Ah, finalement! We can at last see la tour Eiffel, non?

For those unfamiliar with the layout of Parigi, the Eiffel Tower sits roughly due south of the Arc de Triomphe, but on the other side of the river Siene. There are no roads that run directly south from the Arc; the one that we see here, the Avenue Kléber, runs roughly SSW, so the tower sits to the left of it. The next one over, the Avenue d'Iéna, starts out running just veeery fractionally to the east of south (call it south by east if you're familiar with that), meaning that the tower appears on its right as we'll see in later shots. (The Avenue d'Iéna does swing back to the west about half way along as it approaches the river, but that's of no import to us.)

I've found relatively little of interest about the Avenue Kléber. It is 36m wide as most of them are, and it runs 1.135km before terminating at the Place du Trocadéro-et-du-11-Novembre. That's in the area is known as Trocadéro, which was named after a palace that once sat here, which was in turn named after, sigh, you guessed it, a battle in the Napoleoni... no, wait! For once it WASN'T a Napoleonic battle, it was a LATER war! In 1823, it was a war in Spain to keep the Spanish Bourbon house on the throne there. The reference to 11 November refers to the date of the end of World War I. In any case, it is the place just across the river from the tower which affords a great view of the tower if cranes haven't been stuck in front of it as they were when we were there later that day.

There may have been a racecourse on the site of the avenue in 1845, though if so it was short lived with the first stretch of the avenue opening in 1854.

It went through a sequence of names as most of the avenues have, but since it started out as the Avenue Kléber in 1854 and had returned to that name by 1879 I think we can have a pass for not caring too much about the churn of transient names in between.

The avenue was named for Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753 to 1800) who was a general in the revolutionary wars and... the Napoleonic wars, of course. However he seems to have been an exceptionally capable general with a list of battles as long as his arm, and who may have gone on to greater things had he lived longer. Lacking an aristocratic background, his career was going nowhere until 1792 when he joined the French Revolutionary Army at the age of 39. Hew went into retirement for a time in 1797-1798, then went with Napoleon to Egypt in 1798. When Napoleon left for Paris Kléber was left in command of the army, but was murdered by a so-called student in June of 1800 at the age of 47. In effect his entire career was crammed into a span of less than 8 years, which makes the amount that he did in that time quite astonishing.

Unfortunately this is likely to be another case of people traversing a road on a daily basis, knowing nothing of the name behind it. But YOU do now my dear viewers; YOU do.

Oh, are there any other relevant details about the road? Well, the embassies of Iceland and Peru are down there somewhere. It's a very beautiful street, as all of the ones radiating out from the Arc are. And none of us will ever afford a place there, just as we won't on any of the other avenues.