Isadora Duncan dies in Nice when her scarf tangles in the wheel of a Bugatti sports car, breaking her neck

Le Corbusier and other modernist architects set up the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)

Maurice Ravel writes Boléro as music for a ballet choreographed by Nijinska with designs by Benois

The Kellogg-Briand Pact is drawn up by the US and France as a pledge to renounce war

French author Jean Cocteau publishes Les Enfants Terribles, a novel about a brother and sister in a suffocatingly claustrophobic relationsip

20-year-old French composer Olivier Messiaen publishes eight Preludes for piano

René Clair blends satire and surrealism in his film Sous les Toits de Paris, a dark comedy about a Parisian street singer

Henri Matisse completes his Backsequence – four progressively simplified bronze relief sculptures (Nus de Dos)

French actor Jean Gabin makes his screen debut in Chacun sa Chance

The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has his first exhibition, in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York

The newly formed Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo opens for its first season, with George Balanchine as ballet master

French playwright Jean Anouilh has his first play, L'Hermine, produced and published

The Bluebell Girls, formed by Margaret Kelly ('Miss Bluebell'), give their first performances in Paris

Hungarian photographer Brassaï publishes his photographs of the seedier side of Paris night life in Paris de Nuit

Gertrude Stein publishes a best-selling account of her own life under the title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

George Balanchine, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaborate in Paris on Seven Deadly Sins, a ballet with songs

US author Henry Miller publishes in Paris a largely sexual autobiography, Tropic of Cancer, about his life as an expatriate

Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie discover artificial radioactivity

Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grapelli form the Quintet du Hot Club de France

Adolf Hitler informs Britain and France that he is building up the German armed forces, in contravention of the Versailles treaty

Pablo Picasso's Minotauromachy, a masterpiece of etching, prefigures some of the themes of Guernica

Arthur Honegger's opera Joan of Arc at the Stake has its premiere in Basel

French cabaret singer Edith Gassion acquires the nickname la môme piaf ('the little sparrow'), and so becomes Edith Piaf

The Spanish Civil War causes the Basque designer Cristobal Balenciaga to move his business to Paris, capital of the fashion world

French film director Jean Renoir makes La Grande Illusion, set in World War I