Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France

Tanneries along the Bièvre c.1860; photo by Charles Marville (Wikimedia) The foulest area of the foul city of Paris was located only...

Perhaps fortunately, we are not yet able to recreate virtually the odours of historic cities.  By way of consolation, you can find on the in...

The "Projet Bretez" is a virtual reconstruction with a difference.  The brainchild of Mylène Pardoen, musicologist from the U...

In eighteenth-century Paris traders commonly   bought up excess food from the tables of noble and bourgeois households, convents and monaste...

Record-breaking Fahrenheit thermometer 1718 Not French I know, but it isn't very often that antique thermometers make the national ...

The prodigious quantity of  causes ... troubles us, makes us afraid, and hides from us the secret of the Creator.  It is beneath appearances...

The three-hundredth anniversary of the Grand hiver / Great Frost in 2009 generated particular interest because it coincided with a major...

The correspondence of Louis XIV's sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine Elisabeth-Charlotte, duchess of Orléans (1652–1722), mother ...