Place:Bougival, Yvelines, France

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Bougival is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is located from the center of Paris, in its western suburbs.

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 village 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^[1] 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^[1] 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 at Rue Ivan Tourguenievf on the Seine^[2] and noted Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev built a dacha, Les Frênes. A local monument commemorates the Montgolfier brothers, pioneers of flight,^[2] and the commune hosts the annual Festival of Bougival et des Coteaux de Seine.

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