The Place de la Concorde (French: [plas d(ə) la kɔ̃kɔʁd] ⓘ; "Harmony Square"), originally the Place Louis XV (Louis XV Square), and later the Place Louis XVI (Louis XVI Square), is a public square in Paris. Measuring 7.6 ha (19 acres) in area, it is the largest square in the city. It is located in the 8th arrondissement, at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées.
The square was the site of many notable public executions, including Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre in the course of the French Revolution, during which it was temporarily renamed the Place de la Révolution ('Revolution Square'). It received its current name in 1795 as a gesture of reconciliation in the later years of the revolution, although later the original name was reinstated for a period. A metro station is located at the northeastern corner of Place de la Concorde on Lines 1, 8, and 12 of the Paris Métro.
History
Design and construction
The square was originally designed to be the site of an equestrian statue of King Louis XV, commissioned in 1748 by the merchants of Paris, to celebrate the recovery of King Louis XV from a serious illness. The site chosen for the statue was the large esplanade, or space between the revolving gate, the Tuileries Garden and the Cour-la-Reine, a popular lane for horseback riding at the edge of the city. At the time, the Concorde bridge and the Rue de Rivoli did not exist, and the Rue Royale was a muddy lane that descended down to a marsh beside the Seine.
The architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel made a plan for the site and the square was finished by 1772. It was in the form of an octagon, bordered by a sort of moat twenty meters wide, crossed by stone bridges, and surrounded by a stone balustrade. At the eight corners Gabriel placed stone stairways to descend into the square, which was divided into flowerbeds. In the center of the gardens was the pedestal on which the statue stood. The statue, by Edmé Bouchardon, depicted the King on horseback as the victor of the Battle of Fontenoy, dressed as a Roman general, with a laurel wreath on his head. On the four corners of the pedestal, designed by Jean-François Chalgrin, are bronze statues by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, depicting the virtues of great monarchs; Force, Justice, Prudence, and Peace.
The statue was dedicated on 20 June 1763, but by this time the King had lost much of his popularity. A few days after its dedication, someone hung a placard on the statue, proclaiming: "Oh, the beautiful statue! Oh, the fine pedestal! The Virtues are under the feet, and Vice is in the saddle!"
On the north side of the square, between 1760 and 1775, Gabriel planned and built two palatial buildings with identical façades. The classical façades were inspired by those created by Claude Perrault, the royal architect, for the façade of the Louvre. They were originally intended to be occupied by embassies, but in the end the east building became a depot for the Royal furnishings, then the headquarters of the French Navy, the Hôtel de la Marine. The west building was divided into individual properties for the nobility.
French Revolution
Beginning in 1789, the square was a central stage for the events of the French Revolution. On 13 July 1789, a mob came to the Hôtel de la Marine and seized a store of weapons, including two old cannons, gifts from the King of Siam, which fired the first shots during the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. On 11 August 1792, the statue of Louis XV was pulled down and taken to a foundry, where it was melted down. A few months later, a new statue, "Liberty", by the sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot, took its place; it was a figure wearing a red liberty cap and holding a lance. The Place Louis XV ("Louis XV Square") became the Place de la Revolution ("Revolution Square").
In October 1792, the first executions by guillotine in the square took place. The two people who were executed were thieves who had stolen the royal crown diamonds from the Hotel de la Marine. On 21 January 1793, King Louis XVI was executed there, followed in the same year on 16 October by Queen Marie Antoinette. As the Reign of Terror commenced, the guillotine was set up again on 11 May 1793, midway between the Statue of Liberty and the turning bridge at the entrance to the Tuileries Garden, and remained there for thirteen months. Of the 2,498 persons guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, 1,119 were executed on the Place de la Concorde, 73 on the Place de la Bastille and 1,306 on the Place de la Nation. Besides Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, others executed on the same site included Charlotte Corday and Madame du Barry. During the later days of the Reign of Terror in 1794, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Antoine Lavoisier, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just were executed there. The last executions, those of the Prairial riot participants, were carried out on the Place de la Concorde in May 1795.
18th and 19th century: Monuments and fountains
In 1795, under the Directory, the square was renamed the Place de la Concorde ("Concord Square") as a gesture of reconciliation after the turmoil of the revolution. After the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, the name was changed back to the Place Louis XV, and in 1826 the square was renamed the Place Louis XVI ("Louis XVI Square"). After the July Revolution of 1830, the name was returned to the Place de la Concorde.
In 1791, early in the French Revolution, the Concorde bridge was completed. Later, at the suggestion of Jacques-Louis David, the statues of the Marly Horses by Guillaume Coustou the Elder were placed on the west side, at the entrance of the Champs-Élysées. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte began to construct the Rue de Rivoli along the edge of the square.
Under King Louis-Philippe and his prefect of the Seine, Claude-Philibert Barthelot de Rambuteau, the square was remade. In 1832, Jacques Ignace Hittorff was named chief architect of the project. In October 1835 Hittorff installed the new centrepiece of the square, the Luxor Obelisk, a gift to the King from the wali Muhammad Ali of Egypt. It was hoisted into place, before a huge crowd, on 25 October 1836. Hittorff commissioned celebrated sculptors, including James Pradier and Jean-Pierre Cortot to make eight statues representing the major cities of France, which were placed in 1838 on columns which had earlier been put in place around the square by Gabriel. These statues form something of a rudimentary map, such that when viewing the Place de la Concorde from a birdseye perspective, the north-eastern states represent north-eastern cities, in the appropriate arrangement relative to one another, and so on. A ring of twenty columns with lanterns were put in place during the same time.
Between 1836 and 1840, Hittorff erected two monumental fountains, the Fontaine Maritime to the side of the Seine, and the Fontaine Fluviale to the side of the Rue Royale. The design, consisting of two fountains each nine meters high, was modeled after that of the fountains of St. Peter's Square in Rome. In 1853, under Napoleon III, the deep moats around the square, which had turned into rendez-vous points for prostitutes, were filled in.
20th century: Expositions, occupation and triumphs
The square was the entry point of two major international expositions: the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, which left behind the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, and the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which gave its name to the Art Deco architectural style of the 20th century. It was also the site of great national celebrations, including the victory celebrations of the end of the First World War and the Liberation of Paris in the Second World War. It experienced violent confrontations. A far-right demonstration in 1934 turned violent, with eleven deaths and two hundred injured. It also hosted triumphant celebrations of sporting events such as the French national team's victory in the 1998 FIFA World Cup.
21st century: Olympic and Paralympic Games, removal of traffic
The square continues to be the location for the focal point of the Bastille Day military parade down the Champs-Élysées, with the President of France and invited guests watching the parade from the square.
In 2024, the square was the venue for 4 sports at the 2024 Summer Olympics (BMX freestyle, Breaking, Skateboarding and Basketball 3x3), as well as the venue for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games. Temporary stands and sporting facilities were built, while protecting items such as the Luxor Obelisk. Over 25,000 people attended the square each day during the Olympics, and the Paralympics opening ceremony was watched by 35,000 people in the square.
Following the Games, vehicle traffic did not return to the majority of the square, after Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris announced a partial pedestrianisation of the square in January 2024, with plans for a substantial redesign of the square in future.
Description
Luxor Obelisk
The centrepiece of the Place de la Concorde is an ancient Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics exalting the reign of the pharaoh Ramesses II. It is one of two which the Egyptian government gave to the French in the 19th century. The other one stayed in Egypt, too difficult and heavy to move to France with the technology at that time. On 26 September 1981 President François Mitterrand formally returned the title of the second obelisk to Egypt.
The obelisk once marked the entrance to the Luxor Temple. The wali (hereditary governor) of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, offered the 3,300-year-old Luxor Obelisk as a diplomatic gift to France in 1829. It arrived in Paris on 21 December 1833. Three years later, it was hoisted into place, on top of the pedestal which originally supported the statue of Louis XV, destroyed during the Revolution. The raising of the column was a major feat of engineering, depicted by illustrations on the base of the monument. King Louis Philippe dedicated the obelisk on 25 October 1836.
The obelisk, a yellow granite column, rises 23 metres (75 ft) high, including the base, and weighs over 250 tonnes (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 was used for the transportation. In 1998, the government of France added a gold-leafed pyramidal cap to the top of the obelisk, replacing the missing original, believed stolen in the 6th century BC.
Fountains
When he had completed the installation of the Luxor Obelisk, in 1836, Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, chief architect of the square, moved ahead with two new fountains to complement the obelisk. Hittorff had been a student of the Neoclassical designer Charles Percier at the École des Beaux-Arts. He had spent two years studying the architecture and fountains of Rome, particularly the Piazza Navona and Piazza San Pietro, each of which had obelisks aligned with fountains.
Hittorff's fountains were each nine meters high, matching the height of the earlier columns and statues around the square representing great French cities. The Maritime Fountain was on the south, between the obelisk and Seine, and illustrated the seas bordering France, while the Fluvial Fountains or river fountain, on the north, between the Obelisk and the Rue Royale, illustrated the great rivers of France. It is located in the same place where the guillotine which executed Louis XVI had been placed.
Both fountains had the same form: a stone basin; six figures of tritons or naiads holding fish spouting water; six seated allegorical figures, their feet on the prows of ships, supporting the pedestal, of the circular vasque; four statues of different forms of genius in arts or crafts supporting the upper inverted upper vasque; whose water shot up and then cascaded down to the lower vasque and then the basin.
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.
North side
The north side of the square, along the Rue de Rivoli, is occupied by two palatial buildings, whose matching façades were designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel. They are separated by the Rue Royale, which enters the square from the north and was also designed by Gabriel. He planned the harmonious façades of the buildings along Rue Royale, including the façade and interior of his own residence at Number eight.