Left Bank Travel Video Guide

Left Bank Travel Itinerary

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The Left Bank ( rive gauche ) is synonymous with all things Bohemian, dissident and intellectual. In the first half of the twentieth century, the area's reputation for alternative thought and innovation attracted painters and writers like Picasso, Apollinaire, Breton, Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Hemingway, and later, the Existentialist philosophers Camus and Sartre. The quartier was the scene of violent student demonstrations in 1968, leading to widespread unrest and the near-overthrow of the de Gaulle government. Ironically, the very streets from which such revolution sprang are currently home to expensive flats, art galleries, and mod fashion boutiques, and the cafes once frequented by the penniless intellectuals are now filled with the well-educated bourgeois. Over the years, those who question

authority and the status quo have decamped to other parts of the city and their place has been filled by the myth-makers of the image industry: designers, politicians, fashion photographers, journalists.

The heart of the Left Bank is the warren of medieval lanes around the boulevards St-Michel and St-Germain , known as the Quartier Latin because, until the Revolution, Latin was the language spoken at the quartier's prestigious university, the Sorbonne .

Your Tips For Left Bank

• Corsica France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Around one-and-three-quarter million people visit Corsica each year, drawn by a climate that's mild even in winter and by some of the most astonishingly diverse landscapes in Europe. - France
  

• Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic Coast France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  News-stands selling Sud-Ouest remind you where you are: this is not the Mediterranean, certainly, but in summer the quality of the light, the warm air, the fields of sunflowers and the shuttered siesta-silence of the farmhouses give you the first exciting promises of the south. - France
  

• Paris France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . - France
  

• Pyrenees France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Basque-speaking, wet and green in the west; craggy, snowy, Gascon-influenced in the middle; dry, Mediterranean and Catalan-speaking in the east - the Pyrenees are physically beautiful, culturally varied and considerably less developed than the Alps. - France
  

• Normandy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Though now firmly incorporated into the French mainstream, the seaboard province of Normandy has a history of prosperous independence as one of the crucial powers of medieval Europe. - France
  

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  One of the loveliest spots on earth ? a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue ? a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents . - France
  

• Languedoc France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - France
  

• Burgundy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Peaceful, rural Burgundy is one of the most prosperous regions in modern France, but for centuries its powerful dukes remained independent of the French crown. - France
  

• Dordogne Limousin and Lot France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The land covered in this section forms a rough oval bordered to the east by the uplands of the Massif Central and to the west by the Atlantic plains. - France
  

• Loire France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The density of chateaux and all their great Renaissance intrigues and associations can prove quite intimidating, but if you pick your castles selectively, rid yourself of a sense of duty to guided tours and spend days on river banks with supplies of cheese, fruit and white Loire wines, the Loire can be one of the most enjoyable of all French regions. - France
  

• Alsace-Lorraine and the Jura mountains France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  France's eastern frontier provinces, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte , where the Jura mountains lie, have had a complex and tumultuous history. - France
  

• Alps France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . - France
  

• North France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. - France
  

• Cote dAzur France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The Cote d'Azur polarizes opinions like few other places in France. - France
  

• Brittany France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. - France
  

• Rhone valley and Provence France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Of all the areas of France, Provence is the most irresistible. - France