Ballet grew up at the French court: Louis XIV danced it, founded its first academy in 1661 and gave it the French words — plié, jeté, pirouette — that dancers everywhere still use.
Court ballets came to France from Renaissance Italy with Catherine de' Medici, and in 1581 the Ballet comique de la Reine, staged at the Louvre, joined dance, music, verse and scenery into one story. Under Louis XIV dance became an affair of state. The young king danced the rising Sun in the Ballet royal de la Nuit in 1653, trained for over twenty years with his dancing master Pierre Beauchamp — credited with fixing the five positions of the feet — and founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661. The opera academy he licensed in 1669 is the ancestor of today's Paris Opera, and its dance school opened in 1713. Ballet then left the ballroom for the stage: in 1700 Raoul-Auger Feuillet published a system for writing dances down, and in 1760 Jean-Georges Noverre called for ballets that tell stories through movement. Paris also gave birth to Romantic ballet — La Sylphide (1832), in which Marie Taglioni rose onto the tips of her toes, and Giselle (1841). From 1875 the Paris Opera Ballet danced at the Palais Garnier; Rudolf Nureyev directed it from 1983. Today France has the world's oldest national ballet company, national choreographic centres across the country, and classes in almost every town.
