Place Vendôme
| This elegant square,
between the Opéra and Rue de Rivoli, houses the Ritz Hotel and the
British Tourist Office, among other extremely upmarket institutions. It
was originally built to surround a statue of Louis XIV. The enormous,
out-of-scale column now in the centre (144 feet high, when the square
was designed round a 20-foot statue) was put there by Napoleon I. 1,200
bronze cannon captured at the battle of Austerlitz were melted down to
make the sculptured triumphal procession which winds its way from bottom
to top. The statue of Napoleon dressed as Caesar on top of the column was destroyed after Waterloo and replaced by one of Henri IV, later by a huge fleur-de-lys, the symbol of Bourbon monarchy. Louis-Philippe, who replaced the Bourbons in 1830, replaced the statue too, with one of Napoleon in uniform. When Napoleon III took over from Louis-Philippe, he put up the present copy of the original. In 1871, during the Commune – the Parisian revolution which followed the war of 1870 – the painter Courbet, as Minister for the Arts, simultaneously expressed his opinion of Emperors and of monuments out of scale with their surroundings by having the column pulled down (with a very satisfying thud). Unfortunately, the Commune was suppressed, and the new government sent Courbet a repair bill which drove him into exile. |
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