Win a Spotted by Locals Paris iPhone app!

I have contributed to the Spotted by Locals cityguides for two years now, and have seen the network grow from a handful of cities to a whopping 33 European cities today. I was attracted by the principal of giving insider tips to travellers (and locals!) which would help them to immediately locate places that come warmly recommended from the people who use them everyday.

Like all other local bloggers ("Spotters") I was personally selected by husband and wife team Bart and Sanne Van Poll, the genial Dutch couple who started up and run the service. They are passionate about the concept of 'local travel' and are also founder members of the Local Travel Movement.

The Spotted by Locals website contains hundreds of recommendations, including restaurants, bars, museums, hotels or just places to relax, but it is a real bonus to have all of the sites for the city of your choice in an iPhone app. The beauty of this app - as well as the hand-picked recommendations (and I am proof that they really are personal choices!) is that there are no surprise bills. Indeed, it is one of the few iPhone travel apps that does not require internet access, as all tips and maps are included in the application.

Normally priced at €3.99 (£2.99, US$4.99), you can win a complimentary copy on the Paris Weekends blog. If you would like to win one of these applications, click here to find out more.

The inglorious destiny of the Gambetta monument

You can learn a lot of things from old postcards. A few months ago I discovered the picture above on the Daily Postcard blog, which gives a panorama of the Louvre museum that I hadn't even imagined. In approximately the same position as Ieoh Ming Pei's controversial pyramid today stood this no less controversial monument to the politician and republican Leon Gambetta.

At 27 metres high and positioned in front of what seems to be a small garden it offers a curious contrast to the tourist-filled esplanade today. I had though forgotten about this photograph until I walked into the Square Edouard Vaillant in the 20th arrondissement and saw the remnants of something that looked vaguely familiar.

Written on a plaque in front of the statue is the following text; "Detail du monument elevé par Aubé en 1888 au Palais du Louvre Cour Napoléon remonté en cet emplacement à l'occasion du centenaire de la mort de Leon Gambetta Novembre 1982". Roughly translated, a part of the original Gambetta statue built in 1888 was placed in this spot (incidently just off the Avenue Gambetta) for the centenary of Gambetta's death in November 1982.

How did such a grandiose monument end up in a quiet and hidden corner of the city? In reality, it is perhaps fortunate that anything managed to survive at all.

Designed by the sculpter Jean-Paul Aubé and the architect Louis-Charles Boileau, the statue was never a popular one. Léon Gambetta had been a well-regarded politician, but the monument was too grand. This was a period in which the "statuomanie" was prevalent, a phenomenon which saw the widespread installation of statues in questionable taste celebrating minor personalities, and many did not last the test of time.

The Gambetta monument would eventually become one of these, but it did survive untouched until 1941. This year was a terrible one for statues in the city as the Vichy government stripped the metal from all monuments not celebrating saints and royalty for the purposes of agricultural and industrial production (weapons!). Without the bronze figure at the top of the plinth, the statue could not survive, and it was removed altogether in 1954.

Chopped into smaller pieces, it disappeared from public view until 1982. Most parts would have been destroyed altogether, but near thirty years after it was removed, the chunk featuring Léon Gambetta was brought back into the public eye in the quiet Square Edouard Vaillant opposite the Hopital Tenon.
Postcards commemorate a vision of the city at a particular time, not just its physical aspect but also the tastes and attitudes of that particular era. Staues may seem deep rooted and permanent, but they do not guarantee eternal life for those celebrated in stone and metal after death. Feted one year, these personalities can be completely forgotten the next.

Gambetta lives on in Paris in this small stone block, and as a Place and an Avenue - as well as in this postcard! However, for those curious to see exactly what the complete monument looked like, an original scale model still exists in the Musée d'Orsay. It perhaps lacks the extravagant dimensions of the true monument, but it is still two and a half metres high!

The most romantic place in Paris?

I asked a selection of Paris lovers – those who love the city, and those who have loved here - to reveal their most romantic spots in the city, and the answers they gave were wonderfully rich and varied - in prose, images and sound. Railway lines, forgotten doorways, rotting benches, sunlit streets and moonlit corners...

Explore these places on the Paris Weekends blog.

Upstairs Downstairs

Nearly opposite the Saint Germain de Charonne church are two matching houses with a pair of rather curious winding staircases. The houses were in the heart of the old village of Charonne and clearly quite ancient, but what is the story behind the raised entrances?

The answer is a very simple one, but also one we might not initially imagine. According to the Michelin guide "Idées de promenades à Paris", the doors were positioned at ground level up until the middle of the 19th century when it was decided that the terrain should be made flatter for the agricultural workers who passed by each day and who found it a little bit too steep!

The ground was levelled off, but a solution had to be found for the residents of these properties who now found themselves six feet above ground level. Simple - an elegant winding staircase!

Vive le sacrilege?

The Saint Germain de Charonne church on the Rue de Bagnolet is closed until further notice because of severe problems with its foundations. With the building no longer in use, the walls have become the surface for somebody looking to communicate a message.

The rather juvenile messages are seemingly the work of someone who is young and female, but they ask larger questions. Does the concept of sacrilege have any sense today, and are there any sacred surfaces left in our cities today?

With the church being closed and cordoned off to visitors it could be argued that the structure is little more than a construction site today. However, it remains a building that dates in parts from the 12th century, and one that is almost unique in Paris because of its adjoining cemetery. Relatively few people today in Paris would describe themselves as being religious, and even fewer ever go inside a church, but there is generally a respect for the city's history.

This is of course far from being anything that could be classed as artistic but we can ask whether there are walls in the city that can be written on and others that are more deserving of protection. Obviously these walls were chosen to increase the shock value, and the messages would have been quickly overlooked had they been splashed anywhere else, but from a judicial sense no difference would be made if the perpetrator were caught. Is this the right situation?