervour accompanied the extension of the squalid, overcrowded and almost medieval Old Town into the elegant Georgian marvel of urban planning, which constitutes the New Town.
The October Revolution; an event which greatly influenced the history of the 20th century. We will focus here on the stay in Paris of some of the revolutionary and communist leaders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia who had privileged the City of Light before and during the First World War.
Let us guide you through a fascinating walk, and discover the hidden and historic treasures of this monument, but also those of the surrounding galleries.
Few places bear witness to such a concentration of historical events: between seizures of power, revolts, parties and ephemeral pleasures, the palace sometimes welcomes the aristocracy, sometimes the people. People like Richelieu, Corneille, Louis XIV, Molière, Lully, Diderot, Desmoulins, Charlotte Corday, Colette and Cocteau have lived there or have frequented its galleries, theaters and cafes.
“We change religion more easily than cafés. The world, moreover, is divided into two classes: those who go to cafés and those who do not. “
You like to stroll in the cafes of Paris. They have been the scene of a long tradition of culture and politics. From philosophical discussions, to meetings after the theater, from revolutionary circles to chess players, from artistic movements to the muses of the show, everything has gone through the cafes.
For two centuries, Versailles was in the center of all eyes. A city of power, inventiveness and eccentricity, Versailles has established itself as the capital of French excellence.
Around the castle that illuminated the world, like the stage for a king of inexhaustible creativity, you will discover the Saint-Louis district, emblem of a know-how that has inspired the whole of Europe.
Testimony
This application reinforces the tourist attractiveness of our territory and highlights our artistic and historical cultural heritage by making it accessible. A great opportunity to learn more about Chatou!
City of Chatou
