Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris, France. With more than 3.5 million visitors annually, it is the most visited necropolis in the world. Père Lachaise is located in the 20th arrondissement and notable for being the first garden cemetery, as well as the first municipal cemetery in Paris, it is the site of three World War I memorials. The cemetery is on Boulevard de Ménilmontant; the Paris Métro station Philippe Auguste on Line 2 is next to the main entrance, while the station named Père Lachaise, on both Line 2 and Line 3, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta station on Line 3, as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery; the cemetery of Père Lachaise opened in 1804. The cemetery takes its name from the confessor to Louis XIV, Père François de la Chaise, who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt during 1682 on the site of the chapel; the property, situated on the hillside from which the king watched skirmishing between the armies of the Condé and Turenne during the Fronde, was bought by the city during 1804.
Established by Napoleon during this year, the cemetery was laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and extended. Napoleon, proclaimed Emperor by the Senate three days earlier, had declared during the Consulate that "Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”; as the city graveyards of Paris filled, several new, large cemeteries, outside the precincts of the capital, replaced them: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. Near the middle of the city is Passy Cemetery. At the time of its opening, the cemetery was considered to be situated too far from the city and attracted few funerals. Moreover, many Roman Catholics refused to have their graves in a place that had not been blessed by the Church. During 1804, the Père Lachaise contained only 13 graves; the administrators devised a marketing strategy and during 1804, with great fanfare, organized the transfer of the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière.
The next year there were 44 burials, with 49 during 1806, 62 during 1807 and 833 during 1812. In another great spectacle of 1817, the purported remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil were transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine; this strategy achieved its desired effect: people began clamoring to be buried among the famous citizens. Records show that the Père Lachaise contained more than 33,000 graves during 1830. Père Lachaise was expanded five times: during 1824, 1829, 1832, 1842 and 1850. Presently there are more than 1 million bodies buried there, many more in the columbarium, which holds the remains of those who had requested cremation; the Communards' Wall, located within the cemetery, was the site where 147 Communards, the last defenders of the workers' district of Belleville, were shot on May 28, 1871. That day was the last of the "Bloody Week". Today, the site is a traditional rallying point for members of the French political Left.
Adolphe Thiers, the French president who directed "Bloody Week," is interred in the cemetery, where his tomb has been subject to vandalism. A funerary chapel was erected during 1823 by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde at the exact place of the ancient Jesuit house; this same Neoclassical architect created the monumental entrance a few years later. A columbarium and a crematorium of a Neo-Byzantine style were designed in 1894 by Jean-Camille Formigé. Père Lachaise is still an operating cemetery and accepting new burials. However, the rules to be buried in a Paris cemetery are rather strict: people may be buried in one of these cemeteries if they die in the French capital city or if they lived there. Being buried in Père Lachaise is more difficult nowadays as there is a waiting list: few plots are available; the grave sites at Père Lachaise range from a simple, unadorned headstone to towering monuments and elaborate mini chapels dedicated to the memory of a well-known person or family. Many of the tombs are about the size and shape of a telephone booth, with just enough space for a mourner to step inside, kneel to say a prayer, leave some flowers.
The cemetery manages to squeeze an increasing number of bodies into a finite and crowded space. One way it does. At Père Lachaise, it is not uncommon to reopen a grave after a body has decomposed and inter another coffin; some family mausoleums or multi-family tombs contain dozens of bodies in several separate but contiguous graves. Shelves are installed to accommodate them. During recent times, the Père Lachaise has adopted a standard practice of issuing 30-year leases on grave sites, so that if a lease is not renewed by a family, the remains can be removed, space made for a new grave, the overall deterioration of the cemetery minimized. Abandoned remains are boxed and moved to Aux Morts ossuary, in Père Lachaise cemetery. Plots can be bought in perpetuity or for 50, 30 or 10 years, the last being the least expensive option. For the case of mausoleums and chapels, coffins are most of the time below ground. Although some sources incorrectly estimate the number of interred as 300,000 in Père Lachaise, according to the official website of
Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis was a French painter, decorative artist and writer, an important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art. He was associated with Les Nabis the Symbolist movement, with a return to neo-classicism, his theories contributed to the foundations of cubism and abstract art. Following the First World War, he founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré, decorated the interiors of churches, worked for a revival of religious art. Maurice Denis was born 25 November 1870, in Granville, Manche, a coastal town in the Normandy region of France, his father was of modest peasant origins. His mother, the daughter of a miller, worked as a seamstress. After their marriage in 1865, they moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Paris suburbs, his father was employed in the offices the administration of the Western Railroads in Paris. Maurice was an only child. From an early age, his passions were art, he began keeping a journal in 1884 at the age of thirteen. In 1885 he recorded in his journal his admiration for the colors, candle light and incense of the ceremonies at the local church.
He frequented the Louvre, admired the works of Fra Angelico and Botticelli. At the age of fifteen he wrote in his journal, "Yes, I must that I become a Christian painter, that I celebrate all the miracles of Christianity, I feel, what is needed." In 1887 he discovered a new source of the works of Puvis de Chavannes. Denis was accepted as a student at one of the most prestigious Paris schools, the Lycée Condorcet, where he excelled at philosophy. However, he decided to leave the school at the end of 1887 and in 1888 enrolled in Académie Julian to prepare for the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he studied with theorist Jules Joseph Lefebvre, he passed the entrance examination for the Beaux-Arts in July 1888, passed another examination in November to receive his baccalaureate in philosophy. At the Académie Julian, his fellow students included Paul Sérusier and Pierre Bonnard, who had shared ideas about painting. Through Bonnard he met additional artists, including Édouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Hermann-Paul.
In 1890 they formed a group which they called the Nabis, taken from "Nabi"—Hebrew for "Prophet". Their philosophy was based upon the philosophy of positivism, the writings of Auguste Compte and Hippolyte Taine. I rejected materialism in favor of something more idealistic. Denis described it in 1909: "Art is no longer a visual sensation that we gather, like a photograph, as it were, of nature. No, it is a creation of our spirit, for which nature is only the occasion."For his technique, Denis was first drawn toward the neoimpressionist style of Seurat, but rejected it as too scientific. In 1889, Denis was captivated by an exposition of works of Gauguin and his friends at the Cafe Volponi, on the edge of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. Recalling it Denis wrote, "What amazement, followed by what a revelation! In place of windows opening on nature, like the impressionists, these were surfaces which were solidly decorative, powerfully colorful, bordered with brutal strokes, partitioned." The work of Gauguin had an immediate effect on Denis' work.
The brightly colored forms of Gauguin's Vache au-dessus du gouffre first shown in 1889, appeared in an October 1890 work by Denis, Taches du soleil sur la terrace, in Denis' Solitude du Christ. The Nabis drifted apart by the end of the 1880s, but their ideas influenced the work of both Bonnard and Vuillard, as well as non-Nabi painters like Henri Matisse. Another influence on Denis at the time was the art of Japan; the interest of French artists in Japanese arts had begun in the 1850s was renewed by displays at the Paris Universal Exposition and was revived again in 1890 by a major retrospective of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts. Before 1890 Denis had been cutting out and studying the illustrations of the catalog Japan Artistique published by Siegfried Bing. In November 1888 he had declared to his friend Émile Bernard that he wanted to move from "Giving color to" to "making a blend with Japan." His paintings in the Japanese style featured a wide format and stylized composition and decoration, appearing like Japanese screens.
In August 1890, Denis consolidated his new ideas and presented them in a famous essay published in the review Art et Critique. The celebrated opening line of the essay was: "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." This idea was not original to Denis. However, it was the expression of Denis which seized the attention of artists and became part of the foundation of modernism. Denis was among the first artists to insist on the flatness of the picture plane—one of the great starting points for modernism. However, as Denis explained, he did not mean that form of the painting was more important than the subject, he went on to write: "The profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves...everything is contained in the beauty of the work." In his essay, he termed this new movement "neo-traditionaism", in opposition to the "progressism" of the neo-imp
Chicago
Chicago the City of Chicago, is the most populous city in Illinois, as well as the third most populous city in the United States. With an estimated population of 2,716,450, it is the most populous city in the Midwest. Chicago is the principal city of the Chicago metropolitan area referred to as Chicagoland, the county seat of Cook County, the second most populous county in the United States; the metropolitan area, at nearly 10 million people, is the third-largest in the United States, the fourth largest in North America and the third largest metropolitan area in the world by land area. Located on the shores of freshwater Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed and grew in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, the city made a concerted effort to rebuild; the construction boom accelerated population growth throughout the following decades, by 1900 Chicago was the fifth largest city in the world.
Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and zoning standards, including new construction styles, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, the steel-framed skyscraper. Chicago is an international hub for finance, commerce, technology, telecommunications, transportation, it is the site of the creation of the first standardized futures contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade, which today is the largest and most diverse derivatives market gobally, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures. O'Hare International Airport is the one of the busiest airports in the world, the region has the largest number of U. S. highways and greatest amount of railroad freight. In 2012, Chicago was listed as an alpha global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, it ranked seventh in the entire world in the 2017 Global Cities Index; the Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products in the world, generating $680 billion in 2017. In addition, the city has one of the world's most diversified and balanced economies, not being dependent on any one industry, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.
Chicago's 58 million domestic and international visitors in 2018, made it the second most visited city in the nation, behind New York City's approximate 65 million visitors. The city ranked first place in the 2018 Time Out City Life Index, a global quality of life survey of 15,000 people in 32 cities. Landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Grant Park, the Museum of Science and Industry, Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago's culture includes the visual arts, film, comedy and music jazz, soul, hip-hop and electronic dance music including house music. Of the area's many colleges and universities, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago are classified as "highest research" doctoral universities. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams; the name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa for a wild relative of the onion, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more as ramps.
The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the eponymous wild "garlic" grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary of late September 1687:...when we arrived at the said place called "Chicagou" which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region. The city has had several nicknames throughout its history such as the Windy City, Chi-Town, Second City, the City of the Big Shoulders, which refers to the city's numerous skyscrapers and high-rises. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples; the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable arrived in the 1780s, he is known as the "Founder of Chicago".
In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, an area, to be part of Chicago was turned over to the United States for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn and rebuilt; the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis; the Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. Receiver of Public Monies; the City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837, for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city. As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States.
Chicago's first railway and Chicago Union Railroad, the Illi
Frederick Hallen
Frederick Hallen was a Canadian-born vaudeville entertainer who found popularity on the North American stage. Frederick "Fred" Hallen was born in Montreal, Canada, he began touring the vaudeville circuit as early as 1880 with his American wife Enid Hart, as "Hallen and Hart". A year or so before she died in 1890 at the young age of 32, he teamed up with Joseph Hart, as "Hallen and Hart", found success touring for several seasons with Hart's musical comedies, Later On and The Idea. After the two went their separate ways and his second wife, Mollie Fuller, the sister of dancer Loie Fuller, became a headlining vaudeville act. Hallen and Fuller were known for their short comedic plays and skits performed in vaudeville houses across North America for nearly a quarter century. Frederick Hallen died of stomach cancer on 28 February 1920, at his residence in The New York Palace Hotel. Two months earlier he had fallen ill during an engagement in Toronto, Ontario and was told his condition was terminal.
Hallen was survived by Mollie. After producer Edward Franklin Albee learned that Mollie Fuller was nearly blind and living in poverty in Chicago, he brought her back to New York where he asked writer Blanche Merrill to write a piece for her to perform in. With the help of friends Fuller, returned to the stage in December 1922 to appear in the playlet Twilight staged in Brooklyn and at the Strand Theatre in Hoboken, New Jersey. Before her vaudeville days Fuller was on the legitimate stage in productions like the burlesque musical Adonis, by Edward E. Rice and William F. Gill, Rice's Evangeline, in which she replaced Fay Templeton when the actress was unavailable; the highlight of her career came in 1895 when Hallen bought the rights to the play "The Twentieth Century Girl" and cast her in the title role. Mollie Fuller died at around the age of 68 in Hollywood, California, on 5 January 1933. At the time of her death she was receiving assistance from The Troupers, a national vaudeville players association.
Her funeral expenses were handled by the National Vaudeville Artist organization. Blanche Merrill
Isadora Duncan
Angela Isadora Duncan was an American and French dancer who performed to acclaim throughout Europe. Born in California, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50, when her scarf became entangled in the wheels and axle of the car in which she was riding. Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan, a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, Mary Isadora Gray, her brothers were Raymond Duncan. Soon after Isadora's birth, her father was exposed in illegal bank dealings, the family became poor, her parents divorced when she was an infant, her mother moved with her family to Oakland, where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher. From ages six to ten, Isadora attended school; as her family was poor and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children. In 1896, Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York, but she soon became disillusioned with the form and craved a different environment with less of a hierarchy.
Her father, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in 1898 when the British passenger steamer SS Mohegan ran aground off the coast of Cornwall. Duncan began her dancing career at a early age by giving lessons in her home to neighbourhood children, this continued through her teenage years, her novel approach to dance was evident in these early classes, in which she "followed fantasy and improvised, teaching any pretty thing that came into head". A desire to travel brought her to Chicago, where she auditioned for many theater companies finding a place in Augustin Daly's company; this took her to New York City where her unique vision of dance clashed with the popular pantomimes of theater companies. In New York, Duncan took some classes with Marie Bonfanti but was disappointed in ballet routine. Feeling unhappy and unappreciated in America, Duncan moved to London in 1898, she performed in the drawing rooms of the wealthy, taking inspiration from the Greek vases and bas-reliefs in the British Museum.
The earnings from these engagements enabled her to rent a studio, allowing her to develop her work and create larger performances for the stage. From London, she traveled to Paris, where she was inspired by the Louvre and the Exposition Universelle of 1900. In 1902, Loie Fuller invited Duncan to tour with her; this took Duncan all over Europe as she created new works using her innovative technique, which emphasized natural movement in contrast to the rigidity of tradition ballet. She spent most of the rest of her life touring the Americas in this fashion. Despite mixed reaction from critics, Duncan became quite popular for her distinctive style and inspired many visual artists, such as Antoine Bourdelle, Auguste Rodin, Arnold Rönnebeck, Abraham Walkowitz, to create works based on her. Duncan disliked the commercial aspects of public performance, such as touring and contracts, because she felt they distracted her from her real mission, namely the creation of beauty and the education of the young.
To achieve her mission, she opened schools to teach young women her philosophy of dance. The first was established in 1904 in Germany; this institution was the birthplace of the "Isadorables", Duncan's protégées who would continue her legacy. Duncan adopted all six girls in 1919, they took her last name. After about a decade in Berlin, Duncan established a school in Paris, shortly closed because of the outbreak of World War I. In 1910, Duncan met the occultist Aleister Crowley at a party, an episode recounted by Crowley in his Confessions, he refers to Duncan as "Lavinia King", would use the same invented name for her in his novel Moonchild. Crowley wrote of Duncan that she "has this gift of gesture in a high degree. Let the reader study her dancing, if possible in private than in public, learn the superb'unconsciousness' —, magical consciousness — with which she suits the action to the melody." Crowley was, in fact, more attracted to Duncan's bohemian companion Mary Dempsey, with whom he had an affair.
Desti had come to Paris in 1901 where she soon met Duncan, the two became inseparable. Desti appeared in Moonchild, as "Lisa la Giuffria" She joined Crowley's occult order, helping him to write his magnum opus Magick under her magical name of "Soror Virakam". Desti wrote a memoir of her experiences with Duncan. In 1911, the French fashion designer Paul Poiret rented a mansion — Pavillon du Butard in La Celle-Saint-Cloud — and threw lavish parties, including one of the more famous grandes fêtes, La fête de Bacchus on June 20, 1912, re-creating the Bacchanalia hosted by Louis XIV at Versailles. Isadora Duncan, wearing a Greek evening gown designed by Poiret, danced on tables among 300 guests. Duncan, said to have posed for the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, placed an emphasis on "evolutionary" dance motion, insisting that each movement was born from the one that preceded it, that each movement gave rise to the next, so on in organic succession, her dancing defined the force of progress, change and liberation.
In France, as elsewhere, Duncan delighted her audience. In 1914, Duncan moved to the United States and transferred her school there
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
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