A painter was billed for rebuilding the Paris column he helped topple
In May 1871 the Paris Commune pulled down the Vendôme Column, Napoleon's bronze-clad salute to Austerlitz. Once order returned, Gustave Courbet was ordered to fund its reconstruction, some 323,000 francs in yearly slices of 10,000. He fled to Switzerland instead and died in exile, while the column went back up in 1874.
The square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris started in 1698 as a monument to the armies of Louis XIV, first called the Place des Conquêtes and then Place Louis-le-Grand once those conquests slipped away. Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed uniform façades with corners cut on the diagonal, so the rectangle reads almost like an octagon. The land had belonged to César de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, an illegitimate son of Henry IV. Schemes by Hardouin-Mansart and then the finance minister Louvois both stalled before the king bought the plot. The financier John Law finally completed it by 1720, just as his Mississippi paper-money bubble collapsed.
At the centre stood François Girardon's equestrian statue of Louis XIV from 1699, thought to be the first large modern horseback figure cast in one piece; the Revolution destroyed it. Napoleon then raised a column between 1806 and 1810, patterned on Trajan's Column and wrapped in 425 spiralling bronze relief plates. His propaganda claimed the metal came from cannon seized from Europe's armies, though only 180 guns were actually taken at Austerlitz. Around 30 sculptors worked on the reliefs.
The statue on top kept changing with the regime. After the Bourbons returned, Napoleon's figure was melted down to recast Henry IV on the Pont Neuf. Karl Marx, writing in 1852, predicted the bronze Napoleon would one day tumble from its perch. During the Commune, Courbet argued the monument glorified war and should be dismantled; a law passed on 12 April 1871 authorised its removal, and the square was briefly renamed Place Internationale.
Quiet and aristocratic at first, reachable by a single street, the square filled with traffic after Napoleon opened the Rue de la Paix. The 1875 opening of the Palais Garnier nearby pulled fashionable Paris towards it. The Ministry of Justice has occupied numbers 11 and 13 since 1718, the Ritz stands on the square, and the shirtmaker Charvet has traded at number 28 since 1877. Franz Mesmer lived at number 16, and Yoko Ono scattered a handful of Keith Haring's ashes here after his death in 1990.
Source: Place Vendôme
