Rem Koolhaas
Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, of its research-oriented counterpart AMO based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Ole Bouman, he is regarded as one of the most important architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People. Remment Koolhaas abbreviated to Rem Koolhaas, was born on 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Anton Koolhaas and Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg, his father was a novelist and screenwriter. Two documentary films by Bert Haanstra for which his father wrote the scenarios were nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, one won a Golden Bear for Short Film.
His maternal grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg, was a modernist architect who worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, before opening his own practice. Rem Koolhaas has a brother, a sister, Annabel, his paternal cousin was urban planner Teun Koolhaas. The family lived consecutively in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Amsterdam, his father supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch in his writing. When the war of independence was won, he was invited over to run a cultural programme for three years and the family moved to Jakarta in 1952. "It was a important age for me," Koolhaas recalls "and I lived as an Asian."In 1969, Koolhaas co-wrote The White Slave, a Dutch film noir, wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer. He was a journalist for the Haagse Post before starting studies, in 1968, in architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, followed, in 1972, by further studies with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, followed by studies at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.
Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention with OMA, the office he founded in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp in London. They were joined by one of Koolhaas's students, Zaha Hadid – who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right. An early work which would mark their difference from the dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past"; each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street. Other early critically received projects included the Parc de la Villette and the residence for the Prime Minister of Ireland, as well as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam; these schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York, written while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman.
In September 2006, Rem Koolhaas was commissioned to develop 111 First Street in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan, working with real estate developer Louis Dubin. In October 2008, Rem Koolhaas was invited for a European "group of the wise" under the chairmanship of former Spanish prime minister Felipe González to help'design' the future European Union. Other members include Nokia chairman Jorma Ollila, former European Commissioner Mario Monti and former president of Poland Lech Wałęsa. Koolhaas's book Delirious. Koolhaas celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape" "Rem Koolhaas...defined the city as a collection of “red hot spots.”. As Koolhaas himself has acknowledged, this approach had been evident in the Japanese Metabolist Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. A key aspect of architecture that Koolhaas interrogates is the "Program": with the rise of modernism in the 20th century the "Program" became the key theme of architectural design.
The notion of the Program involves "an act to edit function and human activities" as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the maxim Form follows function, first popularised by architect Louis Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century. The notion was first questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise architecture in Manhattan. An early design method derived from such thinking was "cross-programming", introducing unexpected functions in room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers. More Koolhaas unsuccessfully proposed the inclusion of hospital units for the homeless into the Seattle Public Library project; the next landmark publication by Koolhaas was S,M,L,XL, together with Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, a 1376-page tome combining essays, diaries, fiction and meditations on the contemporary city. The layout of the huge book transformed architectural publishing, such books—full-colour graphics and dense texts—have since become common.
Ost
Émile Zola
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. Zola was born in Paris in 1840, his father, François Zola, was an Italian engineer, born in Venice in 1795, who engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence, his mother, Émilie Aubert, was French. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. Four years in 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1858, the Zolas moved to Paris. Zola started to write in the romantic style, his widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile. Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and in the sales department for a publisher.
He wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had run for the office of president under the constitution of the French Second Republic, only to misuse this position as a springboard for the coup d'état that made him emperor. In 1862, Zola was naturalized as a French citizen. In 1865, he met Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley, who called herself Gabrielle, a seamstress, who became his mistress, they married on the 31 May 1870. She was instrumental in promoting his work; the marriage remained childless. Alexandrine Zola had a child before she met Zola that she had given up, because she was unable to take care of it; when she confessed this to Zola after their marriage, they went looking for the girl, but she had died a short time after birth. In 1888, he obtained a near professional level of expertise. In 1888, Alexandrine hired Jeanne Rozerot, a seamstress, to live with them in their home in Médan. Zola fell in love with Jeanne and fathered two children with her: Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891.
After Jeanne left Médan for Paris, Zola continued to visit her and their children. In November 1891 Alexandrine discovered the affair, which brought the marriage to the brink of divorce; the discord was healed, which allowed Zola to take an active role in the lives of the children. After Zola's death, the children were given his name as their lawful surname. During his early years, Zola wrote numerous short stories and essays, four plays, three novels. Among his early books was Contes à Ninon, published in 1864. With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude attracting police attention, Hachette fired Zola, his novel Les Mystères de Marseille appeared as a serial in 1867. After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin, Zola started the series called Les Rougon-Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire. In Paris, Zola maintained his friendship with Cézanne, who painted a portrait of him with another friend from Aix-en-Provence, writer Paul Alexis, entitled Paul Alexis Reading to Zola.
More than half of Zola's novels were part of a set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac, who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the start, at the age of 28, had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution; the series examines two branches of a family—the respectable Rougons and the disreputable Macquarts—for five generations. As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they experienced a falling out in life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters in Zola's novel L'Œuvre.
From 1877, with the publication of l'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy. Because l'Assommoir was such a success, Zola was able to renegotiate his contract with his publisher Georges Charpentier to receive more than 14 percent royalties and the exclusive rights to serial publication in the press, he became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, other writers at his luxurious villa in Médan, near Paris, after 1880. Germinal in 1885 the three "cities"—Lourdes and Paris, established Zola as a successful author; the self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola's works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier, notably Louise in the 1890s. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity, social Manicheanism, idealistic socialism, resonate with those of Nadar and subsequently Flaubert, he is considered to be a significant influence on those writers that are credited with the creation of the so-called new journalism.
Paris
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion and the arts; the City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €681 billion in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of the GDP of France, was the 5th largest region by GDP in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, ahead of Zurich, Hong Kong and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong-Kong, in 2018; the city is a major rail and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly.
Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily, is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2018, with 10.2 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe; the historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Popular landmarks in the centre of the city include the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, both on the Île de la Cité. Paris received 23 million visitors in 2017, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the UK, Germany and China.
It was ranked as the third most visited travel destination in the world in 2017, after Bangkok and London. The football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris; the 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros. Paris will host the 2024 Summer Olympics; the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the 1960, 1984, 2016 UEFA European Championships were held in the city and, every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes there. The name "Paris" is derived from the Celtic Parisii tribe; the city's name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. Paris is referred to as the City of Light, both because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment and more because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
Gas lights were installed on the Place du Carousel, Rue de Rivoli and Place Vendome in 1829. By 1857, the Grand boulevards were lit. By the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps. Since the late 19th century, Paris has been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in French as Parisiens, they are pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité; the Parisii minted their own coins for that purpose. The Romans began their settlement on Paris' Left Bank; the Roman town was called Lutetia. It became a prosperous city with a forum, temples, an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that would become Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île-de-la-Citie failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845, but Paris' strategic importance—with its bridges prevent
George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars. Custer graduated from West Point in 1861, bottom of his class, but as the Civil War was just starting, trained officers were in immediate demand, he worked with General McClellan and the future General Pleasonton, who both recognised his qualities as a cavalry leader, he was brevetted brigadier general of Volunteers at age 23. At Gettysburg, he commanded the Michigan Cavalry Brigade, defeated Jeb Stuart’s assault on Cemetery Ridge, while outnumbered. In 1864, Custer served in the Overland Campaign and in Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Jubal Early at Cedar Creek, his division blocked Lee's final retreat and received the first flag of truce from the Confederates, Custer being present at Lee’s surrender to U. S. Grant at Appomattox. After the war, Custer was appointed a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army, sent west to fight in the Indian Wars.
On June 25, 1876, while leading the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory against a coalition of Native American tribes, he was killed along with over one third of his command during an action romanticized as "Custer's Last Stand". His dramatic end was as controversial as the rest of his career, his legacy remains divided, his bold leadership in battle is unquestioned, but his legend was of his own fabrication, through his extensive journalism, more through his wife’s energetic lobbying throughout her long widowhood. Custer's paternal immigrant ancestors and Gertrude Küster, emigrated to the North American English colonies around 1693 from the Rhineland in Germany among thousands of Palatine refugees whose passage was arranged by the English government to gain settlers in New York and Pennsylvania. According to family letters, Custer was named after George Armstrong, a minister, in his devout mother's hope that her son might join the clergy. Custer was born in New Rumley, Ohio, to Emanuel Henry Custer, a farmer and blacksmith, his second wife, Marie Ward Kirkpatrick, of English and Scots-Irish descent.
He had two younger brothers and Boston. His other full siblings were the family's youngest child, Margaret Custer, Nevin Custer, who suffered from asthma and rheumatism. Custer had three older half-siblings. Custer and his brothers acquired their life-long love of practical jokes, which they played out among the close family members. Emanuel Custer was an outspoken Democrat who taught his children politics and toughness at an early age. In a February 3, 1887 letter to his son's widow, Libby, he related an incident "when Autie was about four years old, he had to have a tooth drawn, he was much afraid of blood. When I took him to the doctor to have the tooth pulled, it was in the night and I told him if it bled well it would get well right away, he must be a good soldier; when he got to the doctor he took his seat, the pulling began. The forceps slipped off and he had to make a second trial, he pulled it out, Autie never scrunched. Going home, I led him by the arm, he jumped and skipped, said'Father you and me can whip all the Whigs in Michigan.'
I thought, saying a good deal but I did not contradict him." In order to attend school, Custer lived with an older half-sister and her husband in Monroe, Michigan. Before entering the United States Military Academy, Custer attended the McNeely Normal School known as Hopedale Normal College, in Hopedale, Ohio, it was to train teachers for elementary schools. While attending Hopedale and classmate William Enos Emery were known to have carried coal to help pay for their room and board. After graduating from McNeely Normal School in 1856, Custer taught school in Ohio, his first sweetheart was Mary Jane Holland. Custer entered West Point as a cadet on July 1, 1857, as a member of the class of 1862, his class numbered seventy-nine cadets embarking on a five-year course of study. With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the course was shortened to four years, Custer and his class graduated on June 24, 1861, he was 34th in a class of 34 graduates: 23 classmates had dropped out for academic reasons while 22 classmates had resigned to join the Confederacy.
Throughout his life, Custer tested rules. In his four years at West Point, he amassed a record-total of 726 demerits, one of the worst conduct records in the history of the academy. A fellow cadet recalled Custer as declaring there were only two places in a class, the head and the foot, since he had no desire to be the head, he aspired to be the foot. A roommate noted, "It was alright with George Custer. Under ordinary national conditions, Custer's low class rank would result in an obscure posting, but Custer had the "fortune" to graduate as the Civil War broke out. All officers were needed. Like the other graduates, Custer was commissioned as a second lieutenant. S. Cavalry Regiment and tasked with drilling volunteers in Washington, D. C. On July 21, 1861, he was with his regiment at the First Battle of Bull Run during the Manassas Campaign, where Army commander Winfield Scott detailed him to carry messages to Major General Irvin McDowell. After the battle, Custer continued participating in the defenses of Washington D.
C. until October, when he became ill. He was absent from his unit until February 1862. In March, he participated with the 2nd Cavalry in the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia until April 4. On April 5, Custer s
Le Ventre de Paris
Le Ventre de Paris is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central market of 19th-century Paris. Les Halles, rebuilt in cast iron and glass during the Second Empire was a landmark of modernity in the city, the wholesale and retail center of a thriving food industry. Le Ventre de Paris is Zola's first novel on the working class; the protagonist is Florent, an escaped political prisoner mistakenly arrested after the French coup of 1851. He returns to his half-brother Quenu, a charcutier and his wife Lisa Quenu, with whom he finds refuge, they get him a job in the market as a fish inspector. After getting mixed up in an ineffectual socialist plot against the Empire, Florent is arrested and deported again. Although Zola had yet to hone his mastery of working-class speech and idioms displayed to such good effect in L'Assommoir, the novel conveys a powerful atmosphere of life in the great market halls and of working class suffering.
There are a number of vivid descriptive passages, the most famous of which, his description of the olfactory sensations experienced upon entering a cheese shop, has become known as the "Cheese Symphony" due to its ingenious orchestral metaphors. Throughout the book, the painter Claude Lantier, a relative of the Macquarts and the protagonist of L'Œuvre - shows up to provide a semi-authorial commentary, playing the role of chorus, it is an interesting and powerful work, though not considered as being on a par with the novelist's achievements in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Le ventre de Paris was translated into English by Henry Vizetelly and published in 1888 under the title Fat and Thin. After Vizetelly's imprisonment for obscene libel the novel was one of those revised and expurgated by his son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly; until 2007 this remained the only English version available. Henry's original full edition was afterward reprinted in Paris for adventurous English readers; the novel was newly translated in 1955 by David Hughes and Marie-Jacqueline Mason for Elek Books under the title Savage Paris but this has long been out of print.
Oxford World's Classics published a new translation by Brian Nelson entitled The Belly of Paris in 2007 and Modern Library published a new translation by Mark Kurlansky in 2009. La Belle Lisa or The Paris Market Girls The Fat and the Thin The Fat and the Thin Savage Paris The Belly of Paris The Belly of Paris Le Ventre de Paris at Project Gutenberg The Fat and the Thin at Project Gutenberg Le Ventre de Paris, audio version
Paris Métro Line 14
Paris Métro Line 14 is a line on the Paris Métro that connects the stations Saint Lazare and Olympiades on a north-west south-east diagonal across the centre of Paris. It was operated automatically from the beginning, the positive return of that experiment motivated the retrofitting of Line 1 for full automation. Before being put into commercial service Line 14 was known as project Météor, an acronym of MÉTro Est-Ouest Rapide; the line is occasionally used as a showcase for the expertise of the RATP, its operator, Systra and Siemens Transportation Systems, constructors of the rolling stock and automated equipment when they bid internationally to build metro systems. In March 2014 the first of 18 MP 05 trains went into revenue service on Line 14; the STIF purchased these trains to improve service along the line and prepare the extension to the north in 2017. These trains will continue to enter service through 2015; the line is expected to be part of the Grand Paris Express rapid transit network and to be extended north and south for this project.
15 October 1998: The new line 14 was inaugurated between Madeleine and Bibliothèque F. Mitterrand. 16 December 2003: Line 14 was extended north from Madeleine to Saint-Lazare. 26 June 2007: Line 14 was extended south from Bibliothèque François Mitterrand to Olympiades. 3 March 2014: The first of eighteen MP 05 railcars goes into revenue service. The original line 14 linked Invalides with Porte de Vanves until 1976, when it was merged into the southern section of the current line 13. Paris's east-west axis across has long been travelled: Line 1 of the Métro began approaching saturation in the 1940s, necessitating the construction of Line A of the RER in the 1960s and'70s. To improve service, the SACEM was installed on the central run of Line A in September 1989; this improved efficiency and reduced the interval between trains to just two minutes, though an improvement insufficient to absorb the increasing demand. To cater permanently to demand on the busy artery between Gare Auber and Gare de Lyon new rail lines would have to be built.
Two proposals were made by the transport companies: the SNCF suggested a new tunnel between Châtelet and Gare de Lyon for Line D of the RER allowing traffic to circulate from the north and south-east of Île-de-France. More it proposed "Project EOLE", the creation of a new standard gauge line from Paris's eastern suburbs to Saint-Lazare an extension onwards to the western suburbs. In 1987, the RATP proposed "project Météor", the creation of a new Métro line, from Porte Maillot on the edge of the 16th arrondissement to the Maison Blanche district in the 13th, an area poorly served by transport despite its large population; the project would fit well with the regeneration of the Tolbiac district on the left bank around the new bibliothèque nationale de France, in that arrondissement. The plans to go to Porte Maillot were abandoned in favour of a terminus at Saint-Lazare, with the possibility of extending the line to Clichy and assimilating the Asnières branch of Line 13, thus simplifying its complicated operation.
This new line parallel to Line A took the opportunity to incorporate innovations on the rest of the network: the stations are larger and, at 120 metres and thus can accommodate eight carriages. The runs between stations are longer, allowing a rolling speed of close to 40 km per hour, close to double that of the other Paris metro lines and approaching that of the RER. Lastly, the line is automated and runs without any driver, the first large-scale metro line in a capital to do so. Given the pressing need, the council of Ministers of Michel Rocard's government approved the project in October 1989. However, budgetary constraints forced the reduction of both. In the first stage, EOLE would be but a simple extension of trains from the suburbs to the new underground station at Saint-Lazare and MÉTEOR limited to the central Madeleine - Bibliothèque run, thus leaving the main railway station of Saint-Lazare and the heart of the 13th arrondissement unserved; the tunnels were dug between 1993 and 1995.
It was opened to the public in 1998 and had its first automatic run in October 1998. Some features of Line 14's train control system are run under the OpenVMS operating system, its control system is noted in the field of software engineering of critical systems because safety properties on some safety-critical parts of the systems were proved using the B-Method, a formal method. Line 14 has some unusual design features – its floor tiling is not bitumenised, platform screen doors at stations prevent passengers from falling onto the track or from committing suicide; the southern extension of the line to Olympiades in June 2007, an area of high rise towers in the XIIIe arrondissement, not served well, was not a real extension: the tunnel was built at the same time as the rest of the line, but it was used as a train maintenance area, so a new maintenance area was constructed. The building of this extension caused the collapse of the courtyard of an elementary school. Due in part to extensive mining for both gypsum and construction stone over two millennia, the underground of much of Paris is quite fragile and considerable care must be exercised before tunnelling work.
F
Philip II of France
Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, was King of France from 1180 to 1223, the seventh from the House of Capet. His predecessors had been known as kings of the Franks, but from 1190 onward, Philip became the first French monarch to style himself "King of France"; the son of King Louis VII and his third wife, Adela of Champagne, he was nicknamed Dieudonné because he was a first son and born late in his father's life. Philip was given the epithet "Augustus" by the chronicler Rigord for having extended the crown lands of France so remarkably; the only known description of Philip describes him as "a handsome, strapping fellow, bald but with a cheerful face of ruddy complexion, a temperament much inclined towards good-living and women. He was generous to his friends, stingy towards those who displeased him, well-versed in the art of stratagem, orthodox in belief and stubborn in his resolves, he made judgements with great exactitude. Fortune's favorite, fearful for his life excited and placated, he was tough with powerful men who resisted him, took pleasure in provoking discord among them.
Never, did he cause an adversary to die in prison. He liked to employ humble men, to be the subduer of the proud, the defender of the Church, feeder of the poor". After a twelve-year struggle with the Plantagenet dynasty in the Anglo-French War of 1202–14, Philip broke up the large Angevin Empire presided over by the crown of England and defeated a coalition of his rivals at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214; this victory would have a lasting impact on western European politics: the authority of the French king became unchallenged, while the English King John was forced by his barons to sign Magna Carta and deal with a rebellion against him aided by Philip, the First Barons' War. The military actions surrounding the Albigensian Crusade helped prepare the expansion of France southward. Philip did not participate directly in these actions, but he allowed his vassals and knights to help carry it out. Philip transformed France from a small feudal state into the most prosperous and powerful country in Europe.
He checked the power of the nobles and helped the towns to free themselves from seigniorial authority, granting privileges and liberties to the emergent bourgeoisie. He built a great wall around Paris, re-organized the French government and brought financial stability to his country. Philip was born in Gonesse on 21 August 1165. King Louis VII intended to make his son Philip co-ruler with him as soon as possible, in accordance with the traditions of the House of Capet, but these plans were delayed when Philip, at the age of thirteen, was separated from his companions during a royal hunt and became lost in the Forest of Compiègne, he spent much of the following night attempting to find his way out, but to no avail. Exhausted by cold and fatigue, he was discovered by a peasant carrying a charcoal burner, but his exposure to the elements meant he soon contracted a dangerously high fever, his father went on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Thomas Becket to pray for Philip's recovery and was told that his son had indeed recovered.
However, on his way back to Paris, the king suffered a stroke. In declining health, Louis VII had his 14-year-old son crowned and anointed as king at Reims on 1 November 1179 by Archbishop William of the White Hands, he was married on 28 April 1180 to Isabelle of Hainaut, the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Hainaut, Margaret I, Countess of Flanders, who brought the County of Artois as her dowry. From the time of his coronation, all real power was transferred to Philip, as his father descended into senility; the great nobles were discontented with Philip's advantageous marriage, while his mother and four uncles, all of whom exercised enormous influence over Louis, were unhappy with his attainment of the throne, which caused a diminution of their power. Louis died on 18 September 1180. While the royal demesne had increased under Philip I and Louis VI, it had diminished under Louis VII. In April 1182 to enrich the French crown, Philip expelled all Jews from the demesne and confiscated their goods.
Philip's eldest son Louis was born on 5 September 1187 and inherited the County of Artois in 1190, when his mother Isabelle died. The main source of funding for Philip's army was from the royal demesne. In times of conflict, he could call up 250 knights, 250 horse sergeants, 100 mounted crossbowmen, 133 crossbowmen on foot, 2,000 foot sergeants, 300 mercenaries. Towards the end of his reign, the king could muster some 3,000 knights, 9,000 sergeants, 6,000 urban militiamen, thousands of foot sergeants. Using his increased revenues, Philip was the first Capetian king to build a French navy actively. By 1215, his fleet could carry a total of 7,000 men. Within two years, his fleet included 10 large ships and many smaller ones. In 1181, Philip began a war with Philip, Count of Flanders, over the Vermandois, which King Philip claimed as his wife's dowry and the Count was unwilling to give up; the Count of Flanders invaded France, ravaging the whole district between the Somme and the Oise before penetrating as far as Dammartin.
Notified of Philip's impending approach with 2,000 knights, he turned around and headed back to Flanders. Philip chased him, the two armies confronted each other near Amiens. By this stage, Philip had managed to counter the ambitions of the count by breaking his alliances with Henry I, Duke of Brabant, Philip of Heinsberg, Archbishop of Cologne. This, together with an uncertain outcome were he to engage the French in battle, forced the Count to conclude a peace. In July 11
