Curated playlist
Grand Officers of the Legion of Honour
- Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi was an intensely private man who liked to claim he had risen from illiterate peasants. The truth was tidier and less romantic. Both his parents came from families of small landowners and traders. His father, listed in 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…
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeJoseph-Louis Lagrange was born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia in Turin on the 25th of January 1736, the firstborn of eleven children. At seventeen, he stumbled across a paper by Edmond Halley from 1693 and was immediately seized by…
- Le CorbusierLe Corbusier insisted that "a house is a machine to live in," a maxim that would unsettle architects for a century. The man who wrote it was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker's son with no formal training as an architect. He…
- Auguste RodinAuguste Rodin was born into a working-class family in Paris on the 12th of November 1840, and he died 77 years later on the 17th of November 1917 -- just five days after his birthday. Between those two dates, he produced works so unlike…
- Auguste de MarmontAuguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont was a man the French came to despise, not for losing battles, but for ending one. Born on the 20th of July 1774 in Châtillon-sur-Seine, he rose from the son of a minor nobleman to become one of…
- 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…
- 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…
- Walter Bedell SmithWalter Bedell Smith signed the Italian armistice beneath an olive tree at Cassibile, Sicily, on the 3rd of September 1943. The ceremony was simple. Smith represented the Allied coalition. Across the table sat Generale di Brigata Giuseppe…
- Pierre-Simon LaplacePierre-Simon Laplace stood before Napoleon Bonaparte in the early years of the nineteenth century and handed him a copy of his book on the universe. Napoleon, who enjoyed putting embarrassing questions to learned men, looked up and said:…
- Jean-Léon GérômeJean-Léon Gérôme was born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, a small town in the Haute-Saône region of France, and by 1880 he had become arguably the most famous living artist in the world. That rise was not built on one triumphant canvas…