DLC Blog

Paris's Most Popular Monument

Question: What is the most visited monument in Paris?

If you guessed the Eiffel Tower, you're wrong.

I thought it was the Eiffel Tower too, an image that pops into most peoples' heads when they think of Paris, or France as a whole.

When I was sixteen, I went to live with a French family for a year in southeastern France. My host dad is very proud of his country's culture, and is a walking encyclopedia for pretty much anything you want to know about France. Naturally, having a foreigner in the house provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to show off his scholarly talent of French trivia; one day, after making me guess how many different types of French cheese there are (he claims that there is one for each day of the year- 365. I have yet to see evidence to back that up), he asked me what I thought the most visited monument in Paris is. Oh! An easy one! I thought. Well, I was wrong about the Eiffel Tower: it is, in fact, Notre Dame de Paris, France's most well known cathedral located in the heart of Paris.

Many of you may know the cathedral from Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", (i.e. Esmeralda and Quasimodo). But Notre Dame de Paris (literally "Our Lady of Paris" in French) is much more than that to the French; unlike the Eiffel Tower, which was built in 1889, Notre Dame dates back to the Middle Ages. Its construction was started in 1160 at the request of Bishop Maurice de Sully, who deemed the current Parisian cathedral too drab and unimpressive. The finishing touches were completed in 1345, when the construction was finally deemed complete.

Since then the cathedral has survived many alterations, vandalisms, and restorations. It had survived fires and riots, the most common one being the Paris Commune of 1871 that saw the burning to the ground of many Parisian monuments including the Palais des Tuileries. The latest restoration started in 1991, and is still in progress!

my friend and I in front of the entrance

a view from the top of the cathedral, complete with gargoyles!

Interesting Facts about Notre Dame de Paris:
-The bell "Emmanuel" in the South Tower weighs 13 metric tons (over 28,000 pounds).
-Isabelle Romée, the mother of Joan of Arc, petitioned a papal delegation on 7 November 1455 to overturn her daughter's conviction for heresy.
-Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned emperor in the cathedral in 1804.

Click here for DLC resources on Paris and Parisian monuments.

-Becca Lewis
Foreign Language and Humanities Student Mentor

Posted by Becca at November 29, 2006 05:42 PM in .