Wednesday: June 9
Place de la Concorde / Place Vendome
The octagonal Place de la Concorde is the largest square in
Paris. It is situated between the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysées.Over a
thousand bodies lost their heads during the height of the French Revolution
under its old name 'Place de la Révolution'.
Place Vendôme is a square in all but shape. The rectangular
Place Vendôme has the appearance of an octagon. The 17th century buildings
surrounding the Square contain some of the most expensive hotels and shops in
Paris. Visit Place Vendome's famous jewelers "les Diamantaires" at your own
risk. Many a credit card has been maxed in this part of town.
Napoleon stands on top of the bronze column in the middle of
the square. The cannons belong to Austria and Russia. They were taken by
Napoleon's Army in 1250. So far they haven't asked for them back.
Place de la Concorde
The Place de la Concorde is 86,400 square metres making it the largest square in
the French capital. The Place was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1755 as a
moat-skirted octagon between the Champs-Élysées to the west and the Tuileries
Gardens to the east. Filled with statues and fountains, the area was named Place
Louis XV to honor the king at that time. The square showcased an equestrian
statue of the king, which had been commissioned in 1748 by the city of Paris,
sculpted mostly by Edmé Bouchardon, and completed by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle after
the death of Bouchardon.
At the north end, two magnificent identical stone buildings were constructed.
Separated by the rue Royale, these structures remain among the best examples of
Louis XV style architecture. Initially, the eastern building served as the
French Naval Ministry. Shortly after its construction, the western building
became the opulent home of the Duc d'Aumont. It was later purchased by the Comte
de Crillon, whose family resided there until 1907. The famous luxury hôtel which
currently occupies the building took its name from its previous owners. The
Hôtel de Crillon served as the headquarters of the occupying German army during
World War II.
During the French Revolution the statue of Louis XV of France was torn down and
the area renamed "Place de la Révolution". The new revolutionary government
erected the guillotine in the square, and the first notable to be executed at
the Place de la Révolution was king Louis XVI, on January 21, 1793. Other
important figures guillotined on the site, often in front of cheering crowds,
were Queen Marie Antoinette, Princess Élisabeth of France, Charlotte Corday,
Madame du Barry, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Antoine Lavoisier,
Maximilien Robespierre, Louis de Saint-Just and Olympe de Gouge. The guillotine
was most active during the "Reign of Terror", in the summer of 1794, when in a
single month more than 1,300 people were executed. A year later, when the
revolution was taking a more moderate course, the guillotine was removed from
the square.
The square was then renamed Place de la Concorde under the Directory (1795-1799)
as a symbolic gesture of reconciliation after the turmoil of the French
Revolution. It underwent a series of name changes in the nineteenth century, but
the city eventually settled on Place de la Concorde.
Obelisk - The center of the Place is occupied by a giant Egyptian obelisk
decorated with hieroglyphics exalting the reign of the pharaoh Ramses II. It is
one of two the Egyptian government gave to the French in the nineteenth century.
The other one stayed in Egypt, too difficult and heavy to move to France with
the technology at that time. In the 1990s, President François Mitterrand gave
the second obelisk back to the Egyptians.
The obelisk once marked the entrance to the Luxor Temple. The Ottoman viceroy of
Egypt, Mehmet Ali, offered the 3,300-year-old Luxor Obelisk to France in 1829.
The obelisk arrived in Paris on December 21, 1833. Three years later, on October
25, 1836, King Louis-Philippe had it placed in the center of Place de la
Concorde, where a guillotine used to stand during the Revolution.
The obelisk, a red granite column, rises 23 metres (75 ft) high, including the
base, and weighs over 250 metric tons (280 short tons). Given the technical
limitations of the day, transporting it was no easy feat — on the pedestal are
drawn diagrams explaining the machinery that were used for the transportation.
The obelisk is flanked on both sides by fountains constructed at the time of its
erection on the Place.
Missing its original cap, believed stolen in the 6th century BC, the government
of France added a gold-leafed pyramid cap to the top of the obelisk in 1998.
The Fountains - The two fountains in the Place de la Concorde have been the most
famous of the fountains built during the time of Louis-Philippe, and came to
symbolize the fountains in Paris. They were designed by Jacques-Ignace Hittorff,
a student of the Neoclassical designer Charles Percier at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts. The German-born Hittorff had served as the official Architect of
Festivals and Ceremonies for the deposed King, and had spent two years studying
the architecture and fountains of Italy.
Hittorff's two fountains were on the theme of rivers and seas, in part because
of their proximity to the Ministry of Navy on the Place de la Concorde, and to
the Seine. Their arrangement, on a north-south axis aligned with the obelisk of
Luxor, and the Rue Royale, and the form of the fountains themselves, were
influenced by the fountains of Rome, particularly Piazza Navona and the Piazza
San Pietro, both of which had obelisks aligned with fountains.
The north fountain was devoted to the Rivers, with allegorical figures
representing the Rhone and the Rhine, the arts of the harvesting of flowers and
fruits, harvesting and grape growing; and the geniuses of river navigation,
industry, and agriculture.
The south fountain, closer to the Seine, represented the seas, with figures
representing the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; harvesting coral; harvesting
fish; collecting shellfish; collecting pearls; and the geniuses of astronomy,
navigation and commerce.
Click here to see other pictures.
Click here to see other pictures.
Place Vendôme
Place Vendôme (French pronunciation: [plas vɑ̃dom]) is a square located to the
north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Église de la Madeleine. It is the
starting point of the Rue de la Paix. Its regular architecture by Jules
Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the corners give the
rectangular Place Vendôme the aspect of an octagon. The Place Vendôme Column at
the centre was erected by Napoleon to commemorate the battle of Austerlitz.
Place Vendôme was laid out in 1702 as a monument to the glory of the armies of
Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque and called Place des Conquêtes, to be renamed
Place Louis le Grand, when the conquests proved temporary; an over life-size
equestrian statue of the king was set up in its centre, donated by the city
authorities; this was by François Girardon (1699) and is supposed to be the
first large modern equestrian statue to be cast in a single piece. It was
destroyed in the French Revolution, though there is a small version in the
Louvre. This led to the popular joke that while Henri IV dwelled among the
people by the Pont Neuf, and Louis XII among the aristocrats of the Place des
Vosges, Louis XIV preferred the company of the tax farmers in the Place Vendôme;
each reflecting the group they had favoured in life.
The site of the square was formerly the hôtel of César, duc de Vendôme, the
illegitimate son of Henry IV and his mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées. Mansart
bought the building and its gardens, with an idea of converting it into building
lots as a profitable speculation. The plan didn't materialize, and Louis XIV's
minister of finance, Louvois, purchased the piece of ground, with the object of
building a square, modelled on the successful Place des Vosges of the previous
century. Louvois came into financial difficulties and nothing came of his
project, either. After his death the king purchased the plot and commissioned
Mansart to design a housefront that the buyers of plots round the Place would
agree to adhere to. When the state finances ran low, the financier John Law took
on the project, built himself a residence behind one of the façades, and the
square was complete by 1720, just as his paper-money Mississippi bubble burst.
Law suffered a major blow when he was forced to pay back taxes amounting to some
tens of millions of dollars. With no way to pay such an amount he was forced to
sell the property he owned on the square. The buyers were members of the exiled
Bourbon-Condé family who later returned to the country to reclaim their land in
the town of Vendôme itself. Between 1720 and 1797 they acquired much of the
square, including a freehold to parts of the site on which the Hôtel Ritz Paris
now stands and in which they still maintain apartments. Their intention to
restore a family palace on the site is dependent on the possible intentions of
the adjacent Justice Ministry to expand its premises.
Napoleon erected the present column, modelled after Trajan's Column, to
celebrate the victory of Austerlitz; its veneer of 425 spiraling bas-relief
bronze plates were made out of cannon taken from the combined armies of Europe,
according to his propaganda (the usual figure given is hugely exaggerated: 133
cannon were actually captured at Austerlitz). These plates were designed by the
sculptor Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret and executed by a team of sculptors including
Jean Joseph Foucou, Louis-Simon Boizot, François Joseph Bosio, Lorenzo Bartolini,
Claude Ramey, François Rude, Corbet, Clodion and Henri-Joseph Ruxthiel. A statue
of Napoleon, bare-headed, crowned with laurels and holding a sword in his right
hand and a globe surmounted with a statue of Victory (as in Napoleon as Mars the
Peacemaker) in his left hand, was placed atop the column
In 1814, taking advantage of the Allied occupying force, a mob of men and horses
had attached a cable to the neck of the statue of Napoleon atop the column, but
it had refused to budge - one woman quipped "If the Emperor is as solid on his
throne as this statue is on its column, he's nowhere near descending the
throne". After the Bourbon Restoration the statue was pulled down and melted
down to provide the bronze for the recast equestrian statue of Henry IV on the
Pont Neuf (as was bronze from sculptures on the Column of the Grande Armée at
Boulogne-sur-Mer), though the statuette of Victory is still to be seen in the
salon Napoléon of the Hôtel des Monnaies (which also contains a model of the
column and a bronze mask of Napoleon copied from his plaster death mask). A
replacement statue of Napoléon, however, was erected by Louis-Philippe in modern
dress (a tricorn hat, boots and a redingote), and a better, more augustly
classicizing one by Louis-Napoléon (later Napoléon III).
During the Paris Commune in 1871, the painter Gustave Courbet proposed the
column to be disassembled and re-erected in the Hôtel des Invalides. Courbet
argued that:
“
Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid
of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war
and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican
nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense
government will authorise him to disassemble this column."
”
This project was not adopted, but, on April 12, 1871, the dismantling of the
imperial symbol was voted, and the column taken down on May 8, with no
intentions of rebuilding it. The bronze plates were preserved. After the assault
on the Paris Commune by Adolphe Thiers, the decision was taken to rebuild the
column with its statue of Napoléon. On his own previous proposition, Gustave
Courbet was condemned to pay part of the expenses. Unable to pay, Courbet went
into a self-imposed exile in Switzerland.
Click here to see other pictures.
Click here to see other pictures.