Olivier Messiaen's opera St Francis of Assisi has its premiere in Paris

Luc Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, discovers a new human retrovirus that he names LAV (later changed to HIV)

US artist Christo tightly binds Paris's Pont Neuf in fabric, as one of his international series of wrapped iconic buildings

French racing driver Alain Prost wins the first of his four Formula One titles

Baby Doc Duvalier escapes from Haiti in a US airforce jet and goes into exile in France

Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu star in Jean De Florette, adapted from a novel by Marcel Pagnol

Sylvie Guillem and Laurent Hilaire dance in the Paris premiere of William Forsythe's In the middle somewhat elevated

French ballerina Sylvie Guillem moves from Paris to join the Royal Ballet in London

Gérard Depardieu plays the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac, based on the play by Edmond Rostand

US architect Ieoh Ming Pei completes his underground extension of the Louvre, surmounted by a glass pyramid

France's President Mitterrand and the British queen Elizabeth II together open the tunnel under the English Channel

Art, a play by French-born Iranian playwright Yasmina Reza, has its premiere in Berlin

Potholers discover the world's oldest known paintings in the Chauvet cave in southern France

Jacques Chirac defeats the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the French presidential election

Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her friend Dodi Fayed die after a car crash in Paris

The European Court of Human Rights replaces a preceding part-time court in Strasbourg

A fire in the Mont Blanc road tunnel kills 39 people and closes the tunnel for three years

A Concorde supersonic airliner crashes after take-off from Paris, killing all 109 on board

UK terrorist Richard Reid tries to bring down a Paris-Miami flight but fails to light the exposive in his shoe

Palestinian president Yasser Arafat dies in a hospital near Paris

The superjumbo Airbus A380 makes its first test flight from Toulouse

The French people become the first to reject, in a referendum, the proposed European Constitution

US cyclist Lance Armstrong retires from competition after winning a seventh successive victory in the Tour de France

French surgeon Bernard Devauchelle and his team in Amiens carry out the first human face transplant

Nicolas Sarkozy defeats Ségolène Royal to become President of the French Republic