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This modern-day boulangerie commemorates a famous Siege of Paris hot air balloon escape
Amid the bustle of the long, tree -lined avenue Gambetta in Paris’s 20th arrondissement is a particularly eye-catching sight. A bakery with an old-fashioned façade and a hand-made doorknob shaped like a…hot air balloon. Even more surprising: the panels on the façade that once probably listed the different types of bread and pastries that were sold here have been replaced by large paintings of one of the most famous events that took place during the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris. On October 7, 1870, dynamic statesman Léon Gambetta, who had proclaimed the new Third French Republic from a window of the Hôtel de Ville just a few weeks before, donned a fur coat and stepped inside the wicker basket of a hot air balloon called L’Armand-Barbès. Along with his fellow politician Eugène Spuller and pilot Alexandre Trichet, Gambetta soon soared above the Place Saint-Pierre, at the foot of Montmartre, a popular site for balloons to take off during the Siege. Most of the balloons that left the besieged c