Place Vendome

By parisian on 20/08/2009 in Attractions

Place Vendome at night

Place Vendome (French pronunciation: [plas vɑ̃dom]) is a square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France, 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 Vendome the aspect of an octagon. The original Vendome Column at the centre was erected by Napoleon I to commemorate the battle of Austerlitz; it was destroyed on 16 May 1871, during the Paris Commune.

History

Place Vendome 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 have been the first large modern equestrian statue to be cast in a single piece. It was destroyed in the French Revolution; however, there is a small version in the Louvre.^[1] This led to the popular joke that while Henri IV dwelled among the people by the Pont Neuf, and Louis XIII among the aristocrats of the Place des Vosges, Louis XIV preferred the company of the tax farmers in the Place Vendome; each reflecting the group they had favoured in life.^[2]

The site of the square was formerly the hotel of César, duc de Vendome, the illegitimate son of Henry IV and his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées. Hardouin-Mansart bought the building and its gardens, with the idea of converting it into building lots as a profitable speculation. The plan did not 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 Hardouin-Mansart to design a housefront that the buyers of plots round the square 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 Vendome itself. Between 1720 and 1797, they acquired much of the square, including a freehold to parts of the site on which the Hotel 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.

The Vendome Column

Napoleon erected the original 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 Hotel 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 Hotel des Invalides. This project 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 the rebuilding cost, estimated at 323,000 Francs, in yearly installments of 10,000 Francs, for the following thirty-three years. Unable to pay, Courbet went into a self-imposed exile in Switzerland, where he died shortly after without having made the first payment. (Text Source: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)

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