For sale: history, with a view.

France is selling dozens of historic properties in Paris and the provinces, using the proceeds to move government bureaucrats into less expensive properties and to help pay off the national debt.

So far it has unloaded dozens of chateaus, villas and “hôtels particuliers,” the stone mansions of Paris’s golden age. Foreigners, primarily American pension funds and private equity firms, are the biggest buyers so far. For all their Gallic pride, the French seem happy to have anyone take the properties off the hands of taxpayers.