Paris, France in the context of "Musée Marmottan Monet"

The beheading of John the Baptist, also known as the decollation of Saint John the Baptist or the beheading of the Forerunner, is a biblical event commemorated as a holy day by various Christian churches. According to the New Testament, Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee under the Roman Empire, had imprisoned John the Baptist because he had publicly reproved Herod for divorcing his first wife and unlawfully taking his sister-in-law (his brother's wife) Herodias as his second wife. He then ordered him to be killed by beheading.

As a non-Biblical source, Jewish historian Josephus also recounts that Herod had John imprisoned and killed due to "the great influence John had over the people", which might persuade John "to raise a rebellion". Josephus also writes that many of the Jews believed that Herod's later military disaster was God's punishment for his treatment of John.

The covered passages of Paris (French: Passages couverts de Paris) are an early form of shopping arcade built in Paris, France, primarily during the first half of the 19th century. By 1867, there were approximately 183 covered passages in Paris but many were demolished during Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Only 25 survived into the 21st century, all but one are in the arrondissements (municipal districts) on the Right Bank of the Seine.

The common characteristics of the covered passages is that they link at least two streets, have glass ceilings and are pedestrianised, artificially illuminated at night (initially with gas lamps), privately owned, highly ornamented and decorated, and lined with small shops on the ground floor. The passages’ upper floors usually had apartments. Originally, to keep the passages clean, each would have at the entrance an artiste de décrottage (a ‘shoe cleaning artist’).

An atmospheric theatre is a type of movie palace design which was popular in the late 1920s. Atmospheric theatres were designed and decorated to evoke the feeling of a particular time and place for patrons, through the use of projectors, architectural elements and ornamentation that evoked a sense of being outdoors. This was intended to make the patron a more active participant in the setting.

The most successful promoter of the style was John Eberson. He credited the Hoblitzelle Majestic Theatre (Houston, 1923, since demolished) as the first. Before the end of the 1920s he designed around 100 atmospheric theatres in the U.S. and a few other countries, personally selecting the furnishings and art objects. His most notable surviving theatres in the United States include the Tampa Theatre (1926), Palace Theatre (1928), Majestic Theatre (1929), Paramount Theatre (1929), and the Loew's Theatre (1929). Remaining international examples include The Civic Theatre (1929, Auckland, New Zealand), The Forum (1929, Melbourne, Australia), as well as two theatres completed in Sydney, Australia, the Capitol Theatre (1928) and State Theatre (1929) (both designed by Henry Eli White with assistance from Eberson), and Le Grand Rex, (1932, Paris, France) which was designed by architect Auguste Bluysen with assistance from Eberson.

Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to film theory, criticism, and production, with origins in Paris, France in the 1920s. The Surrealist movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Philippe Soupault and André Breton’s 1920 book collaboration Les Champs magnétiques is often considered to be the first Surrealist work, but it was only once Breton had completed his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 that ‘Surrealism drafted itself an official birth certificate.’

Surrealist films of the 1920s include René Clair's Entr'acte (1924), Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924), Jean Renoir's La Fille de l'Eau (1924), Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926), Jean Epstein's Fall of the House of Usher (1928) (with Luis Buñuel assisting), Watson and Webber's Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) (from a screenplay by Antonin Artaud). Other films include Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge D'Or (1930), both by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí; Buñuel went on to direct many more films, never denying his surrealist roots. Ingmar Bergman said "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films".

Leonidas at Thermopylae is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Jacques-Louis David. The work currently hangs in the Louvre in Paris, France. David completed the massive work (3.95 m × 5.31 m) 15 years after he began, working on it from 1799 to 1803 and again in 1813–1814. Leonidas at Thermopylae was purchased, along with The Intervention of the Sabine Women, in November 1819 for 100,000 francs by Louis XVIII, the king of France. The piece depicts the Spartan king Leonidas prior to the Battle of Thermopylae. David's pupil Georges Rouget collaborated on it.

Eugène Samuel Grasset (French pronunciation: [øʒɛn samɥɛl ɡʁasɛ]; 25 May 1845 – 23 October 1917) was a Swiss decorative artist who worked in Paris, France in a variety of creative design fields during the Belle Époque. He is considered a pioneer in Art Nouveau design.

The Chapel of Graces of the Miraculous Virgin (French: La Chapelle du Grâce de Sainte Vierge Miraculeuse) or informally the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, is a Roman Catholic Marian shrine located in Paris, France. It is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the Marian title the Virgin of Miracles.

The venerated Marian image enshrined within merited a decree of Pontifical coronation from Pope Leo XIII in 1897 as well as an Apostolic Visit from Pope John Paul II on 31 May 1980.

Varieties of the French language are spoken in France and around the world. The Francophones of France generally use Metropolitan French (spoken in Paris and considered standard) although some also use regional dialects or varieties such as Meridional French. In Europe outside France there are Belgian French, Swiss French, and in Italy Aostan French. In Canada, French is an official language along with English; the two main dialects of French in Canada are Canadian French and Acadian French. Standard French (e.g. used by Anglophones speaking French or by Francophones in Canada using a different dialect) is also commonly grouped as Canadian French. In Lebanon, French was an official language until 1941 and the main dialect spoken there is Lebanese French or Levantine French. Levantine French was also spoken by Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Smyrna, by Armenians and Greek bourgeois in the urban centres of Asia Minor, by Syrian Catholics and Melkites in Aleppo and Beirut.

Note that the discussion here refers to varieties of the French language, not to the Romance sister languages (sometimes considered dialects) of French spoken in France (e.g. Picard, Limousin, Gascon, etc.; for these languages see: Langues d'oïl, Francoprovençal, Occitan and languages of France). See also French-based creole languages, which are also considered separate languages.

On 9 January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, armed with a submachine gun, an assault rifle, and two Tokarev pistols, entered and attacked a Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes in Paris, France. There, Coulibaly murdered four Jewish hostages and held fifteen other hostages during a siege in which he demanded that the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the Kouachi brothers, not be harmed. The siege ended when police stormed the supermarket, killing Coulibaly. The Charlie Hebdo shooting had taken place just days earlier, as did the Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis, in which the two Charlie Hebdo gunmen were cornered.

On 16 December 2020, 14 accomplices to both the Jewish supermarket attack and the Charlie Hebdo shooting, including Coulibaly's former partner Hayat Boumeddiene, were convicted. At that time, three of the accomplices, including Bouddiene, had not been captured and were tried in absentia.