View from Pont de'Jena toward the Chateau d'Eau

No less than 271 of those photos are on Flickr. Click here to view them, or sit back and watch the slideshow.

Actor, film critic, filmmaker, producer, screenwriter and Frogsmoker François Truffaut

In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in which he attacked the current state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers. The article resulted in a storm of controversy. After having been a critic, Truffaut decided to make films of his own. He started with short films, and made his feature film debut in 1959 with Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows). This film was an instant success and won him a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This film and the following films were successful even with the low budget he had to make the films. He was also notably one of the main stars in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where he played scientist Claude Lacombe.

Truffaut was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1959 to 1965, and they had two daughters. While he had affairs with almost all of his leading ladies – in 1968 he was fiancé of Claude Jade – Truffaut and actress Fanny Ardant lived together from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter in 1983.

In 1983, Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died on 21 October 1984, aged 52. At the time of his death, he still had numerous films in preparation. His goal was to make thirty films and then retire to write books for his remaining days. He was five films short of his personal goal.

Google celebrates Truffaut’s 80th birthday with a triple doodle:

View of the Mont Blanc from over the Lac de Roselend, Savoie (2816x2112)

Moorea Island, French Polynesia (1920x1200)

Fabrèges, Aquitaine (1024x1022) "A fairy tale behind this picture"

The Alps at night – Timelapse from Matthew Vandeputte on Vimeo.

Singer, songwriter and Frogsmoker Daniel Balavoine

In the French music-business, Balavoine earned his own spot with both his powerful voice, his wide range and his lyrics, which were full of sadness and revolt. He was emphatic, and his songs for the most part talked about despair, pain, and death. Hope was present as a theme as well.

In the 1980s, Balavoine fell in love with Africa and started using his fame to fund the building of water wells for the Sahel. He participated in his first Paris-Dakar motor rally in 1982. Four years later, on 14 January 1986, while flying over the rally, Balavoine died, along with Thierry Sabine and three other people, when their helicopter crashed into a dune in Mali.

Here’s the man with one of his 1985 successes:

Click for the full series.

Not enough francophone to understand the blooper? Here’s the translation of “petite bite”.

Franz Reichelt [wiki] was an Austrian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, who is remembered for his accidental death by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design. Reichelt had become fixated on developing a suit for aviators that would convert into a parachute and allow them to survive a fall should they be forced to leave their aircraft. Initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful, but he was unable to replicate those early successes with any of his subsequent designs.

Believing that the lack of a suitably high test platform was partially to blame for his failures, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Parisian Prefecture of Police for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. He was finally granted permission in early 1912, but when he arrived at the tower on February 4 he made it clear that he intended to jump himself rather than conduct an experiment with dummies. Despite attempts by his friends and spectators to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he crashed into the icy ground at the foot of the tower. Although it was clear that the fall had killed him, he was taken to a nearby hospital where he was officially pronounced dead. The next day, newspapers were full of the story of the reckless inventor and his fatal jump – many included pictures of the fall taken by press photographers who had gathered to witness Reichelt’s experiment – and a film documenting the jump appeared in newsreels.