Place des Vosges — square
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Place des Vosges

  • 2 min read
  • 48.856° N 2.366° E

Interesting facts

  • The square stands on the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, where King Henri II was mortally wounded in the eye by a lance during a joust in 1559.
  • Henri IV first planned a silk manufactory on the site, but his ministers persuaded him to build a luxury residential square instead.
  • Not all the brick is real: on some facades genuine brick sits side by side with surfaces merely painted to look like brick.
  • The original bronze of Louis XIII was destroyed during the Revolution; the present statue by Charles Dupaty and Jean-Pierre Cortot was unveiled in 1825.
  • The open centre was once a venue for duels, and the Count of Montmorency-Bouteville fought a famous one here in 1627 in defiance of a royal ban.
  • Despite their names, no king lived in the King's Pavilion, and Anne of Austria stayed only briefly in the Queen's Pavilion.
  • The square was renamed several times, reverting to Place Royale under the restored monarchies and settling as Place des Vosges in 1870.
  • Writers Théophile Gautier and Alphonse Daudet both lived at No. 8, and the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet at No. 12.
  • The square was laid out as 36 private mansions behind a single uniform design, with house fronts attributed to Jean Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau.

Why it is worth it

The Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and still one of the most perfect: a square exactly 140 metres a side, closed on all four sides by houses of the same design, with a formal garden of lawns, gravel and clipped trees in the middle. It was built between 1605 and 1612 by order of Henri IV as the Place Royale, a new kind of urban space — not a market or a parvis, but a residential set piece where the nobility would live around an open stage. The king was assassinated in 1610 and never saw it finished; it was inaugurated in 1612 with a great equestrian carrousel celebrating the engagement of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria.

The architecture is what makes the square sing. The facades are of red brick framed by pale stone quoins, above ground-floor arcades carried on square pillars, and topped with steep slate roofs pierced by dormers. The uniformity is broken only by two taller pavilions facing each other across the garden — the Pavillon du Roi and the Pavillon de la Reine. Walking the arcades, with light falling through the arches onto the stone floor and the garden glimpsed between the pillars, is one of the great quiet pleasures of Paris.

Cardinal Richelieu commissioned an equestrian bronze of Louis XIII for the centre, and a mounted Louis XIII still presides over the garden, flanked by four fountains added in 1825. The square took its present name in 1800, in honour of the Vosges department, the first to pay its taxes to support the revolutionary army. Its houses have had illustrious residents: Madame de Sévigné was born at No. 1 bis, Richelieu lived at No. 21, and Victor Hugo rented an apartment at No. 6 from 1832 to 1848 — today a museum devoted to him, and the best way to see one of these houses from the inside.

Getting there

The square is in the Marais, on the border of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements of Paris, a short walk from the Bastille. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 14 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

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From the encyclopaedia

The Place des Vosges, originally the Place Royale, is the oldest planned square in Paris, just before the Place Dauphine. It is located in the Marais district, and it straddles the dividing-line between the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. It is an enclosed square, accessible via a main street on one of its four sides and two streets running beneath pavilions. It was a fashionable and expensive square to live in during the 17th and 18th centuries, and one of the main reasons for the chic nature of the Marais among the Parisian nobility. Along with the Place des Victoires, the Place Dauphine, the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde, it is one of the five royal squares in Paris.

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