This is Paris.
A city of romance and adventure,
from the buzz of its cafes to its swinging street life.
Paris has natural born style,
fabulous buildings,
great restaurants.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
Charm, glamour, it's got it all.
But beyond the postcard Paris,
there's something else that's very special,
a spirit of rebellion,
energy and endless creativity.
This is the city I love.
Brilliant cinema, hidden worlds,
a photographer's dream, amazing fashion,
unforgettable art.
The way we work, rest and play was born here.
Welcome to my city.
This is one of the world's great museums,
and it means so much to me personally.
My name is Sandrine Voillet.
It was the Louvre that first brought me to Paris
from my hometown of Nantes in western France.
Welcome to my turf. This is a quite familiar place to me.
I was nine when I came here for the first time with my parents,
and I think, I guess, I fell in love with the place.
I came back, I was 19, studied at the Louvre School,
and now I'm a curator.
I've moved on from the Louvre, but I come back whenever I can.
Being a student here was like a dream come true.
just imagine, this was my playground.
I spent every day
with some of the most beautiful artworks ever created.
The Louvre used to be a palace
and only became a museum after the French Revolution of 1789.
And that's when the Paris we all think of today was born,
in the aftermath of the world's most famous revolution.
(BAND PLAYING LA MARSEILLAISE)
When we talk about the Revolution,
we don't mean just the day of the 14th of July, 1789,
or even the year.
The Revolution was about a whole era,
a period of 25 years that began with the storming of the Bastille
and saw the rise and fall of one of the greatest rulers in history,
Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
So as you can see, today is the 14th of July,
one of the biggest days of the year in Paris,
and all this parade has got very little to do
with the people's revolution of 1789.
And this is more about the vision
Napoleon had for France and especially Paris.
Napoleon dreamt of making France a great military power
with Paris at the heart of his empire.
The Garde Republicaine are among the favourites
'cause they're very dashing, of course,
and at the back of their helmets you can see the horse hair.
Yeah, it's almost like a glimpse of Napoleon's time here.
Those are my favourite. That's the firemen.
I guess all the 1 4th of July, it's like, I don't know, a nice masquerade.
It's a nice costume parade.
The parade lasts for one hour and a half.
That's not really my cup of tea, I must admit.
I don't like all this nationalism, tanks and everything.
But this pomp is only one part of Napoleon's legacy.
Without him, Paris wouldn't have become the world's first truly modern city.
In Napoleon's time, if you wanted to get a glimpse
of what Paris was to become in the 1 800s,
this was the place to be, the Palais-Royal.
This was where the empire's new aristocracy, the bourgeoisie,
came to have a good time,
shopping, drinking, eating and cavorting.
Paris gave the world the restaurant,
and I'm going to take you to one of the very best.
The first restaurants had opened just before the Revolution.
People didn't go there to eat themselves silly,
but to get healthy.
The word ''se restaurer'' means to restore oneself.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
Today the Grand Vefour's head chef is Guy Martin,
with three Michelin stars.
Mmm!
(BOTH SPEAKING FRENCH)
It's just amazing. I've never experienced such food.
I mean, it's what we call haute gastronomie, absolutely.
To tell you the truth, it's a bit pricey,
so I've never eaten here before.
It's quite a privilege.
Some of the decoration is over 200 years old
and celebrates the delights of Parisian gastronomy.
Some of the great names in our history have been regulars here,
including Napoleon Bonaparte himself.
From the early 1 9th century, more and more of the people of Paris
began to eat out, a habit which continues to this day.
We just love our cuisine.
That's why we've got so many words for the places we eat and drink in.
Le restaurant, caf'conce, cabaret, la taverne, cafe, cafe-theatre,
boullion, troquet, estaminet, le bock,
la bibine, table, cafeteria, le zinc...
Food was the key to Napoleon's plan
to make sure the monarchy could never return.
He knew the best way to a person's heart is through the stomach.
He once said that what mattered most to Parisians was water, wine and food,
and he called the market in Les Halles ''the people's Louvre''.
To this day, one of the great pleasures of Paris
is shopping in its food markets.
I recommend the one in Rue Montorgueil,
once the heart of the thriving fish trade.
I like the choice here, actually, to see...
On the Parisian stalls, you've got lots of choice, variety.
Mushrooms, fresh food, fresh vegetables and fruit. It's very colourful.
And I guess that's been always the priority,
to bring fresh food to feed the population.
No meal is complete without a little treat,
so where better to go than the oldest patisserie in town?
The Patissier Stohrer was founded right back in 1 730.
It's real strawberry.
Before his fall from power in 1 8 1 5,
Napoleon determined who would be the main victor of the Revolution,
the middle class.
He helped them on their way to new fortunes
by setting up the Paris Bourse, or Stock Exchange,
a temple of big-money finance.
The new breed of capitalists needed somewhere to go shopping
without having to brave the damp climate, filthy streets
and speeding horse-drawn carriages.
This was the solution, the galeries or the shopping arcade.
Havens of elegance and calm, they were sophisticated and safe.
The Galerie Vivienne was built in 1 823,
and soon there were 1 50 arcades in Paris.
They had the very latest technology,
glass roofs, iron frames, gas lighting.
The shops catered for the aspirations of the bourgeois elite.
There were restaurants, bookstores, clothes shops and wine merchants.
Everyday life for many Parisians was being transformed.
As more people became literate,
more books and newspapers were read than ever before.
After Napoleon, the monarchy came back,
but the new kings were not above criticism.
King Louis Philippe was savaged by the press.
The sharpest pen against Louis Philippe didn't belong to a journalist
but to an illustrator, an artist whose work I love.
His name was Honore Daumier.
His caricatures were cruel but funny and full of political messages.
They've survived the test of time,
and you can still find them today in antiquarian bookshops,
though they'll set you back as much as 1,000 euros per print.
SANDRINE: This king, Louis Philippe, decided to finish the publications,
and Daumier had to go to jail.
Louis Philippe appears like a very big, fat man,
and he hauls in front of him this puppet of the President,
but yeah, it's quite ferocious, actually.
After his problems, he started to work for another newspaper,
far less politics, actually, which were really dangerous,
and much more what we call comedie de mceurs,
so he would just depict
either the bourgeois or the working class
and the lawyers and the doctors,
just sharp and very well spotted.
They're quite funny.
(SANDRINE READING CAPTION)
So, ''I like hairless soup.'' There is lots of humour in it
and it's terribly human.
I think you can still appreciate
the caricatures of people,
because even nowadays I don't think we've changed much.
The city he was portraying was growing so fast.
At the start of the century, there were half a million Parisians.
By mid-century, there were a million and Paris simply couldn't cope.
The whole place was terribly overcrowded.
Most people lived in dark, dank alleys where disease was rife.
That was all about to change.
This narrow street behind Notre Dame is typical of the old Paris.
It's hardly changed since the Middle Ages.
You can't say that about most of Paris today.
It looks quaint and charming now,
but around 1 850 it was often said
people here lived like reptiles in a swamp.
The solution was simple, demolish the slums.
There used to be a church here.
Its footprint, it's marked on the pavement.
Now it's a distant memory, a ghost of the old Paris.
And all this was down to two men,
the Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann.
Together they turned Paris into the city it is today.
After another revolution, the kings were finally booted out for good
and Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III, was in.
Like his uncle, he had grand designs for Paris.
Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine, was the man to carry them out.
Haussmann wanted to make Paris safe, clean and easy to move about in.
To do so, he had to carve through the poor, dingy back streets.
''Get these warts off my face'' is how he put it.
No wonder his enemies soon called him ''the demolition artist':
but it's his legacy that survives.
So we are just right in the middle of Haussmann's district.
He just pierced very large boulevards in Paris to ease the traffic
and just transform the city into a modern city.
And you've got boulevards and boulevards
of this very homogeneous, slightly monotonous, architecture.
I prefer to say Paris is one of the nicest cities in the world.
The star-shaped Place de l'Etoile, with the Arc de Triomphe at its centre,
was the crowning glory of the new Paris.
Haussmann added seven new boulevards to the existing five.
Today it's one of the busiest and scariest roundabouts in the world.
Les grands boulevards would soon be lined with les grands magasins.
From the 1 860s, new department stores sprung up,
like Les Galeries Lafayette and Le Printemps.
Everything was available and affordable.
The new stores soon overtook the galleries
as the place where you could shop till you dropped.
You can really see from up here
that Haussmann was the architect of modern Paris.
In a burst of urban planning on a scale not seen since ancient Rome,
he created the cityscape in front of me.
He opened up the broad vistas
to show off the city's buildings and monuments.
He had many critics, but he gave Paris the distinctive character
it still has today.
Haussmann saw the modern city as an organism
and the boulevards as a city's arteries.
He changed the way Parisians worked and played.
I'll let you into a little secret.
The best way to see and to feel Paris is by wandering the streets.
That was one of the favourite pastimes of the 1 9th century.
This is the world of the flaneur.
There's just no word for flaneur in English,
and you don't know what you're missing.
Loosely translated, it means 'gentleman stroller of city streets''.
It used to be the preserve of dandies, bohemians and posers,
but the wide pavements of Haussmann's new boulevards
meant the pastime spread,
and soon being a flaneur became one of Paris'great traditions.
just walk, look at buildings and places,
watch the passers-by, think, be inspired.
You might as well.
When in Paris, do as the Parisians.
Just feels too good to just sit down after a long day at work,
either shopping or working or walking anytime,
and, yeah, just watch the world go by.
You sit at a cafe to look at people,
but it's to be seen, also.
It's a little game, I guess,
between the person who watches and the person who walks by.
There were also huge new public parks.
Napoleon III called them ''the lungs of Paris''.
He decreed that Paris should have more green spaces,just like in London.
The Tuileries Gardens, next to the Louvre, had a makeover.
He also gave the people the Bois de Boulogne in the west
and had two pleasure lakes dug there.
But one of the city's best kept secrets
is in the working-class 1 9th arrondissement, or district.
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is a magical, fairy-tale park
in northeastern Paris.
It is so picturesque and down-to-earth.
The park is known as ''the people's Tuileries''.
Here you can get lost in nature, a special thing in Paris.
On the top of the massive rock rising out of the water,
there's a Roman-style folly.
It's quite a lovely park here. I quite like it.
It's quite a rare park in Paris because it's very hilly,
so it feels much more like an English park than a French one.
But it's a perfect place to come here, wander, take pictures and just relax.
I love it.
This early photo shows the amazing change
from disused quarry and rubbish dump to wonderful park.
At the end of the 1 830s,
the new art of photography transformed the way Paris was portrayed.
The photograph arrived just in time to capture the old Paris
before it disappeared forever.
Since then, Paris has become probably the most photographed city in the world.
Belleville,just down the road from Buttes-Chaumont Park,
is the spiritual home of one of France's most talented photographers.
Born in Paris in 1 9 1 0,
Willy Ronis is the man behind some of the most iconic images of his home city.
I've always admired his work, and now I have a chance to meet him.
(SANDRINE SPEAKING FRENCH)
In the 1 9th century, the place I'm going to take you next
was a magnet to photographers and tourists alike.
Even kings and queens took excursions to the pride of Paris.
Goodness! I mean, it's as if I'm going to war.
I'm going on a guided tour of the sewers with the city's unsung heroes
who help keep Paris clean and smelling of roses.
Pray for me.
In 1 850, engineer Eugene Belgrand began work on a new sewer system
to try and stamp out the scourge of cholera blighting Paris.
Today, thanks to him, the tunnels run for more than 2,000 kilometres.
This is much more technical than I expected.
This is really good. I mean, Belgrand was a real genius, actually,
to think of all this network.
I expected it to smell even stronger,
but I can imagine after staying here a few hours,
you might have a very strong headache.
Feels like very physical work. It must be really hard to work here.
What's so striking is how the whole of Paris is mirrored below ground,
building by building, street by street.
I'm really disappointed there's no rats.
I was told they are really big, big like cats. I want to see that.
And also, what is quite interesting is that rats are necessary
because they eat all the detritus, all the junk,
so again, that's quite eco-friendly.
I guess you can find lots of stuff here.
They found a crocodile years ago, dead cats, snakes.
Anything goes.
Depending on the volume of the water,
you can see if people had a shower or bath
or something else.
(SANDRINE LAUGHS)
The Opera Garnier has been called an over-the-top wedding cake,
but I can't resist it.
It's named after its architect, Charles Garnier,
who won a competition to design it in 1 860.
After many delays, it finally opened in 1 875.
My friend Frederic Vaysse-Knitter is rehearsing here.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
just walking up the grand escalier, or great staircase,
is a theatrical experience in its own right.
It's so luxurious and decadent.
I adore the multicoloured marble from all over France,
but it's only an appetiser.
The piece de resistance is the foyer.
I've never been there before.
Wow.
Goody!
The story of Marie Duplessis is very moving.
She was young, brilliant and beautiful,
but died from tuberculosis at the age of 23.
Her story was told by one of her many lovers,
the writer Alexandre Dumas, and set to music by Chopin.
Marie was one of Paris' legendary courtesans.
More than just elite prostitutes,
they were muses to the great artists of their day.
I'm intrigued by the role these cultured and influential women
played in the history of Paris.
It's partly because of them
that the city earned its reputation as the sexiest place on earth.
During the second half of the 1 9th century,
Paris was famed around the world for its exotic striptease revues.
Hanky-panky was very big business,
and about 30,000 women worked in the industry.
There is an amazing number of words in French for prostitute.
Many date from this time.
Lassina takes me to the Left Bank,
to what was then one of the hottest places in Paris.
Today the Laperouse is a very chic and expensive restaurant,
perfect for a romantic meal a deux or more.
It's quite a charming place here, and famous for those boudoir lounges,
those little private salons
where, in the 1 9th century, slightly before that,
all the politicians, aristocrats...
I mean, wealthy men of all sorts
could just see some courtesans in the privacy.
Actually, that's a perfect illustration of this famous French libertinage,
which started in the 1 8th century.
And it's about this art of love and flirt and seduction,
and really not making sex a big deal.
And, yeah, it's lovely.
Here is one of those mirrors.
They are known for the scratchings, and the story goes that the courtesans
used to scratch, actually, their diamonds,
the presents of those messieurs, to check if they were real.
One of the most outrageous courtesans was English,
Emma Crouch from Plymouth.
Her lovers knew her as Cora Pearl.
They included princes, dukes and, she claimed, the Emperor.
All is revealed in her colourful memoirs.
Apparently she had the fancy to just present herself as a dessert
at the end of the meal, in front of the dukes, the princes,
and among meringues and fruit.
''With that deftness and artistry for which he was so famed,
''the chef, Salis, began to decorate my naked body
''with rosettes and swathes of creams and sauce,
''each carefully composed so that the heat of my body
''would not melt them before I came to table.''
That's really the artistry and the haute cuisine,
with haute prostitution, too.
Well, that's quite sweet and quite funny,
but then I must admit that all those courtesans
and petites femmes de Paris
just stigmatised the image of French women, even abroad,
when we're, again, believed to be always very seductive
and very pretty and very charming, which is not always true.
The courtesans of Paris inspired many artists.
A little further along the Left Bank there's a converted railway station,
now the Orsay Museum.
It boasts the world's finest collection of 1 9th-century French masters.
One of the most erotic works
is this sculpture of a courtesan called Apollonie Sabatier,
clearly in rapture.
If you find this offensive, please look away now.
This is The Origin of the World, by Gustave Courbet.
As you notice, it's a bit slightly in-your-face,
but let me tell you, it wasn't meant to be in-your-face.
It was meant to be hidden away behind shutters,
which the viewer could open for a discreet and private peek.
Much more mysterious that way.
The world was not ready for such realism,
as Edouard Manet found out
when his Dejeuner sur l'herbe outraged Paris in 1 863.
That was another truly shocking painting for the time.
People were absolutely appalled by it.
The main reason, it's because it's portraying a naked lady
with a dressed man.
The first reaction for people
was that they thought it was a prostitute.
In the 1 9th century, the only accepted nudes
had to be goddesses or anything to do with mythology.
But just to show a modern day lady naked like that,
that was truly shocking to them.
Manet sparked a revolution in art.
A new generation of painters known as the Impressionists
broke through.
They included Claude Monet,
Edgar Degas,
and Pierre Auguste Renoir.
The Impressionists wanted to celebrate the new Paris
as it took shape before their very eyes.
The steam engine embodied this extraordinary new age.
The railways changed the way Parisians lived, worked and played.
Paris' first railway station was the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Monet loved to paint here,
delighting in the way the light danced through the steam.
Stations were the cathedrals of their day,
symbols of freedom and progress.
Suddenly people could take day trips out of town
and found new ways to have fun.
Riverside party venues known as guinguettes
became all the rage.
You could swim, dance, pose and flirt,
a tradition which continues to this day with Paris Plage every August,
when the banks of the river
are covered with sand and turned into beaches.
In 1 869, Monet painted one of the great Impressionist paintings
at a guinguette called La Grenouillere.
With the Impressionists leading the way,
Paris was fast becoming the art capital of the world.
To me, there was one man who stood out in the 1 9th century,
a real genius.
His name was Auguste Rodin.
What I like about his work
is that you have the feeling of life, a real masterpiece of drama and effect.
This is The Thinker.
It shows Rodin's incredible grasp of body language.
From the head right down to the toes, every inch is taut with concentration.
The Thinker was meant to be part of a hugely ambitious work,
The Gates of Hell.
It was unfinished when Rodin died in 1 9 1 7.
This house on the Left Bank
is where Rodin lived and worked at the end of his life.
It's now a museum devoted to his work.
It's where you can find his best-loved and most sensual sculpture.
So now, this is The Kiss.
This piece was originally made for The Gates of Hell
and then after that removed from this original project.
What I really like in this piece is that you see some parts
are left unsculptured, untouched.
It's as if the whole sculpture was just born from the mass.
From any angle, it's a real masterpiece.
You can really see the embrace, the two characters being in fusion.
It's almost like a swirl.
I really like this piece, actually,
because it reminds me of a story when I was a teenager.
A friend of mine, a girlfriend of mine, sent me the postcard of this piece.
And initially she wanted to send the postcard to her boyfriend,
but apparently she got too shy, I don't know,
and then I ended up with the postcard of The Kiss.
This was a century of innovation on every front,
sculpture, painting, photography,
boulevards, department stores and even sewers.
Napoleon III presided over this modernisation of Paris,
but in some ways he was stuck in the past.
You can see that for yourself in the Louvre,
where he renovated a wing for his own use.
Wow.
These are Napoleon III's apartments.
They are sumptuous, ostentatious.
For one minute you think you could be in Versailles.
It means that Napoleon III was a true monarch, actually,
in the line of the others.
It's quite incredible, actually.
Looks like a theatre. I mean, it's a real fantasy.
Makes me think that Napoleon III was living in a world of his own.
Napoleon III led France
into its most turbulent time since the Revolution.
It all began when he declared war on Prussia in 1 870.
It was a big mistake.
The French Army was duly crushed.
Napoleon left the country and the Prussians took Paris.
When they left, there was a political vacuum in the capital
because the French government had fled to Versailles,
24 kilometres away.
Then in March 1 87 1, a riot broke out
between local people and government troops
in Montmartre, to the north of the city.
Two generals were shot dead here,
prompting the government to withdraw the army to Versailles.
A popular left wing movement, the Commune, took control of Paris,
but their experiment in social democracy would only last for 1 0 weeks.
The Communards were a mix of socialists, anarchists
and ordinary men and women.
Among them was Louise Michel,
a schoolteacher who famously manned the barricades.
The Communards literally set Paris alight,
burning down some of its most important buildings.
But the government in Versailles responded with a vengeance.
Driven by government forces
to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in northeast Paris,
the Communards made their last stand among the tombs.
The cemetery had been one of the great achievements
of Napoleon III's era,
a mini-Paris for the dead,
but now it was the scene of slaughter.
Some of the heaviest fighting was here,
among the graves of the great and the good.
The soldiers were ordered to show no mercy.
It's quite sad to see that in such a beautiful, sacred place,
such violence took place.
But worse was to come.
On the 28th of May, 1 87 1,
1 4 7 Communard rebels were machine-gunned
against the eastern wall of Pere Lachaise.
Alain Dalotel and Maryse Bezagu, of the Friends of the Commune,
regularly pay their respects to the dead.
(CHURCH BELLS RINGING)
After the Commune had been crushed,
the government decided that Paris would repent,
so they built this.
The Basilica of Sacre Coeur was built in Montmartre
to atone for the sins of the Communards.
Nowadays tourists flock here,
attracted by its romantic aura and panoramic views of the city.
Many Parisians really hated it.
It was seen as the symbol of repression.
Although it's really beautiful,
knowing the history, I feel rather saddened by it.
Its Romano-Byzantine architecture and bright white stone
were out of keeping with the rest of Paris.
Everything about it was wrong.
In 2004, the Commune won a small victory
when this square, in the shadow of the basilica,
took the name of Louise Michel, the Communard heroine.
(SINGING LE TEMPS DES CERISES IN FRENCH)
She also had a song dedicated to her,
one of the many inspired by the uprising which remain popular today.
Long before it was completed,
Sacre Coeur had a rival as the most hated building in Paris.
This one.
When the Eiffel Tower was proposed,
it was attacked as a ''truly tragic streetlamp''
and a ''belfry skeleton''.
A group of leading writers and intellectuals
put together a petition to try to stop it being built.
Thank goodness they failed.
Today it's the most famous monument in the world,
visited by 200 million people and counting.
I join chief engineer Yves Camaret on an early morning inspection.
Named after the engineer who designed it, Gustave Eiffel,
the 300-metre tower took just over two years to build.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
I've never come up this high before, with good reason.
I've got vertigo.
Allo, allo. Reaching the very top now.
Thank goodness. There's someone here.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
You know, I'm quite afraid of heights usually,
but what feels good, it's all those grids,
so it's not as if you were in the void, really.
(LAUGHING NERVOUSLY)
Hold onto it!
It's beautiful, really.
(LAUGHING)
It's great. I feel great.
But I'll be able to talk about it
once I'm down on the plateau des vaches, as we say,
on the cows' floor. Voila.
The tower was due to be dismantled after 20 years,
but was saved when they made it a radio mast.
The Eiffel Tower has become the very symbol for Paris itself.
It's not bad for a building which wasn't supposed to last.
Back in 1 889, it proclaimed Paris a new city for a new era.
Next time, chocolate, fashion, cafes, sex and revolution.
The story of how Paris was born.
For a free bilingual guide
featuring one of my favourite walks in Paris
and more about Open University programmes on the BBC,
call 0870 900 958 1
or go to bbc.co.uk/paris.