The Left Bank ( rive gauche ) is synonymous with all things Bohemian, dissident and intellectual. In the first half of the twentieth century, the area's reputation for alternative thought and innovation attracted painters and writers like Picasso, Apollinaire, Breton, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Hemingway, and later, the Existentialist philosophers Camus and Sartre. The quartier was the scene of violent student demonstrations in 1968, leading to widespread unrest and the near-overthrow of the de Gaulle government. Ironically, the very streets from which such revolution sprang are currently home to expensive flats, art galleries, and mod fashion boutiques, and the cafés once frequented by the penniless intellectuals are now filled with the well-educated bourgeois. Over the years, those who question authority and the status quo have decamped to other parts of the city and their place has been filled by the myth-makers of the image industry: designers, politicians, fashion photographers, journalists.

 

The heart of the Left Bank is the warren of medieval lanes around the boulevards St-Michel and St-Germain , known as the Quartier Latin because, until the Revolution, Latin was the language spoken at the quartier's prestigious university, the Sorbonne .