The church atop Mont-Saint-Michel was established as early as the eighth century, and if you ask the appropriate people, you'll learn that it was built by the Archangel Michael himself. Other houses and streets were built on the steep slopes alongside it throughout the years, until Mont-Saint-Michel finally formed a small town and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today it has been a major pilgrimage destination for centuries, not to mention a hit with the tourists. It lies in the bay where Brittany and Normandy merge, seemingly free-floating on days of high tide. For hundreds of years, the causeway between the mont and the mainland was only uncovered at low tide. These days there is a light bridge crossing which allows the ocean to ebb and flow around it, only covering the path on the occasional “supertide”.

Location: Normandie, France

Père Lachaise Cemetery is both the largest park and the largest cemetery in Paris. It was founded in 1804 and has since expanded across 44 hectares of land. These grounds hold 70,000 marked burial plots, but nobody knows for sure how many people have been buried here over the years (educated guesses range from 300,000 to 1,000,000). One thing is for sure, however: a myriad of celebrities have found their eternal resting place at Père Lachaise…

You'll come across more than one recognized name as you travel through the apparently unending maze of strange-looking plots, ranging from gothic burials to Haussmann apartments and old mausoleums. Honoré de Balzac, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frédéric Chopin, Colette, Jean-François Champollion, Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Jim Morrison, Alfred de Musset, Edith Piaf, Camille Pissarro, and Oscar Wilde are among those on the list...

Location: Paris, France

Nîmes Arena hosted typical Roman sports throughout the reign of that mighty empire. Its stunning oval design provided 20,000 spectators on the 34 seating rows with unimpeded views of the shows. The arena's two floors and surmounting attic are covered by sixty stone arches and a network of galleries with no less than 126 staircases leading to visitors' seats.

After the Roman Empire fell, the Visigoths converted the Nîmes Arena into a stronghold. Later, during the Middle Ages, a small settlement with wells, dwellings, churches, and a castle was built inside its walls. These constructions existed until the 18th century, when they were deconstructed. In 1813, the Prefect of the Guard approved the first bull races, restoring the arena to its former role. Bullfighting is still performed there at the Feria de Nîmes.

Location: Nîmes, France

You've probably heard the D-Day tale many times before. How On June 6, 1994, Operation Overlord was launched, with almost 6000 ships and boats going directly for the beaches of northern Normandy, unloading tens of thousands of Allied forces onto their dunes. These beaches, once the sites of history's greatest seaborne invasion, today draw tens of thousands of tourists who come to pay their respects and witness relics of the 76-day Battle of Normandy, which claimed over 200,000 lives and permanently transformed the globe.

Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword are the names of the 80km of beaches north of Bayeux where it all happened. Each witnessed a distinct facet of the fight and has left its mark in the shape of memorials, bunkers, and abandoned batteries. These landmarks, as well as the six museums that describe the complicated tale of the event, should be included in a tour to the D-Day Landing beaches.

Location: Normandy, France

The Lascaux caves, discovered by a French adolescent and his young companions in the 1940s, include around 600 drawings of animals from the Upper Palaeolithic period. The murals that cover the cave's walls and ceilings are thought to be around 17,000 years old, the result of a multigenerational art effort.

After World War II, Lascaux opened to the public, but as visitor numbers increased to roughly 1500 per day, the massive volumes of carbon dioxide produced by human breath began to destroy the art. As a result, the original Lascaux cave closed in 1963 and is now only accessible to an ever-shrinking handful of scientists and field specialists each year. Visitors are instead encouraged to visit the neighboring facsimile of the caverns, which has been meticulously rebuilt. Several times a day, professional guides will accompany groups of tourists, offering tours and answering questions about the cave's oddities.

Location: Montignac, France

A subterranean labyrinth lies twenty meters below the earth, beneath the heart of gorgeous Paris. This meandering network of small corridors and gloomy halls was created centuries ago out of the stone used to build the city. They house the ashes of millions of Parisians who were relocated from their original burial sites after the city's graveyards were closed due to public health concerns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The bones in the ossuary are arranged in a fairly horrific exhibition of typical Romantic preferences, and when tourists begin the two-kilometer walk through the tunnels, they are welcomed by the poem "Arrête, c'est ici l'empire de la death" (Halt, here is the kingdom of Death). The trip takes around 45 minutes to complete and is pretty impressive, but not for the faint of heart.

Location: Paris, France

The Strasbourg Cathedral is a Gothic aesthetic masterpiece that should not be overlooked. Victor Hugo described it as a "light and delicate masterpiece," yet that barely scratches the surface. The cathedral is nearly a thousand years old and was built over decades over the site of an earlier Roman temple, the crypt of which still exists.

The masons and artists who embellished the tower to the smallest detail left a trail of mysterious secrets and codes, but the most stunning of them is the astronomical clock, whose mechanized figures march around each day at half past noon. The building's exterior, made of pink sandstone that changes color as the light changes throughout the day, is covered in hundreds of sculptures that employ light and shadows to appear to spring out at you.

Location: Strasbourg, France.

Carnac Megalithic Standing Stones is one of the most beautiful historical sites in France.

Over 3000 megalithic standing stones have remained in the Carnac area since the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Brittany constructed them an unknown number of millennia ago. The collection includes both solitary stones (menhirs) and interesting groupings (dolmens). The largest such alignment is made up of 12 converging rows of stone that run for a kilometer and conclude with a stone circle. The biggest stones are to the west, while the tiniest are to the east.

What is the function of such stones, you may wonder? Nobody knows, to be honest. According to local mythology, Merlin once turned a Roman army passing through Carnac into stone and left them there. Historians and scientists believe the stones served as calendars, keeping track of the seasons and the moon. Their exact purpose is unknown, but the mystery certainly adds to the visitor experience.

Location: Carnac, France

Jean Le Breton, Francis I's Finance Minister, purchased the ancient Villandry Estate in 1532. He then demolished the previous structures and created Castle de Villandry, the last magnificent Loire Valley chateau completed during the Renaissance. The chateau saw various changes in design and ambiance throughout the ages until Doctor Joachim Carvallo and his wife Ann Coleman acquired it in 1906, and their family committed their whole wealth to restoring it to its original beauty.

The Chateau de Villandry is still a testimony to the French Renaissance lifestyle, albeit the interiors include a fountain in the dining room and the famed Hispano-Moorish ceiling over the Oriental Room. But the chateau's six formal gardens, each of which is meticulously planted into a different design, are even more famous.

Location: Villandry, France

The next place on the list of most beautiful historical sites in France is Les Invalides. Les Invalides, or Hôtel des Invalides as it was originally known, is a collection of buildings on Paris's Left Bank with a long military history. In order to honor the sacrifices made by war veterans, Louis XIV had the hôtel erected in the 1670s to serve as a residence and hospital for aging and ailing soldiers who had nowhere else to go. The rabble that seized the Bastille also looted their weaponry here. The vast estate covers 196 meters of riverbank and has fifteen courtyards among its various structures (including a chapel).

Les Invalides is still used as a hospital and retirement home today, but it also includes a number of monuments and museums related to French war history, as well as the headquarters of the military governor of Paris and the iconic Dôme des Invalides, the cathedral where Napoleon lies entombed.

Location: Paris, France