I went travel/history nerd on a relatives post... Reposted here, because I like sharing history factoids. Je suis très jalouse ! J’étais là en 2006. Interesting to be there now, seeing as some pretty big events are occurring over there this week. I was a bit too chicken (severe fear of heights) to go up on top of Napoléon Bonapartes lArc de Triomphe... Lovely view, though. What have you done so far? Le palais du Louvre (which was actually the royal palace prior to Versailles before it became an art museum!)? Le château de Versailles? La cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris? As I said, one of the things I regretted not getting to do was the catacombs. I also know that theres a small museum somewhere in Paris where the copper medicinal bathtub of Jean-Paul Marat is held (he was loaded with skin ailments, hence that tub). Marat was the French Revolutions violent Jacobin propagandist who called for more and more beheadings during Maximilien de Robespierres Reign of Terror. Marat was stabbed in his bathtub by Girondin sympathizer Charlotte Corday (the Girondins were the moderates and were heavily guillotined by the radical Jacobins), who had a knife hidden in her bodice. Marat was treated as a martyr by the revolutionaries and is the subject of that famous portrait of the man in a bathtub in a pietà pose. Heres a possibly surprising factoid about Notre-Dame de Paris: During the Hundred Years War, Henry V of England came very close to conquering France (his brother John, Duke of Bedford took up the cause and ran into Jeanne dArc) and France had a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. So much so, that upon Henry Vs premature death at the age of 35 from dysentery, his infant son (king at the age of 9 months) Henry VI was crowned King of France at Notre-Dame de Paris. There was actually an agreement that upon Charles VI the Mads death that Henry V would come after him instead of Charles VII (le Dauphin of Joan of Arc fame) because of his marriage to his daughter Catherine de Valois (who, upon her second marriage to Welshman Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur--though without permission--was mother to the Tudors). However, this coronation was done at the wrong cathedral, as Kings of France were supposed to be crowned at la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims, but England had conquered Paris and not Reims. Note that France also ran into big problems earlier with Edward IIIs son Edward, the Black Prince (father of Richard II, who similarly became another disastrous child king at the age of 10 and eventually was starved to death at Pontefract Castle by his cousin Henry IV Bolingbroke--Henry Vs father), who, at one point, had Jean II of France in the Tower of London and held for ransom (England got very rich from that ransom). Mad Henry VI, like the mad implies, eventually showed his inherited catatonic schizophrenic insanity from his French grandfather Charles VI the Mad (who was comparatively a much more violent schizophrenic), which resulted in Richard, Duke of York (father of Edward IV, George, Duke of Clarence and Richard III) becoming regent of England--though his butting heads with Henry VIs infamous French army-leading wife Marguerite dAnjou resulted in the Wars of the Roses and his head on a pike along with his brother-in-law and son. Charles VI the Mads smashed helmet (he smashed a lot of things during his bouts of mental illness) is in le Louvre, by the way. So if you see or saw a smashed helmet there, thats the story behind it and who that particular monarch was. Charles VI is infamous for events such as the time that he killed four of his own men in a bout of insanity and le Bal des Ardents in which several party-goers were set on fire. Charles VI had two daughters who were Queen consorts of England: Isabelle de Valois (6-year-old purely political second wife of Richard II after his beloved Anne of Bohemia died of the bubonic plague) and Catherine de Valois (wife of Henry V, mother of Henry VI and grandmother of Henry VII Tudor) and possibly spread his problematic genes to other English monarchs (see Henry VIII and Mad George III). But yeah, not many people realize that Notre-Dame de Paris, besides being the famous subject of a Victor Hugo novel and noted for its flying buttresses, was the place of a coronation for a Plantagenet King of England as the contested King of France. Alas, Charles VII did not agree with that! Several Kings of England are actually buried in France... Richard I the Lionheart (who much preferred his mothers native France to England--he spoke the Occitan language and almost no English) and the exiled Catholic James II Stuart (fled to France during the Glorious Revolution of William & Mary in 1688) are amongst them. James IIs dissected remains were mostly destroyed by the revolutionaries and all that now remains of him is a bit of his bladder! The revolutionaries were responsible for a lot of desecrations of royal remains (especially the earlier Bourbons) and, of course, the disappearance of the French Blue (stolen from an Indian idol), which was owned by Louis XIV-XVI (and worn by Marie-Antoinette) and later known as the Hope Diamond (now in the Smithsonian along with Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais crown--I remember seeing both). The diamond went missing during the Revolution, only to turn up a few decades later cut into a new shape in England. Speaking of grave desecrations and ransacking at la basilique de Saint-Denis, the assassinated Henri IVs embalmed head turned up fairly recently in a tax collectors attic and matched the Y-DNA from a handkerchief that soaked up blood after Louis XVIs guillotining!
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:56:24 +0000
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