France Facts

In France, it is legal to marry a dead person.

In 1386, a pig in Falaise, France was publicly executed by hanging for killing a child. The pig was even dressed in human clothes for the execution.

One punishment for an adulterous wife in medieval France was to make her chase a chicken through town naked.

In France, there's a place called Y.

The Statue of Liberty was a gift of friendship resulting from the diplomatic relationship between the United States and France.

The 'Big Dipper' is known as 'The Casserole' in France.

Stilts were invented by French shepherds who needed a way to get around in wet marshes.

A homing pigeon shot through the breast with one leg hanging by a tendon flew 25 miles to save 194 men trapped behind enemy lines. The survivors carved him a wooden leg. He still stands at the Smithsonian today.

After noticing the wind rustling and turning the leaves on trees, French entrepreneur Jérôme Michaud-Larivière designed wind turbine trees that could provide clean energy for urban settings.

In 1846, a 14-year-old French peasant girl named Angélique Cottin became famous for allegedly possessing strange physical powers. Witnesses claimed that furniture moved away from her, compasses spun wildly in her presence, and people felt electric-like shocks when near her. Scientists of the era studied her, though they never explained the phenomenon.

There's a café in France which charges €7 for a coffee to rude customers and €1.40 to people who talk politely to staff.

In France, by law a bakery has to make all the bread it sells from scratch in order to have the right to be called a bakery.

In 1542, French noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque was marooned on a remote island off Quebec as punishment for a love affair. After her lover and servant died, she survived alone for months before being rescued by fishermen.

The word 'mortgage' comes from a French law term that means 'death pledge'.

The French named one of their aircraft carriers after Ferdinand Foch, a man who once said "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value".

More people in Africa speak French than in France itself.

During a war between France and England in 1697, Louis XIV ordered the release of a captured English engineer who had been building a lighthouse. His reasoning: "France is at war with England, not with humanity."

Americans filled a 700-boxcar train with food for war-torn France in 1947. It came entirely from ordinary citizens, not the government. France answered two years later with 49 boxcars of its own, one for every state. Six million French and Italian donors packed them with 52,000 gifts. Air Force jets and fireboats greeted it in New York Harbor. Most of those boxcars are still around today, kept in museums nationwide.

In 1997, a 23-year-old French con artist convinced a Texas family he was their missing teenage son — despite having brown eyes instead of blue, a heavy French accent, and being a completely different person. He lived with them for months before a private investigator uncovered the truth.

French street artist Le CyKlop has been transforming ordinary anti-parking bollards into bright yellow LEGO-like characters across France since 2014. His 'Angry L'éGO' series started as guerrilla art — painting the posts at night in just two minutes using custom stencils — and has since grown into both unauthorized installations and official city commissions.

In 1986, Nadine Vaujour hovered a rented helicopter over La Santé Prison in Paris while her husband Michel climbed a rope to reach her. She'd spent three years learning to fly under a fake name specifically for this moment. Michel had fought his way to the roof using nectarines he'd painted green and passed off as grenades. Not a single shot was fired. They disappeared for four months before being caught.

In 1965, French lawyer André-François Raffray agreed to pay 90-year-old Jeanne Calment a monthly fee for her apartment in Arles — he'd get it when she died. Calment lived to 122 years and 164 days, becoming the oldest verified person in history. Raffray died in 1995 at age 77, having paid more than double the apartment's value. His widow was legally required to keep paying until Calment finally died in 1997.

Julie d'Aubigny was a 17th-century French opera singer and one of the most feared swordfighters in Paris. When her girlfriend's parents sent the girl to a convent, Julie checked in as a novice, placed a dead nun's body in her lover's bed, set the building on fire, and escaped with her. She was sentenced to death. The king pardoned her.

In 1925, con man Victor Lustig forged government documents, posed as a ministry official, and convinced six scrap metal dealers that the French government was secretly selling the Eiffel Tower for scrap. He "sold" it to the highest bidder. The victim was so humiliated he never went to police. So Lustig went back to Paris and sold it a second time.