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Troops under Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov crossing the Alps in 1799, by Vasily Surikov Napoleon passing the Great St Bernard Pass, by Edouard Castres. The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his famous volume on Mediterranean civilisation, describes the Alps as "an exceptional range of mountains from the point of view of resources, collective disciplines, the quality of its human ...
The Alps extend in an arc from France in the south and west to Slovenia in the east, and from Monaco in the south to Germany in the north. The Alps are a crescent shaped geographic feature of central Europe that ranges in an 800 km (500 mi) arc (curved line) from east to west and is 200 km (120 mi) in width.
While some of the ranges of the French Alps are entirely in France, others, such as the Mont Blanc massif, are shared with Switzerland and Italy. At 4,808 metres (15,774 ft), Mont Blanc, on the France–Italy border, is the highest mountain in the Alps, and the highest Western European mountain. [1]
The Alps continue fairly smoothly into the following related Alpine mountain ranges: the Apennines to the southwest, the Dinarides to the southeast and the Carpathians to the northeast. In the east the Alps are bounded by the Viennese Basin and the Pannonian Basin , where east–west stretching of the crust takes place.
The Aiguille du Midi (French pronunciation: [eɡɥij dy midi], "Needle at midday" [2]) is a 3,842-metre-tall (12,605 ft) mountain in the Mont Blanc massif within the French Alps. It is a popular tourist destination and can be directly accessed by cable car from Chamonix that takes visitors close to Mont Blanc. [3]
Mont Blanc (BrE: / ˌ m ɒ̃ ˈ b l ɒ̃ (k)/; AmE: / ˌ m ɒ n (t) ˈ b l ɑː ŋ k /) [a] is the highest mountain in the Alps and Western Europe, and the highest mountain in Europe outside the Caucasus Mountains, rising 4,805.59 m (15,766 ft) [1] above sea level, located on the Franco-Italian border. [3]
Grenoble is regarded as the capital of the French Alps. It is the centre of the Grenoble urban unit (agglomeration). [40] Except for a few dozen houses on the slopes of the Bastille hill of Chartreuse, Grenoble is exclusively built on the alluvial plain of the rivers Isère and Drac at an altitude of 214 metres (702 ft). As a result, the city ...
In French, the adjective derived from the river is rhodanien, as in le sillon rhodanien (literally "the furrow of the Rhône"), which is the name of the long, straight Saône and Rhône river valleys, a deep cleft running due south to the Mediterranean and separating the Alps from the Massif Central.