[1] After the balloon Zénith was inflated under the supervision of Adrien Duté-Poitevin, who was Sivel's brother-in-law, three aeronauts—Sivel, Crocé-Spinelli, and Gaston Tissandier—took off near the gas plant of La Villette, located in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, on April 15, 1875, at 11:35, hoping to break the altitude record (8,800 metres [28,900 ft] at the time) and conduct observations.

[5] Only Tissandier managed to regain consciousness to slow the descent, and the balloon landed violently sometime after noon, tearing against a tree but with little damage to the basket, in the territory of Ciron (Indre) near Le Blanc, 250 kilometres (160 mi) from Paris, at 16:00.

[11] During World War I, Gaston Tissandier's publisher Maurice Dreyfous wrote that the aeronaut had revealed certain details to him about the Zénith incident that he had previously hidden from the public.

[12][13] The announcement of this incident had an impact in France and abroad, and more than twenty thousand people[14] followed the funerals of Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli from the Orléans station to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

[4] A public subscription was opened by the Société française de navigation aérienne to help the families of the victims and to erect a commemorative monument at the landing site of the balloon.

The first hall built was located in the Parc de la Villette at the take-off site, with the Minister of Culture being inspired by this feat to name the structure.

[22] This ascent and the resulting tragedy inspired a poem, named Le Zénith, by the French poet and future first Nobel Prize in Literature winner Sully Prudhomme.