Place de la Concorde

The Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris, 7.6 hectares of open ground at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées, between the Tuileries Garden and the Seine. It began as a royal flattery. In 1748 the merchants of Paris commissioned an equestrian statue of Louis XV to celebrate his recovery from illness, and the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel laid out an octagonal square around it, finished by 1772 and ringed with a dry moat and balustrades. On the north side he built two identical palaces with classical façades modelled on Claude Perrault's front of the Louvre; the eastern one became the Hôtel de la Marine, the headquarters of the French navy.

The Revolution gave the square its darkest chapter. The king's statue was pulled down in 1792 and melted, the square was renamed Place de la Révolution, and the guillotine was set up here. Louis XVI was executed on the square in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette that October; Danton, Lavoisier and Robespierre followed. Of about 2,500 people guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, some 1,100 died here. The name Concorde, "harmony", was given in 1795 as a gesture of reconciliation, lost under the Restoration and restored in 1830.

The square as it looks today is largely the work of Jacques Ignace Hittorff under King Louis-Philippe. At its centre stands the Luxor Obelisk, a 3,300-year-old shaft of granite carved with hieroglyphs praising Ramesses II, which once marked the entrance of the temple at Luxor. Egypt's ruler Muhammad Ali offered it to France; it reached Paris in 1833 and was hoisted onto the old pedestal of Louis XV before a huge crowd on 25 October 1836. Diagrams on the base show the machinery used to raise it, and a gold-leaf pyramidion was added to the top in 1998. Around it Hittorff placed two fountains modelled on those of St Peter's Square in Rome and eight statues personifying the great cities of France, each set roughly in the direction of the city it represents.

Getting there

The square lies in the 8th arrondissement of central Paris. Concorde Métro station, at its north-eastern corner, is served by Lines 1, 8 and 12. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 15 km away.