Researching the past isn’t easy — and I’m learning that certain time periods are even more difficult to visualize and understand than I might have expected. What I hope will be my next novel is taking me to a different time in Paris’s history, and I’m trying to get down…

Paris, December, 1870: Under siege by the Prussians since September 19, the city has run out of a number of basic cooking ingredients, including most common sources of meat (cat, rat, dog, horse, and for the extremely wealthy, zoo animals, are usually substitutes), as well as milk and cheese. Flour…

Located near the busy Gare Montparnasse (Montparnasse train station), le Musée de la Poste (The (French) Postal Museum) contains one of the best collections of objects related to the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris anywhere. You may be wondering why. Out of necessity, the Siege of Paris was a part…

I’m going to interrupt this blog’s usual content about life during the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris, to travel back nearly eight decades from the Siege, to the French Revolution and the turbulent years that followed. A few days ago, I saw something so extraordinary from that time that I have…

Amid the bustle of the long, tree -lined avenue Gambetta in Paris’s 20th arrondissement is a particularly eye-catching sight. A bakery with an old-fashioned façade and a hand-made doorknob shaped like a…hot air balloon. Even more surprising: the panels on the façade that once probably listed the different types of…

Sometimes, war and natural disasters end up influencing everyday life in unexpected ways. During the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris, for instance, shortages of food staples and favorites led to Parisians eating rats, cats, dogs, and zoo animals, pining after cheese, and auctioning off sacks of potatoes. Nowadays, food shortages are…

The view of Paris from Montmartre is one of the most breathtaking sights in the city — a sea of slate rooftops and white buildings, scattered with recognizable landmarks, green spaces and other details like islands among its waves. But how long has it looked like this? Last weekend, a…

One of the things that fascinates me the most about the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris is what still remains of it. Not really anything large-scale, despite the fact that so many historical events happened during or (at least partially) because of it. Rather, physical remnants of the Siege are memoirs…

The Siege of Paris changed the city in some significant ways. Once-magnificent parks were stripped of their trees or used for pasture, the Comédie Française was transformed into a private hospital, and the southern reaches of the city suffered damage from roughly a month of shelling from the Prussians. And…