Things To Do in Paris France

Art, Culture and the Museum City

Paris holds a concentration of major art institutions that no other city can match in terms of the quality and volume of work held within a small geographic area. The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world and holds the largest art collection in existence, including the most famous painting in history, displayed in a gallery that is always crowded regardless of time of day or season. The Musée d'Orsay, housed in a converted railway station, holds the definitive collection of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which is to say the most commercially valued and broadly recognised group of paintings produced in any country in the nineteenth century. The Center Pompidou holds the most significant collection of twentieth-century and contemporary art in Europe. All three are within a few kilometres of each other along the Seine.

Food, Restaurants and the Parisian Table

The French relationship with food is the most codified and culturally serious of any European country, and Paris is where that relationship is expressed at its most concentrated. The brasserie culture of the grands boulevards, the zinc-countered bistros of the old neighbourhoods, the patisserie windows whose contents are constructed with the precision of jewellery, and the market stalls of the Marché d'Aligre, the Marché de Bastille, and the Marché Biologique Raspail constitute a food infrastructure that functions at high quality across every level of expenditure and ambition. The French baguette, produced according to protected specifications, is bought fresh twice daily by a significant proportion of the city's population from one of the city's thousands of boulangeries. Cheese, charcuterie, wine, and the coffee culture of the stand-up zinc bar are each specific Parisian experiences.

Fashion, Couture and Cultural Leadership

Paris Fashion Week, held twice yearly on the official schedule coordinated by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, is the most important of the four major fashion weeks and the event at which the directions of fashion for the following season are most authoritatively set. The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Avenue Montaigne are the primary addresses of the major French and international luxury houses. The history of Parisian couture, which gave the world the concept of seasonal collections, the runway show, and the notion of the fashion designer as cultural figure, continues to define the city's global reputation. The Palais Galliera, the museum of fashion, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs provide the institutional context for a tradition that is as much a cultural inheritance as an industry.

Architecture, Boulevards and the City's Form

Paris's urban form is the result of a deliberate transformation in the 1850s and 1860s under the direction of Baron Haussmann, who replaced much of the medieval city with the wide boulevards, uniform stone facades, and geometric street plan that now define the city's character. The result, whatever its social costs at the time, is one of the most coherent large-scale urban environments in the world, whose internal logic is visible from the ground and from the air. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame Cathedral (undergoing reconstruction following the 2019 fire), Sacré-Coeur, and the Palais Royal are all landmarks in a city whose density of significant buildings per square kilometre is higher than anywhere else in Europe. The Seine riverbanks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are where the city's public life is most concentrated.

Film, Gardens and Cultural Life Beyond the Museums

Paris maintains a film culture more serious and institutionally supported than any other major city. The Cinémathèque Française in the Bercy district is the world's most important film archive, and its repertoire screenings, retrospectives, and permanent collection make it the destination for film scholarship from across the world. The network of independent cinemas in the Latin Quarter and around Saint-Germain maintains a culture of film spectatorship that treats cinema as an art form requiring specific conditions of attention, and Parisian audiences sustain a market for restored prints of international classics that no other city outside a handful of film festivals can replicate. The Jardin du Luxembourg and the Jardin des Tuileries are the two great formal gardens of the city, both free to enter and used daily by residents in ways that make them as much part of neighbourhood life as any street or square. The Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, with its iron footbridges and tree-lined banks, is the most characterful waterway in the city and the focal point of a neighbourhood culture that is specifically Parisian in its combination of the domestic and the fashionable. The Fête de la Musique on the 21st of June, when musicians of every kind perform for free in streets, courtyards, and squares across the city, is a model adopted in hundreds of cities worldwide since its introduction in 1982 but nowhere replicated with the same density and variety. The bouquinistes along the Seine, selling second-hand books, prints, and postcards from their green metal boxes along both banks, have been a protected feature of the riverside since the 16th century and remain one of the most specifically Parisian experiences available at no cost.