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A good way to find out what is going on in the local area is to keep a look on posters in the shop windows, and this was the way I found out that my local CIQ had organised a guided walk in Pernety, which is where I live, on a Sunday afternoon. The subject was "Known and little-known women in Pernety', and I admit that I expected a 45 minute walk with an autodidact guide, but I was proven oh, so wrong!
It turned out to be a very interesting afternoon under the guidance of Jean-Louis Robert, a historian who has written a big book about Pernety. Jean-Louis seems to know all about the people who have ever lived in the area and lots about the historical and social content in which they lived. In every street there was a story to be told, and we were given bits of pieces of information to arouse our appetite for more information.
There was Cecile Furtado-Heine, a rich Jewish philanthrope, who financed a dispensary for children and an atelier for the blind in the street now named after her, and there was Leonide Chaptal who created a nurse school near Porte de Vanves. There were sufragettes and feminists who fought for women's right to vote (which they only got in 1945!!!). Marie de Valsayre was quite a personality who married a doctor, created a secondary school for girls, was a champion in duelling and made a petiition to allow women to wear trousers! There were doctors and painters and musicians and writers and participants in the resistance movement. The women were there and they were influencing social rights, even if they could not open a bank account without the consent of either their fathers or husbands until 1971!
It always amazes me how every street in Paris has its writer and politician and how something historical has happened absolutely on every corner. I cannot wait to get my hands on the book by Jean-Louis Robert, and I am eagerly waiting for his next historical walk in Pernety whatever the subject will be.
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Jean-Louis Robert présente sa monumentale histoire du quartier Pernety
Pour le quartier Pernety-Plaisance la publication de la somme que lui a consacré Jean-Louis Robert, professeur émérite à la Sorbonne, habitant et historien éminent du village parisiendes comme...