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Fortean / Peculiar Paris

A

Anonymous

Guest
Hello.

I am making my first trip to Paris and the village of Lacoste (and first trip out of the states) next week. I am trying to avoid the normal tourist-like places to visit, except the Catacombs and Pere Lachaise in Paris and De Sade's castle in Lacoste. (Living in both Orlando, FL and Savannah, GA make me hate normal tourist places.)

I was wondering if any of our Parisian members had some other interesting places to visit while in Paris. Strange museums? Ghost tours? Pagan temples? Good bars? Record stores?

Websites, or names or any info is greatly appreciated.

Merci,
Robert
 
Our Woman In Paris: Ectoplasm ain't what it used to be

Alex Duval Smith

16 November 2004

The fact that Parisians refer to the Phantom of the Opera by his real name, Erik, says it all. Fairies are out of fashion, levitation has fallen flat and ectoplasm is not emanating from mediums like it used to. In this era, in which ghosts have a negative effect on property prices, it is years since anyone admitted to attending a good séance.

Yet this city hosts the Père Lachaise, possibly the world's most eerie cemetery. In August police discovered a private horror cinema, set up by "cataphiles" in the rabbit warren of limestone quarries under the French capital. Don't believe the Cartesians - mystery, illusion, telekinesis and even the odd ghost still account for the occasional cold draft and slamming door.

Under the respectable and mainstream banner of the capital's annual Photography Month, one gallery has assembled 250 prints from the 19th and early 20th centuries that show what happens when technological progress meets irrational thought. Called Photography and the Occult, the exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photo celebrates the fantastic in a series of montages and double-exposure prints.

They date from a time when poltergeists were milling about in Paris, the world capital of spiritualism. After a rush on the ever-after during the First World War, eminent scientists, including Pierre and Marie Curie, became fascinated by telepathy and clairvoyance. At dinner parties, guests compared their best ghost stories.

Paris still has a few exorcists, and African immigrants have brought in their own marabouts to banish evil spirits. The Service de l'Exorciste at the Diocese of Paris receives about 1,500 calls a year from people who are afraid that Satan has got a grip on them. Father Maurice Bellot, 73, says nearly half of his clients are simply in a bad way - they just believe they are possessed. Of the rest, however, he insists: "We are not talking about hysterics but of the work of the devil.'' The antidote, he says, lies in exorcism sessions, including prayers of deliverance.

One man who has called on a religious exorcist is Patrick de L who wished to remain anonymous when he told Nouvel Observateur magazine of the spooky goings-on in his 19th-century neo-gothic house at 1 Avenue Frochot, in the 9th arrondissement. When he bought it in 1986, the house was haunted by a female servant who had been knifed to death on the staircase 100 years earlier. Builders working for Patrick reported the sound of steps and one claimed he had felt someone's breath on the back of his neck as he used the stairs. "I called on a friend who is a priest to sort out the problem with the house. I myself do not believe in ghosts,'' he claimed, but added: "I don't live in the house. I just use it for concerts and parties."

A woman who for 15 years has lived in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Marcel in the 5th arrondissement said two inexplicable deaths and "a strange atmosphere'' dominated the street until she found a skeleton in her cellar and arranged for its burial. "I discovered that the street used to contain the entrance to an 18th-century paupers' cemetery. After the skeleton was reburied, I organised a mass for souls erring in purgatory. Things have been normal since then," she said.

To get really close to the spirits of the past the best bet remains the Père Lachaise cemetery. On its Chemin du Dragon, it is impossible to miss the gargoyles and sculptures adorning Princess Demidoff's mausoleum. Its black door, adorned with a huge cross, has been locked to prevent ghouls from trying to take on a challenge set by the Russian aristocrat, who died in 1818. According to legend she promised a large sum to anyone who dared spend 365 days in her tomb. The caretakers of the cemetery say that those who tried - before the door was put up - never managed more than one night.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=583211
 
Borderline non-Fortean, but also borderline futurist, which is of interest to many Forteans.

Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters Brings a Sensual Brazilian Lilt to Paris​

In 1967, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer left his homeland for what would become almost two decades of self-imposed exile in France. Three years earlier, an American-backed military coup had overthrown Brazil’s government. Despite being renowned for designing the main buildings in Brasília—the spectacularly modern inland capital planned and built from scratch in a gobsmacking three and a half years—Niemeyer, who had been a member of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1945, found his work dried up under the implacably hostile right-wing dictatorship. So the displaced architect, who was twice refused entry to the U.S. because of his party affiliation, set up shop on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Interior-Design-Oscar-Niemeyer-idx191101_on04-11.19.jpgInterior-Design-Oscar-Niemeyer-idx191101_on10-11.19.jpgInterior-Design-Oscar-Niemeyer-idx191101_on09_2-11.19.jpgInterior-Design-Oscar-Niemeyer-idx191101_on06-11.19.jpg

One of Niemeyer’s first major commissions there was a new Paris headquarters for the French Communist Party, powerful enough at the time to win more than 20 percent of the national vote, though its fiercely pro-Soviet ideology would become increasingly unpopular and out of touch. The architect had abandoned his country but not his lifelong political principles: In a show of solidarity, Niemeyer worked on the project for free.


Full Article with more photos:

https://interiordesign.net/projects...ers-brings-a-sensual-brazilian-lilt-to-paris/
 
Borderline non-Fortean, but also borderline futurist, which is of interest to many Forteans.

Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters Brings a Sensual Brazilian Lilt to Paris​

In 1967, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer left his homeland for what would become almost two decades of self-imposed exile in France. Three years earlier, an American-backed military coup had overthrown Brazil’s government. Despite being renowned for designing the main buildings in Brasília—the spectacularly modern inland capital planned and built from scratch in a gobsmacking three and a half years—Niemeyer, who had been a member of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1945, found his work dried up under the implacably hostile right-wing dictatorship. So the displaced architect, who was twice refused entry to the U.S. because of his party affiliation, set up shop on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

View attachment 58843View attachment 58844View attachment 58845View attachment 58847

One of Niemeyer’s first major commissions there was a new Paris headquarters for the French Communist Party, powerful enough at the time to win more than 20 percent of the national vote, though its fiercely pro-Soviet ideology would become increasingly unpopular and out of touch. The architect had abandoned his country but not his lifelong political principles: In a show of solidarity, Niemeyer worked on the project for free.


Full Article with more photos:
https://interiordesign.net/projects...ers-brings-a-sensual-brazilian-lilt-to-paris/
Some of those interior shots remind me a little of those 'Backrooms' videos on Youtube.
Liminal spaces.
 
Paris is overdue for it's 100 year flood.

Can Anyone Stop Paris From Drowning?​

MADELEINE SCHWARTZ

The city is preparing for the return of a hundred-year flood that could displace millions.​

I.​

In late 2019, trucks carrying Greek statues, Egyptian sarcophagi and sculptures by Bernini departed from the Louvre Museum in the center of Paris. Bound for Liévin, a small French town near the Belgian border, the artworks were wrapped in frames and stacked on pallets for the journey.

Liévin was not a well-known cultural capital. A former mining center, its most prominent public art was a sculpture commemorating a 1974 explosion that killed 42 workers. The trucks were heading to a low triangular building northeast of the city. Once unpacked, the artworks would be stored along a “boulevard” lined with doors 5 meters tall, either placed along 26 kilometers of hallways or hung up on mesh wiring. Ninety-six stone columns that had been raised out of a ditch along the rue de Rivoli were covered in plastic wrap and transported on wooden pallets to be unpacked in the northern town, near a small satellite of the museum.

After 16 months of to-ing and fro-ing, the trucks completed their mission: 100,000 artworks in the Louvre’s underground storage had been removed from Paris. The last time this kind of evacuation took place was the late 1930s, at the advent of the German occupation, when artworks were hidden away to the Château of Chambord. This time, the Louvre was preparing for another sort of catastrophe: the inevitable yet unpredictable flooding of the Seine.

The Paris region sits at the meeting of four rivers: the Seine, the Marne, the Oise and the Yonne. Visitors to the city tend to follow their eyes upward toward the city’s monuments and spires. But under the Eiffel Tower lies a vast water table. Streams course through the soil, cutting their own paths across the earth. The observant flâneur might notice that the name of the city’s hippest neighborhood, Le Marais, translates to “the marsh.” In the southeast of the city, small metal plaques mark the passage of a river called the Bièvre under the sidewalks; it was pushed underground in the early part of the 20th century. Under the Palais Garnier, with its paintings by Marc Chagall, is a 10,000 square meter artificial lake, which inspired Gaston Leroux to set his novel The Phantom of the Opera there. Now police and firefighters use it to practice scuba diving. French protestors used to shout, “Sous les pavés, la plage!” — “Under the cobblestones lies the beach!” They were almost correct. Deep underneath the roads of Paris there is not sand but pools of water.

The chalky land is riven with holes; over the past century, it has been drilled and dug up and drilled again. Paris lies atop 217 kilometers of metros, 2,600 kilometers of sewers and 300 kilometers of catacombs; there are also conduits for water, telephone cables, electricity, and the new tunnels of what will be the Grand Paris Express, a planned subway system that will connect the city to its suburbs. Every year, the water threatens to rise up through these tunnels.

Unlike floods caused by storms or bad weather, rivers tend to rise and fall slowly; asynchronous with the water table, their movements are irregular and uncertain. Though scientists are currently working to create models of what the flood will look like and where it might flow, it is hard to predict where, and how much, water will pour into the streets. In 2017, construction workers in the northeast of Paris accidentally pierced through the water table, flooding the train system and halting traffic for days. The accident was a small example of what awaits in the case of a hundred-year flood, which could occur at almost any point. According to Serge Garrigues, a retired general once in charge of overseeing such disasters, “It could be that everything works fine. But if we end up in this kind of situation, all of a sudden, we might have a whole transportation network that collapses.”

II.​

There’s reason to be worried. After all, Paris has flooded before. The last catastrophe to overtake Paris occurred about a hundred years ago, in 1910. It started in January, after a fall heavy with snow and rain. The river began to rush so fast that people upstream could not take accurate measurements of the swell. Paris depended on the Seine for deliveries of food and supplies, but the speed of the water moving along the banks prevented ships from docking. ...

https://www.thedial.world/issue-6/france-paris-floods-seine-preparation
 
But will the Seine come to the streets of Paris before Parisians get a chance to swim in it?

With a year to go to the Olympics, Paris is in the final phase of a historic clean-up which will soon see swimmers and divers back in the River Seine.

Banned for a century because of the filthy water, city swimming is set to be one of the major legacies of the Games thanks to a €1.4bn (£1.2bn; $1.6bn) regeneration project universally hailed as a success.

Not only are three Olympic and Paralympic events - triathlon, marathon swimming and Para-triathlon - scheduled to take place in the Seine in central Paris, but by 2025 three open-air swimming areas will be accessible from the quayside.

"When people see athletes swimming in the Seine with no health problems, they'll be confident themselves to start going back in the Seine," predicts Pierre Rabadan, deputy Paris mayor in charge of the Olympics. "It's our contribution for the future."

Like many Western cities, Paris saw its river quality decline drastically thanks to upstream industrial sewage and the sanitation demands of a burgeoning population.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66238618
 
But will the Seine come to the streets of Paris before Parisians get a chance to swim in it?

With a year to go to the Olympics, Paris is in the final phase of a historic clean-up which will soon see swimmers and divers back in the River Seine.

Banned for a century because of the filthy water, city swimming is set to be one of the major legacies of the Games thanks to a €1.4bn (£1.2bn; $1.6bn) regeneration project universally hailed as a success.

Not only are three Olympic and Paralympic events - triathlon, marathon swimming and Para-triathlon - scheduled to take place in the Seine in central Paris, but by 2025 three open-air swimming areas will be accessible from the quayside.

"When people see athletes swimming in the Seine with no health problems, they'll be confident themselves to start going back in the Seine," predicts Pierre Rabadan, deputy Paris mayor in charge of the Olympics. "It's our contribution for the future."

Like many Western cities, Paris saw its river quality decline drastically thanks to upstream industrial sewage and the sanitation demands of a burgeoning population.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66238618

Sadly the Olympic swim is off.

The swimming stage of a triathlon in Paris's Seine River was canceled on Sunday due to pollution, organizers announced, raising further questions about holding competitions there during the 2024 Olympics.

The mixed relay triathlon is the third pre-Olympics test event to be affected by excessive E. coli bacteria in the water, but organizers insist the Seine will be fit to host events next year.

The triathlon was changed to a duathlon only involving cycling and running after analyzes of the water quality did not offer the "necessary guarantees," said the Paris Olympics organizing committee and governing body World Triathlon.

The same solution was reached for a para-triathlon test event on Saturday, while the World Aquatics Open Water Swimming World Cup was canceled altogether earlier this month.

As organizers investigated the source of Saturday's elevated E. coli readings Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, stressed there was no "Plan B" for next year's sporting extravaganza.

"There is no solution to move the event, the triathlon and open water swimming will be held in the Seine next year," he insisted.

"From the start, we have remained on the same project, to organize the triathlon and para-triathlon in this extraordinary site. You have a beautiful setting between the Grand Palais, the Invalides, this Alexandre III bridge. This course, I believe, is unanimous."

The cause of this impasse in the Seine remains the same: the concentration of Escherichia Coli (E. coli) bacteria in the river.

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-seine-pollution-cancelation-olympics-event.html
 
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