FredsWalks

11/01/2025

😮😮😮😮

"The Black Shame," Weimar Germany medal commemorating the use of African troops in the occupation of Germany, 1923. Racist Germans viewed their occupation by black troops as an unforgiveable humiliation inflicted upon them by the French. What was especially controversial were the 'Rhineland bastards'; the mixed offspring of black African soldiers serving France and the German women they slept with. This history is an important part of the racialized component of politics at the time.

07/01/2025

January 7, 1785: first crossing of the English Channel in a balloon. Only 4 years before the French Revolution!

French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard made the first crossing of the English Channel in 2 hours and 25 minutes in a hydrogen-filled balloon.

It was not until 1909 that the first airplane crossing took place. The latter was completed by French aviator Louis Blériot in less than 37 minutes.

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03/01/2025

January 3, 512: death of Saint Geneviève, patron saint of Paris.
Illustration: Sainte-Genevieve Devoting herself exclusively to God from a very young age, Saint Geneviève, who was buried in a church whose construction had been ordered by Clovis, gained a great reputation for ensuring that Paris, besieged by the Huns in 451, would not be invaded.

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01/01/2025

01/01/2025

01/01/2025

December 30, 1936 aboard a Caudron Simoun, Maryse Bastié (French) sets the record for crossing the South Atlantic after a flight of 12 hours and 05 minutes, covering 3,173 km, from Dakar at Ouakkam airfield (Senegal) to Natal (Brazil).

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06/12/2024

05/12/2024

In 1620, the young sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini was commissioned to sculpt a marble mattress for the statue of the Hermaphrodite, receiving sixty scudi for his work. The statue, discovered near the Baths of Diocletian in Rome in 1608, represents Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, according to the mythology recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses. This marble figure, reclining with his arms above his head, is a Roman copy of a bronze original from the 2nd century BC. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, after acquiring the statue, asked Bernini to restore it and create the surprisingly realistic marble mattress. The work became one of the most admired pieces in the Borghese Collection, and was reproduced in multiple bronze and marble versions. In 1807, Napoleon purchased the statue along with much of the Borghese collection, and today it is in the Louvre, standing as a specimen of Bernini's incomparable talent in sculpture.

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03/12/2024

December 2, 1804 - Napoleon's coronation at Notre Dame

The religious ceremony of coronation by Pope Pius VII of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, lasts almost five hours.

Jacques-Louis David painted two pictures, which we're sharing with you in a carousel: "Le Sacre de Napoléon" and "La distribution des aigles" (from its real name, "Serment de l'armée fait à l'Empereur après la distribution des aigles").

Long live the Emperor!

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#1805

03/12/2024

December 3, 1800:
The Battle of Hohenlinden.
Six months after Marengo during the Second Coalition, General Moreau's French troops won this victory over Archduke Jean's Austrians and Bavarians in Bavaria.
Moreau's victory was decisive and strategic, as he continued on his way to the Austrian capital, Vienna.
Panic-stricken, the Austrians signed an armistice against the advice of their English allies, followed by the Peace of Lunéville on February 9, 1801.
This marked the end of the second European coalition against revolutionary France. Henceforth, England stood alone against a France victorious on all fronts.
Illustration: painting by Henri Frédéric Schopin.
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29/11/2024

50 YEARS AGO, SIMONE VEIL'S HISTORIC ABORTION LAW WAS PASSED

On November 29, 1974, the French National Assembly passed the Veil law, decriminalizing voluntary interruption of pregnancy (abortion). Fifty years later, the law has been fleshed out.

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