Since the early twentieth century and long before, Paris was known as a cultural melting pot and vibrant crossroads for diverse artistic personalities. The modernisations of the city from the 1850s under Haussman’s designs, leading to the development of the present-day boulevards, parks and public works, were part and parcel of modernisations putting Paris at the forefront of cultural development in Europe, alongside Vienna, Berlin and London. Among notable events were the Expositions Universelles (International Exhibitions), the first one taking place in Paris in 1855. It showcased exciting art and culture from France and abroad. Comparable events in London included the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851, the first of multiple such events, which Paris attempted to surpass.

France has a long and rich tradition of intellectual thought, literature, drama and the arts. In Paris, thinkers such as Denis Diderot, with his contributions to the Encyclopédie, were challenging conventional and received thought and ideas. His dictum ‘scepticism is the first step to philosophy’ readily encapsulates new trends in thinking in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, an aspect the era’s title suggests. The playwrights Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by the name Molière, Jean Racine and others were major figures in Enlightenment drama. One of the greatest Enlightenment writers was François-Marie Arouet, later known by the pseudonym Voltaire. His views on ideals of progress, religion and reached far into Parisian and French consciousness. While he was a controversial figure, attracting the attention then repulsion of the royal court and being exiled to England, he later returned to France. His voice in Parisian society was keenly noted. In later centuries Paris boasted an equally impressive array of literary and poetic trailblazers. The nineteenth centuries was the age of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. André Gide bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the twentieth was the era of writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Algerian-born Albert Camus and Romanian-born Eugène Ionesco. During the nineteenth century, new directions in poetry were being taken by Charles Baudelaire, Paul-Marie Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Musically, French traditions with named composers stretched back roughly as far as than the medieval music of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, to the polyphonic organum of Léonin and Pérotin in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries respectively. Fourteenth century Paris saw the flourishing of musicians such as Philippe de Vitry, with his contributions to the ‘Ars Nova’. Major musicians of the French Baroque included Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was composer to King Louis XIV from 1661. Bridging the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was Michel-Richard de Lalande, a noted composer of sacred music, as well as ballets and other secular works. He worked for some time in the service of Louis XIV; by 1704 he was in charge of all sacred music in the court. The eighteenth century saw the rise of keyboard-player and composer François Couperin, one of an illustrious family of musicians and the nephew of Louis Couperin. Also active during the eighteenth century was Jean-Philippe Rameau, famous for his harpsichord works, operas and theatrical works, but also known for his theoretical writings.

In the world of art, the twentieth century stood poised both to inherit and reject rich heritage from earlier nineteenth-century Romantic painters such as Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century was marked by the development in Paris of many great painters, sculptors and print-makers, with whom we are familiar. These include: Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, Pierre-August Renoir, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Braque, Alfred Sisley and others. This was an era, however, that witnessed the emergence of radical new techniques, forms of conception, different styles and trends, notably Symbolism, Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism and Post-Impressionism. It was an era whose hallmarks in artistic content and communication were individuality, expression, innovation and shock or surprise.

In the early twentieth century, Paris was a hotbed of collaboration and was the location for impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a cutting-edge dance company active from 1909 to 1929. The work of the Ballet Russes included collaborations with composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Sergei Prokofiev; choreographers Mikhail Fokine and Léonide Massine; artists Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; costume designers Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel; and numerous dancers, in particular Vaslav Nijinsky. Paris was the site of the purportedly riotous scandal of the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, at the new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. It was choreographed by Nijinsky and brought to life by Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.

Vital and radical musical collaborations were taking place around the same time. In 1920, the critic Henri Collet grouped together six young French composers: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honneger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre. That year, they published their only work composed collectively: a group of piano pieces called L’Album des Six. In 1921, members of Les Six collaborated with playwright and director Jean Cocteau, who effectively became their promoter, on a comical absurd ballet called Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Marriage on the Eiffel Tower). In years that followed some of Les Six worked with composers outside of their de facto group on other works. In part, Les Six were an important syndicate of advocates for progressive ideas in French music, reacting against the music of Wagner and the traits of Impressionism and Symbolism. Friendship and musical symbiosis was also an important element uniting the group. Their music, collectively, showed a distinctive vibrancy, with tendencies towards angularity and eclectic influences, mainly in Milhaud’s use of Latin American rhythms and ideas.

Paris was the site of varied international influences too, notably including jazz and Latin American music but also, since the time of Debussy, East Asian music. A crucial meeting ground for numerous artistic figures was the nightclub founded in 1921, Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit. The array of dramatis personae in what must have been witty, spirited encounters in a high-class music bar, was dazzling. Its frequenters at various times included: members of Les Six, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Ravel, the then Prince of Wales, actors Maurice Chevalier and Charlie Chaplin, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, filmmaker René Clair, and Chanel and Diaghilev. According to Jean Cocteau: ‘The Boeuf was not a bar at all, but a kind of club, the meeting place of all the best people in Paris, from all spheres of life, the prettiest women, poets, musicians, businessmen, publishers – everybody met everybody at the Boeuf.’

Paris was therefore a vibrant centre of culture and knowledge, the site of education, exchange and ever-expanding horizons. Among its revered institutions that survive today are: Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, Louvre Museum, National Museum of Natural History, the Sorbonne University, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Conservatoire, Ecole de Fontainebleau, Musée D’Orsay and Les Invalides, to name a few important examples. Paris remains a vital part of the political, economic and cultural fabric and heartbeat of Europe, and of the exchanges taking place on a European level and globally.