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In 1909, the Ballets Russes, a touring ensemble of Russian dancers under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev, astonished Parisian audiences with exquisite dancing, innovative choreography, and vibrant set decor and costumes, which were surrounded by an aura of pagan exoticism. That first season introduced the choreography of Michel Fokine and the dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Platonovna Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, and others, as well as the colorful set and costume designs of Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Nikolay Konstantinovich Roerich. Music for the ballets was equally nationalistic, featuring Russian composers Aleksandr Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, and Nicholas Tcherepnin. A brilliant artistic and cultural success, the Ballets Russes’ 1909 premiere season set the stage for subsequent triumphs.

Charles De Gaulle, whose full name was Charles André Joseph Marie De Gaulle, became the first president of the Fifth Republic of France on June 1, 1958. France's foremost war hero during World War II, he was the controversial leader of the nation for the next 11 years.

After Richard M. Nixon’s inauguration in January, 1969, secret negotiations between National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger for the United States and Le Duc Tho for North Vietnam began in Paris. They proceeded tortuously as the North Vietnamese hoped that American public opinion would force the Nixon administration to make concessions favorable to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.

The legendary “Man in the Iron Mask,” who has been the inspiration for many speculative works of both history and fiction including several movies, died on November 19, 1703, in the Bastille prison in Paris, France. He had been incarcerated there, and in other prisons, for many years for unknown reasons, which sparked much imaginative speculation.

The son of a middle-class farming family of Franche-Comté, Gustave Courbet arrived in Paris in 1839 and set about teaching himself to be a painter by copying the masterpieces of the Louvre Museum. In Paris, he met with a number of artists, critics, and novelists who shared his ideas of what art and literature should be. They all were intent upon rejecting the traditional, academic rules for art and literature, a tradition that depicted the past and not the everyday as well as the exceptional and not the common, and preferred the imagination over observation in both art and literature. Extremely popular during this time were the historical novels of Alexandre Dumas, père, about musketeers and seventeenth century court intrigue peopled with bigger-than-life heroes. Victor Hugo’s novels, such as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), took readers into past ages, and Prosper Mérimée transported readers to exotic places in novels such as Carmen (1845). The Salon of Paris preferred to exhibit paintings that dealt with the historical past. Courbet, Jules Champfleury, and Charles Baudelaire, among others, were seeking an artistic expression that presented contemporary life in an objective manner.

Although often seen as the steam engine’s successor, the internal combustion engine actually antedates in conception the many eighteenth and nineteenth century devices powered by steam. Motivated by a desire to use atmospheric pressure to perform burdensome tasks, Christiaan Huygens in the seventeenth century conceived of a machine in which the combustion of gunpowder in a cylinder would raise a piston. When the hot gases were cooled, the pressure of the atmosphere would force the piston down. Repetitions of this cycle would mean that the engine might work to power a pump.

The French Revolution of 1789 captured the heart of France’s most prominent and influential neoclassical painter, Jacques-Louis David. David’s career began as the ornamental artistic style later known as rococo was still in full blossom, so David’s early work—stunning and austere political paintings such as Oath of the Horatii (1784) and Death of Socrates (1787)—reflected the changing moral climate in France. When the revolution began in 1789, David quickly became its supporter. He eventually served in the National Assembly, and his art became a tool for advancing the revolution. His Death of Marat (1794), a heroic portrayal of his murdered friend Jean-Paul Marat, evokes the pietà, equating Marat’s sacrifice with that of Christ.