Place de la Révolution

A square for a king

In 1748 the city of Paris resolved to honour Louis XV, then still called the Well-Beloved, with a bronze statue of the king on horseback. The king gave a stretch of marshy ground beyond the western end of the Tuileries Garden, at the edge of the city as it then was, and after a competition the commission went to his first architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel.

Gabriel’s design was unusual. Rather than close the square in with buildings, he left it open to the gardens, the river and the Champs-Élysées, bordered by dry moats and balustrades, and built only on the north side: two long colonnaded palaces on either side of a new street, the Rue Royale. The eastern one housed the Garde-Meuble, the store of the crown’s furniture and treasures. Work lasted from 1755 to 1775. The statue, by Edmé Bouchardon and finished after his death by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, was unveiled in 1763.

The square’s first disaster came on 30 May 1770. Paris was celebrating here, with fireworks, the marriage of the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI, to Marie Antoinette. As the crowd left, a crush in the Rue Royale killed more than 130 people.

The Revolution’s square

The Revolution reached the square early. On 12 July 1789, as news of Necker’s dismissal spread through Paris, cavalry of the Royal-Allemand regiment under the Prince de Lambesc charged a crowd at the entrance to the Tuileries Garden. It was one of the sparks that led, two days later, to the storming of the Bastille.

After the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, the statue of Louis XV was pulled down and the square renamed Place de la Révolution. On the empty pedestal rose a plaster statue of Liberty wearing the red cap. In September 1792 thieves broke into the Garde-Meuble over several nights and carried off most of the crown jewels, among them the Regent diamond, later recovered.

The guillotine’s square

Where the Terror’s best-known victims died

On 21 January 1793 a scaffold was put up here for the execution of Louis XVI. In May 1793 the guillotine moved here from the Place du Carrousel, beside the Tuileries Palace. For more than a year most of those condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal were brought here in carts from the Conciergerie: Charlotte Corday in July 1793, Marie Antoinette on 16 October, twenty-one Girondin deputies at the end of October, Madame Roland in November, Danton and Camille Desmoulins on 5 April 1794, the chemist Lavoisier in May.

In June 1794, at the height of the Terror, the guillotine was moved to the eastern edge of the city. It came back at the end of July 1794: on 28 July Robespierre, overthrown the day before, was executed here with twenty-one of his followers, and the next day some seventy members of the Paris Commune followed them.

Concorde

In 1795, as the Convention gave way to the Directory, the square was renamed Place de la Concorde, a wish for reconciliation after the Terror. The restored Bourbons named it after Louis XV again in 1814, later after Louis XVI, and planned a monument here to the executed king; after the July Revolution of 1830 the name Concorde returned for good.

King Louis-Philippe filled the centre with something no faction could claim: an obelisk more than 3,000 years old from the temple of Luxor, given by Egypt’s ruler Muhammad Ali. It was raised on 25 October 1836. The architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff then added two fountains and eight statues representing French cities. The Pont de la Concorde to the south, begun in 1787, was finished in 1791 partly with stone from the demolished Bastille.

Gabriel’s eastern palace, the old Garde-Meuble, housed the headquarters of the French Navy from 1789 to 2015 and is now open to visitors as the Hôtel de la Marine.