Paris, the City of Kisses: A Short Introduction from the Francophile
Paris is without a doubt the most romantic city in the world, and not by accident. The combination of sensuous history, beautiful buildings and gardens where couples in love can tuck themselves away makes all of us feel like love runs wild through these streets, just like Michel Sardou once sang.
So it’s no surprise that before the pandemic (and probably after it too) Paris was a city of kissing and kissers. We’ve all seen two Parisians meet on the street and kiss each other on both cheeks (the famous “bise”). And what about the couples kissing on a quiet park bench, or on the bridges, as if to keep the language pure and their intentions clear?
But just before the subject of kisses and kissing turns sticky and saccharine, Ronit Gruman joins us to show that a kiss can be something else entirely. On this walking tour, we’ll stroll through two gardens, a church and even a cemetery, and discover kisses of very different kinds that each tell their own story…
Instead of a map: under the heading of each stop you’ll find its address, and every address is a link. Click it, and the spot opens right away in Google Maps.
Parc Montsouris
Parc Montsouris sits in the south of Paris, in the 14th arrondissement. It’s designed in the English style and is much loved by locals.
In Parc Montsouris, let’s sit on a bench in the shade of handsome trees, looking out over a beautiful lake. This is the spot where Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) set his poem “Le Jardin” (“The Garden”). Prévert was a poet and screenwriter who earned worldwide fame. His poetry, written in a simple, almost folk-like style, deals with love, friendship and everyday experience.
“Le Jardin” is a very short poem that describes the moment of a kiss in a fresh, original light. It reads almost in one breath: the lack of punctuation and the gentle repetition give it the feel of a flowing melody, a kind of perfect harmony.
The happiness of that moment comes through in the time of day Prévert chooses (a winter morning) and in the setting itself: a garden. There’s a hint here of the Garden of Eden, where Adam first met Eve.
Montparnasse Cemetery (Cimetière du Montparnasse)
Montparnasse Cemetery is located in the 14th arrondissement. It’s also considered a tourist site because so many artists and famous figures are buried there, including Charles Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, and Jean-Paul Sartre…
Looking for a kiss in a cemetery?! A little strange, I know. Let’s solve the mystery right away.
On a gloomy day in November 1910, the body of Tatiana Rachewskaia was found: she had hanged herself in her room. She was 23 years old. Who was this mysterious young woman, unknown in her lifetime, who became famous thanks to the sculpture placed on her grave?
Tatiana had fled Russia and come to Paris to study medicine. There, she met a doctor of Romanian origin and fell in love with him. But it was a love that ended in heartbreak and death. Her family came from Russia and decided to honor her memory with a unique sculpture to be placed on her grave.
They commissioned a sculpture of two lovers kissing from a still-unknown young Romanian sculptor named Constantin Brâncuși. And the rest, as they say, is history…
Brâncuși was born in 1876 into a peasant household in a Romanian village. At age 11 he ran away from home and supported himself with various manual jobs. At 18 he began working as an apprentice carpenter while studying at a school of arts and crafts. When he graduated with honors he won a scholarship and moved to Bucharest, where he studied at the school of fine arts and found great success.
In 1902 he left Bucharest and made his way through Munich and Switzerland to Paris, covering much of the distance on foot. His work caught the attention of Rodin himself, who invited him to work in his studio. After learning a great deal from Rodin, Brâncuși left his studio, famously saying that “nothing grows in the shade of tall trees.”
After leaving Rodin, his style changed completely.
The sculpture “The Kiss” is a prime example of his new direction. The version in the cemetery is the third of six. Here’s another version:
Brâncuși abandoned bronze, with its polished, smooth finishes, and turned to stone, working without preparatory sketches and emphasizing the raw material itself. He was no longer a naturalistic sculptor but an artist moving toward abstraction. The two figures are shaped with minimal detail. The kiss merges them not only in movement but in the alignment of eye to eye, mouth to mouth, hair to hair. Even though the subject is “the kiss,” there’s nothing erotic about this sculpture. The emphasis is on the idea of a kiss that unites two people, not on a fleeting physical act.
Dear readers, sadly the sculpture in the cemetery is today covered by a protective box. The reason is a bitter dispute between the young woman’s family and the French government. The family wants the original removed and replaced with a copy. The original sculpture is valued at a legendary sum of money…
Before we move on, if you’d like to read more about Brâncuși and his friends from Montparnasse, I recommend Dr. Orna Liberman’s article Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine: The Last Bohemians of Montparnasse.
Église Saint-Sulpice
An erotic scene, a femme fatale seducing a priest, ending in a kiss and maybe more… inside a church?!
Let’s step into the church, located in the 6th arrondissement, the second largest in the city, and admire the wall paintings by Eugène Delacroix: “Heliodorus Driven from the Temple” and “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.”
Let’s step out of the church to the square in front of it, and put on our headphones…
The opera “Manon” by Jules Massenet tells the story of a beautiful young woman trying to navigate her life between true love and a life of wealth and status. The opera is based on a novel by the French writer Abbé Prévost, published in 1731. The novel is largely autobiographical. When it first came out it was considered highly provocative and was banned from publication in France. The scandal only increased readers’ curiosity and led to it being circulated underground, quickly becoming a famous and beloved book.
Prévost was raised Catholic, joined the army, but left and joined the Benedictine order, only to “betray” the church with a string of women. He got entangled in an affair with a courtesan who spent most of his money, and because of her he even ended up in prison…
The novel has been adapted into four operas, as well as theater and film productions.
Let’s watch the seduction scene from Massenet’s opera “Manon” (which takes place in Saint-Sulpice), in which Manon convinces her former lover, who has since become a sought-after priest at the church, to run away with her.
The Tuileries Garden
The wonderful Tuileries Garden is dotted with fountains and sculptures. Let’s stop by the sculpture “The Kiss” by Auguste Rodin, near the Musée de l’Orangerie.
The famous sculpture “The Kiss” captures a fatal moment of forbidden love between two people, embodied in a single kiss. The scene is described in the fifth canto of Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy.”
In the canto, Francesca da Rimini, following the custom of noblewomen of her time, was married off, against her will, to Giovanni da Rimini, a man neither attractive nor impressive in stature. After the wedding, Francesca and Paolo (Giovanni’s younger brother) find themselves hopelessly in love with one another. They are caught in the act by the betrayed husband-brother and murdered by his hand. The doomed couple is sent to eternal suffering in the depths of hell.
The bronze version in the Tuileries Garden (74 centimeters tall) was sent for display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The sculpture’s eroticism made it controversial. It was deemed unsuitable for general display and was moved to a private room accessible only by special invitation.
While in the Tuileries Garden, we shouldn’t skip the sculpture of Charles Perrault, author of “Sleeping Beauty.” If we’re traveling with kids, or still have a bit of a kid in us, we’re sure to enjoy recalling this wonderful tale, which ends, of course, with a kiss…
Charles Perrault (1628-1703) laid the foundations of children’s literature. In 1697 he published his famous book “Tales of Mother Goose.” Most of the stories were drawn from folk traditions, passed down by word of mouth for generations, and Perrault gave them their final form. The tales were translated into many languages and became beloved classics: “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” “Cinderella”…
In classic children’s fairy tales, kisses were given magical powers, powerful enough to restore a woman’s very existence, especially when given by a handsome prince who would later marry her. A kiss like that is what brings “Sleeping Beauty” back to life, after she was cursed into an enchanted sleep…
Want to travel through France following in Charles Perrault’s footsteps?
France has two châteaux tied to two of his most famous tales.
- The first is the Château d’Ussé, in the Loire Valley. “Sleeping Beauty” was written here, and you can find wax figures depicting the story on site. If you’d like to read more about it, check out the article Ussé: The Castle of Sleeping Beauty.
- The second is the Château de Breteuil, about a half-hour drive southwest of Paris. Charles Perrault wrote “Puss in Boots” there, and the entire château is now dedicated to that tale. You can read more about it in the article Château de Breteuil: The Castle of Puss in Boots.
The Louvre Museum
In our search for a kiss, we arrive at the Louvre Museum to see a sculpture by Antonio Canova (1757-1822), an Italian sculptor and leading figure of the Neoclassical movement. His greatest inspiration came from Greek mythology. His sculptures, now part of the art-historical canon, are displayed in the world’s most important museums.
Let’s look at the sculpture “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss” (1787). Working in hard marble, Canova managed to capture some of the most delicate ideas of emotion and love. As in children’s fairy tales, in mythology too a kiss was given magical powers, powerful enough to give a kissed woman back her very existence.
The sculpture depicts the moment when Cupid (the young god of love) descends into the underworld, the land of the dead, and brings his beloved Psyche back to life… with a kiss!
The sculpture is considered a masterpiece of Neoclassical sculpture, yet it captures its mythological lovers in a moment of overwhelming emotion, characteristic of the Romantic movement that was then taking shape.
The 18th century was a battleground over the place of reason. On one side stood the Rationalists (supporters of the Neoclassical movement), and on the other the Romantics, pushing back against a rational outlook they saw as draining the magic out of life.
It’s hard not to read political meaning into a sculpture created two years before the French Revolution. Isn’t every love also a love of freedom? A refusal to accept the world as it is? And to a viewer like the revolutionary Robespierre, wasn’t the subject of this sculpture a metaphor for an awakening toward revolutionary consciousness?
Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville
Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville in Paris is the backdrop for one of the most famous photographs in the history of photography: “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” (1950).
Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) was one of the pioneers of photojournalism. More than anything, Doisneau is identified with his city, Paris, which he photographed in a style that was poetic, simple and deeply human. He walked the streets of Paris and captured street life and everyday humanity in countless photographs.
In 1950, Doisneau took his photograph “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville” for Life magazine. In 1986, a poster of the image was printed and distributed in more than 500,000 copies, along with 400,000 postcards. The photo became an international symbol of young love in Paris.
But all that fame opened a Pandora’s box for Doisneau.
A young couple, Jean and Denise, believed they were the ones pictured in the photo, though that wasn’t actually the case. They sued Doisneau in court for “photographing them without their knowledge.” Under French law, a person holds rights over their own image.
The lawsuit forced Doisneau to reveal the identity of the real subjects, and it came out that the photo had been staged. After seeing a young couple kissing, he had asked them if they’d kiss again, and they agreed.
Doisneau, of course, won the case…
La Cinémathèque française, 12th Arrondissement: A Treasure Trove of Cinema
La Cinémathèque française is one of the city’s most important cultural institutions. The building sits near one of the city’s most charming and unusual gardens, the Jardin Yitzhak-Rabin, named after the Israeli prime minister. The postmodern building was designed by the American architect Frank Gehry. Inside, you’ll find a film museum, screening rooms and one of the richest libraries in the world of films and film-related documents.
The history of this venerable institution began in 1936. The leading figure behind it was Henri Langlois. During the German occupation of France, an order was given to destroy every film made before 1937. Langlois and his colleagues smuggled films out of the collection and saved them.
Langlois was a hugely influential figure for the directors of the French New Wave. His unconventional methods got him fired from his position in 1968, a decision that caused an uproar across the film world: the prestigious Cannes Film Festival was halted, famous directors from around the world protested, and riots broke out. The minister of education was forced to reinstate Langlois.
Over the years, the Cinémathèque occupied several different locations. The current building was built in 1993, intended to serve as an American cultural center. After a few years it closed due to budget problems. In 1998 it became the Cinémathèque’s permanent home.
A kiss in the movies?
Cinema loves a kiss. In many films, these scenes are the main draw for the audience and are always part of what we expect from a movie. Film turns the kiss from an everyday act into a grand, larger-than-life moment, one that filmmakers hope will leave a lasting mark on their audience.
My personal favorite kiss scene appears in the 1938 film “Port of Shadows” (Le Quai des brumes), which is well worth looking up in the Cinémathèque’s collection.
The film follows an army deserter (Jean Gabin) waiting for a ship at the port so he can flee France. While he waits, he finds love (Michèle Morgan), trouble and death.
The kiss scene, within the film’s tragic story, captures everything missed, everything denied the characters by harsh circumstances. The film was directed by Marcel Carné, with a screenplay by Jacques Prévert, and it became a classic of French cinema.
To wrap up…
Until about two hundred years ago, the subject of “the kiss” in art was considered the very embodiment of eroticism. So artists who wanted to depict a kiss would usually hang it on a story from mythology or history to gain some legitimacy. At the end of the 18th century, the Romantic movement emerged, deeply concerned with human emotion, including romantic love, and the kiss became a legitimate subject in depictions of everyday life.
Over the years, society has grown more permissive and art more provocative, and sometimes it feels like the kiss has been left behind, a little bit missing from contemporary art.
Countless artists weren’t mentioned in this article: Picasso, Chagall, Fragonard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and many more… Dear reader, feel free to add your own favorite “kiss” to the list, even if the painter or sculptor isn’t French (Klimt, anyone?).
Did you enjoy the article? Want to read more?
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you’re looking for more like it, here are two ideas:
– If this talk of kisses has warmed your heart and you’re looking for romantic spots in Paris, I highly recommend Yoel Thamanlis’s article 17 Romantic Spots in Paris.
– If you’re looking for more walking tour ideas in Paris, check out Walking Routes in Paris.
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