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FRENCH HISTORY
- Les explorateurs qui ont cartographie
Australie
- La revolution
- La guillotine
- L'empereur Napoleon
- Les monuments
FRENCH LANGUAGE
- Conversation simple pour tous les ages
- Avec tous les etudiants
- Ecrites et verbales
- Conversation informelle
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LEARN FRENCH HISTORY
RECENT FRENCH HISTORY This includes the explorers, in particular those who explored and charted Australia and the near Pacific. One of the most famous is La Pérouse. Did you know that the Sydney suburb of La Perouse was named after the French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse (1741-88), who landed on the northern
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The British received La Pérouse courteously, but were unable to help him with food as they had none to spare. La Pérouse sent his journals and letters to |
LA Perouse, sydney
The beach suburb of Sydney, La Perouse today
Culture and history
After the king Louis XVI gave
instructions and support to the La Pérouse
expedition, and while La Pérouse
was travelling on his voyage of discovery, the French Revolution
intervened. Louis XVI was condemned to death. On January 20, 1793, the National Convention condemned Louis XVI to death, his execution scheduled for the next day. Louis spent that evening saying goodbye to his wife and children. The following day dawned cold and wet. Louis arose at five. At eight o'clock a guard of 1,200 horsemen arrived to escort the former king on a two-hour carriage ride to his place of execution. The guillotine! |
The most obvious landmark in Paris is the Eiffel Tower (Tour Eiffel). The structure was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, a World's Fair marking the centennial celebration of the French Revolution. Eiffel originally planned to build the tower in Barcelona, for the Universal Exposition of 1888, but those responsible at the Barcelona city hall thought it was a strange and expensive construction, which did not fit into the design of the city. After the refusal of the Consistory of Barcelona, Eiffel submitted his draft to those responsible for the Universal Exhibition in Paris, where he would build his tower a year later, in 1889. The tower was inaugurated on 31 March 1889, and opened on 6 May. Three hundred workers joined together 18,038 pieces of puddled iron (a very pure form of structural iron), using two and a half million rivets, in a structural design by Maurice Koechlin. The risk of accident was great, for unlike modern skyscrapers the tower is an open frame without any intermediate floors except the two platforms. However, because Eiffel took safety precautions, including the use of movable stagings, guard-rails and screens, only one man died. | |
The Arc de Triomphe is one of the most famous monuments in Paris. It was commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon at the peak of his fortunes. Laying the foundations alone took two years, and in 1810 when Napoleon entered Paris from the west with his bride Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, he had a wooden mock-up of the completed arch constructed. The architect Jean Chalgrin died in 1811, and the work was taken over by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. During the Restoration, construction was halted and would not be completed until the reign of King Louis-Philippe, in 1833–36 when the architects on site were Goust, then Huyot, under the direction of Héricart de Thury. Napoleon's body passed under it on 15 December 1840 on its way to its second and final resting place at Les Invalides. |