The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale that was published by Lévy et Neurdein Réunis of 44, Rue Letellier, Paris. The card has a divided back.
Place de la Concorde
The Place de la Concorde is one of the major public squares in Paris. Measuring 7.6 ha (19 acres) in area, it is the largest square in the French capital. It is located in the city's eighth arrondissement, at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées.
It was the site of many notable public executions, including those of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre in the course of the French Revolution, during which the square was temporarily renamed Place de la Révolution.
History of the Place de la Concorde
The Place was originally designed to be the site of an equestrian statue of King Louis XV, commissioned in 1748 by the merchants of Paris, to celebrate the recovery of King Louis XV from a serious illness.
The site chosen for the statue was the large esplanade or space between the revolving gate the Tuileries Gardens and the Cour-de-la-Reine, a popular lane for horseback riding at the edge of the city.
At the time the Concorde bridge and the Rue de Rivoli did not exist, and the Rue Royale was a muddy lane that descended down to a marsh beside the Seine.
The architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel made a plan for the site, and the square was finished by 1772. It was in the form of an octagon, bordered by a moat twenty meters wide, crossed by stone bridges, and surrounded by a stone balustrade.
At the eight corners Gabriel placed stone stairways to descend into the Place, which was divided into flowerbeds. In the center of the gardens was the pedestal on which the statue stood.
The statue, by Bouchardon, depicted the King on horseback as the victor of the Battle of Fontenoy, dressed as a Roman general, with a laurel wreath on his head.
The four corners of the pedestal were designed with bronze statues by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, depicting the virtues of great monarchs; Force, Justice, Prudence, and Peace.
The statue was dedicated on the 20th. June 1763, but by this time the King had lost much of his popularity. A few days after its dedication, someone hung a placard on the statue, proclaiming:
"Oh, the beautiful statue! Oh, the fine
pedestal! The Virtues are under the
feet, and Vice is in the saddle!"
On the north side of the square, between 1760 and 1775, Gabriel built two palatial buildings with identical façades. The classical façades were inspired by those created by Charles Perrault, the royal architect, for the facade of the Louvre.
They were originally intended to be occupied by embassies, but in the end the east building became a depot for the Royal furnishings, before becoming the headquarters of the French Navy, the Hôtel de la Marine. The west building was divided into individual properties for the nobility.
The French Revolution
Beginning in 1789, the Place was a central stage for the events of the French Revolution. On the 13th. July 1789, a mob came to the Hotel de la Marine and seized a store of weapons, including two old cannon, gifts from the King of Siam, which fired the first shots during the storming of the Bastille on the 14th. July 1789.
On the 11th. August 1792, the statue of Louis XV was pulled down and taken to a foundry, where it was melted down. A few months later, a new statue, "Liberty", by the sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot, took its place; it was figure wearing a red liberty cap and holding a lance. The Place Louis XV became the Place de la Revolution.
The first executions by guillotine in the square, those of two thieves who had stolen the royal crown diamonds from the Hotel de la Marine, took place there in October 1792. On the 21st. January 1793, the guillotine was used to execute King Louis XVI. The guillotine was nicknamed 'The National Razor'.
As the Reign of Terror commenced, it was set up again on the 11th. May 1793, midway between the Statue of Liberty and the turning bridge at the entrance to the Tuileries Gardens, and remained there for thirteen months.
Of the 2,498 persons executed by the guillotine in Paris during the Revolution, 1,119 were executed in the Place de la Concorde, 73 in the Place Bastille and 1,306 in the Place de la Nation.
Beside Louis XVI, others executed there included Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Madame du Barry, and Antoine Lavoisier.
In the later days of the Terror, after the 27th. July 1794, the revolutionaries Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just were guillotined. The last executions, those of the Prairial rlot participants, were carried out in the Place de la Concorde in May 1795.
In 1790, early in the French Revolution, the Concorde bridge was constructed, and, at the suggestion of Jacques-Louis David, the statues of the "Horses of Marly" by G. Cousteau, were placed on the north side, at the entrance to the Champs-Élysées.
In 1795, under the Directory, the square was renamed Place de la Concorde as a gesture of reconciliation after the turmoil of the revolution.
The Place de la Concorde in the 19th. Century
In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte began to construct the Rue de Rivoli along the edge of the square.
After the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, the name of the square was changed back to Place Louis XV, and in 1826 it was renamed Place Louis XVI. After the July Revolution of 1830 the name was returned to Place de la Concorde.
Under King Louis-Philippe, and his prefect of the Seine, Rambuteau, the square was remade. IN 1832, Jacques Ignace Hittorff was named chief architect of the project.
In October 1835 Hittorff installed the new centrepiece of the square, the Luxor Obelisk, a gift to the King from the vice-pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali. It was hoisted into place, before a huge crowd, on the 25th. October 1836.
Hittorff commissioned celebrated sculptors, including James Pradier and Jean-Pierre Cortot to make eight statues representing the major cities of France, which were placed in 1838 on columns which had earlier been put in place around the square. A ring of twenty columns with lanterns was put in place at the same time.
Between 1836 and 1840, Hittorff erected two monumental fountains, the Fontaine Maritime on the side of the Seine, and the Fontaine Fluviale on the side of the Rue Royale. The design, with two fountains each nine meters high, was modelled after that of the fountains of Saint-Peter's Square in Rome.
In 1853, under Napoleon III, the deep moats around the square, which had turned into rendezvous-points for prostitutes, were filled in.
Events in the Place de la Concorde
The Place was the entry point for two major international expositions:
-- The Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, which
left behind the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais.
-- The 1925 International Exhibition of Modern
Decorative and Industrial Arts, which gave its
name to Art Deco.
The square was also the site of great national celebrations, including the victory celebrations of the end of the Great War.
Crowds celebrating the August 1944 Liberation of Paris in the Second World War had to scatter from German sniper fire.
The square has experienced violent confrontations, including a demonstration against parliamentary corruption in 1934 which turned violent, with eleven deaths and two hundred injured.
The Luxor Obelisk
The centrepiece of the Place de la Concorde is an ancient Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics. In the 1800's François Chabas produced a full translation of these. They exalt the reign of Ramesses II, and also praise Amun-Ra and Horus.
The obelisk is a monolith carved from a single block of red granite. It is one of two which the Egyptian government gave to the French in the 19th. century. The other, slightly larger one, stayed in Egypt, too difficult and heavy to move to France with the technology available at that time.
On the 26th. September 1981, President François Mitterrand formally returned the title of the second obelisk to Egypt.
The obelisk once marked the entrance to the Luxor Temple. The Khedive of Egypt, or royal constitutional monarch, Muhammad Ali Pasha, offered the 3,300-year-old Luxor Obelisk as a diplomatic gift to France in November 1829.
This was in spite of the fact that the obelisks had previously been given to the British, and the fact that the French diplomat arranging the acquisition, Baron Taylor, had been authorized to do so by Charles X, who had been overthrown in July.
The obelisk was taken down and transported to France by a ship custom-built for the transport, the Luxor.
In reciprocation for the gift, France gave a mechanical clock in the 1840's, today known as the Cairo Citadel Clock. The clock has rarely worked since its arrival in Cairo, but in 2021 the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that:
"Egypt is seeking to repair the citadel
clock, one of the oldest of its type in
the world, so that it will work again."
The obelisk arrived in Paris on the 21st. December 1833.
Three years later, it was hoisted into place, on top of the pedestal which originally supported the statue of Louis XVI, destroyed during the July Revolution 1830. In 1839, diagrams explaining the complex machinery that was used for the transportation were added to the pedestal.
The original Egyptian pedestals involved sculptures of baboons with prominent male genitalia, raising their hands to the sun. A fragment of this original pedestal from the rear of the remaining obelisk was brought to Paris at the same time as the obelisk, intended to be displayed with it. Deemed too obscene for public exhibition, it was sent to the Egyptian section of the Louvre.
The raising of the column was a major feat of engineering, depicted by illustrations on the base of the monument. King Louis Philippe dedicated the obelisk on the 25th. October 1836.
The obelisk is 23 metres (75 ft) high, including the base, and weighs over 250 tonnes. Given the technical limitations of the day, transporting it was no easy feat.
The Paris obelisk has a fissure in the original stone that had been tended to in antiquity.
The eastern and western faces of both obelisks are slightly convex, the only two ancient obelisks with this feature, and the reason for this is not understood.
The government of France added a gold-leafed pyramidal cap to the top of the obelisk in 1998, replacing the missing original, believed to have been stolen in the 6th. century BC.
More Recent Events Associated With the Obelisk
Modern events include the following:
-- On the 1st. December 1993, demonstrators from Act Up Paris. an organization dedicated to fighting AIDS, covered the Parisian obelisk with a giant pink condom to mark World AIDS Day.
-- In 1998 Alain "Spiderman" Robert, the French urban climber, illegally scaled the Parisian obelisk without the use of any ropes or other climbing equipment or safety devices.
-- In 1999 as part of Paris's millennium celebration activities, 300 brass disks and nearly 1,000 feet of yellow thermosensitive strips were placed around the obelisk in order to use it as the gnomon of a functioning sundial. They remained until the end of the year 2000.
-- In 2015 Milène Guermont's monumental interactive sculpture PHARES was displayed next to the obelisk for several months, where it was designed to illuminate the obelisk.
