Bougival

As the site where many of the Impressionists (including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Auguste Renoir) painted country scenes along the Seine, the town today hosts a series of six historical placards, known as the "Impressionists Walk", at locations from which the noted painters depicted the scenes of Bougival.

Bougival is also noted as the site of the Machine de Marly, a sprawling, complicated hydraulic pumping device that began supplying the massive quantity of water required by the fountains at Palace of Versailles in the late 17th century. Considered one of the foremost engineering accomplishments of its era, the cacophonous, breakdown-prone apparatus comprised fourteen waterwheels (approximately 38 feet in diameter) driven by the current of the Seine — in turn powering more than 250 pumps, delivering water up a 500-foot vertical rise through a series of pumping stations, holding tanks, reservoirs, pipes and mechanical linkages. In use until 1817, the machine was subsequently updated, replaced with another pumping building in 1858 and finally replaced by an electrical generator in 1963. The building itself remained until 1968. Remnants are visible today at the riverbank.

In Bougival, Georges Bizet composed the opera Carmen at his home on Rue Ivan Tourguenievf on the Seine, close to where Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev had a dacha built, named Les Frênes (current-day Villa Viardot). A local monument commemorates the Montgolfier brothers, pioneers of flight; the commune hosts the annual Festival of Bougival et des Coteaux de Seine.

History

In the 19th century, Bougival emerged as a fashionable suburb of Paris. Pauline Viardot had a villa there, as did her paramour Ivan Turgenev, who died in the town in 1883. Bougival was also known as the "Cradle of Impressionism" during the Belle Époque. Painters Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Sisley among others painted the light, sky, and water of this area. Alexandre Dumas, fils set parts of his novel The Lady of the Camellias in Bougival.

The Junior division of the British School of Paris (formerly the English School of Paris) was located in Bougival up until 2008. Prior to the English School, it was a Catholic all-girls school called Marymount in the 1960s. It was reported that the Germans occupied the estate during World War II, along with the nuns that lived there, due to the estate's vantage point of the Seine River. Rennequin Sualem