Curated playlist
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
- Oscar WildeOscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde arrived in the world on the 16th of October 1854 at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, and from the very beginning his life seemed constructed for drama. Born the second of three children to two Anglo-Irish…
- Eléonore Denuelle de La PlaigneEléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne was born on the 13th of September 1787, into a middle-class French family, and she died on the 30th of January 1868 having outlived an empire. Her life touched the fate of France in a way she could not have…
- Max ErnstMax Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. That, at least, was how he described it. In his autobiography, he wrote: "On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." Those dates bracket the four…
- MolièreMolière collapsed on stage on the 17th of February 1673, mid-performance, coughing and haemorrhaging blood. He was playing Argan, a hypochondriac obsessed with his own imaginary ailments, in a play he himself had written called The…
- Gioachino RossiniGioachino Rossini wrote his last opera while still in his thirties, then stopped composing operas for the remaining 40 years of his life. He was born on the 29th of February 1792, a leap day, in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast that…
- Eugène BurnoufEugène Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852, the same year his translation of the Lotus Sutra finally appeared in print. He had spent his final years working on a text central to Buddhist tradition, and the book arrived just as he did not.…
- Jim MorrisonJim Morrison was found dead in a Paris bathtub on the morning of Saturday, the 3rd of July, 1971. He was 27 years old. No doctor had been called. No autopsy would be performed. The cause of death listed as heart failure was a placeholder,…
- Eugène DelacroixEugène Delacroix once heard the poet and critic Baudelaire describe him this way: "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." That tension defines the French Romantic…
- Édouard DaladierÉdouard Daladier landed at Le Bourget Airfield on the 30th of September 1938 to a crowd of cheering Parisians. They waved and shouted, relieved that the man returning from Munich had kept France out of another war. Daladier looked out at…
- Jacques-Louis DavidJacques-Louis David was born in Paris on the 30th of August 1748, into a world of powdered wigs, gilded ceilings, and a painting style built on prettiness. He would spend his life tearing all of it down. By the time he died on the 29th of…
- Joachim MuratJoachim Murat, born on the 25th of March 1767 in a small town in southwestern France, died facing a firing squad on the 13th of October 1815 in Pizzo Calabro. He was forty-eight years old. In between those two dates, he rose from an…
- Édouard DetailleJean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille entered the world on the 5th of October 1848 in Paris. He grew up in Picardy within a prosperous military family. His grandfather had supplied arms to Napoleon during his campaigns. This background placed him…
- Paul BarrasPaul Barras, born on the 30th of June 1755 in the small Provencal town of Fox-Amphoux, rose from a noble family to become the most powerful executive in revolutionary France. At a moment when the nation was tearing itself apart, he stood…
- Antoine-Jean GrosAntoine-Jean Gros was born in Paris on the 16th of March 1771, the son of two painters, in a city on the edge of revolution. By the time he died on the 25th of June 1835, he had painted the most celebrated image of Napoleon Bonaparte that…
- Emmanuel Joseph SieyèsEmmanuel Joseph Sieyès published a slim pamphlet in January 1789 and, within months, helped bring down a social order that had stood for centuries. The pamphlet's opening lines framed a nation's grievances in three blunt questions: What is…
- Louis-Guillaume OttoLouis-Guillaume Otto, comte de Mosloy, wrote a letter on the 6th of July 1799 that most historians have overlooked for centuries. In it, he announced that a revolution had begun in France. He called it, in French, the Industrial…
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier fell down a flight of stairs on the 4th of May 1830. He had been living with a heart condition since his days in Egypt and Grenoble, but that fall aggravated the malady beyond what anyone had feared. Twelve days later, he…
- Charles-Pierre AugereauCharles-Pierre-François Augereau was born on the 21st of October 1757 in Faubourg Saint-Marceau, Paris, the son of a fruit seller. Few soldiers of the age traveled a stranger road to a Marshal's baton. Before Napoleon Bonaparte ever…
- Jean-Baptiste SayJean-Baptiste Say was born in Lyon on the 5th of January 1767, into a Protestant family whose roots had been uprooted by religious persecution a generation earlier. His grandfather's family had fled from Nîmes to Geneva after the…
- Charles de SteubenCharles de Steuben stood before the Salon de Paris in 1812 and unveiled a canvas of Peter the Great fighting a storm on Lake Ladoga. The painting caught the attention of the professional world. It launched the career of a man born Carl…
- Charles-François LebrunCharles-François Lebrun was born on the 19th of March 1739 in Saint-Sauveur-Lendelin, a small town in the Manche region of France, and he would live to see nearly every form of government his country could devise. Monarchy, republic,…
- Jean-Jacques-Régis de CambacérèsJean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès was born in Montpellier on the 18th of October 1753, into a family with deep roots in the legal profession. His childhood was relatively poor, yet the household he grew up in would eventually produce a…
- Louis ViscontiLouis Tullius Joachim Visconti was born in Rome on the 11th of February 1791, into a family so entwined with antiquity that the past was practically the family business. His grandfather had founded the Vatican Museums. His father was a…
- Alexandre Colonna-WalewskiAlexandre Colonna-Walewski was born on the 4th of May 1810 during a thunderstorm, and according to family lore, the lightning was taken as a sign that his life would be stormy and even life-changing. He would later write of that moment…
- Gustave DoréGustave Doré created over 10,000 illustrations across his lifetime, and at the peak of his career he kept some 40 block-cutters employed just to translate his drawings onto wooden printing blocks. Born in Strasbourg on the 6th of January…
- Michel NeyMichel Ney stood before a firing squad in Paris on the 7th of December 1815 and refused to wear a blindfold. His reason was simple and devastating: he had spent twenty-five years staring down cannonballs and bullets. He then exercised one…
- Jules MicheletJules Michelet died on the 9th of February 1874, in the southern French town of Hyères, from a heart attack. He left behind nineteen volumes of French history, a second wife still preparing a new manuscript, and a single borrowed word that…