Champs-Élysées

Marie de Médicis had a long tree-lined walk, the cours la Reine, opened along the Seine in 1616. The avenue itself began with a royal decree of 24 August 1667: Louis XIV wanted an easier road for the carriages of courtiers travelling to Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Versailles, and gave the work to André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre laid out a wide promenade on the axis of the Tuileries' central pavilion, lined with elms and lawns and known as the Grand Cours. The name Champs-Élysées, after the Elysian Fields of Greek myth, appears in 1694 and was fixed by 1709.

In 1710 the duc d'Antin, superintendent of the King's Buildings, threw a stone bridge over the Grand Égout, allowing the avenue to be pushed on towards the étoile de Chaillot; that work was finished in 1724.

In 1765 the king allowed building on either side of the avenue. From 1770 the marquis de Marigny, Director-General of the King's Buildings and brother of Madame de Pompadour, had the hill of the Roule levelled and renewed the plantations; in 1774 he widened the avenue and extended it westward.

The Champs-Élysées kept a poor reputation for decades, mediocre guinguettes drawing prostitutes and even brigands. The Colisée, a luxurious pleasure garden opened at the Rond-Point in 1771, went bankrupt in 1780, the public hesitating to come out at night to a quarter still remote and ill-famed. To make the avenue safer, a post of Swiss Guards was established beside the barrière de Chaillot in 1777. The road took its settled name, avenue des Champs-Élysées, in 1789.

On 5 October 1789 the procession of women marching on Versailles to fetch the royal family, led by Théroigne de Méricourt and Reine Audu, went out along the avenue; the family was brought back down it on 25 June 1791 after the flight to Varennes, between hedges of National Guards saluting with their muskets reversed. Under the Terror the marble horses Guillaume Coustou had carved for the horse-pond at Marly were set at the foot of the avenue on plinths designed by the painter David.

The trees had to be replanted, because occupying Russian, British and Prussian troops had camped in the gardens and used the trees for firewood. On 25 June 1815 Napoleon crossed the Champs-Élysées on his way out of Paris after abdicating at the Élysée Palace, the Arc de Triomphe he had commissioned still unfinished at the head of the avenue; it was completed under Louis Philippe in 1833–1836. A law of August 1828 handed the promenade and its gardens to the City of Paris.

From 1834 the architect Jacques Hittorff was charged with remaking the gardens. He laid out English-style beds, raised four fountains in 1839 and 1840, and designed the cast-iron lamp standards, then burning gas, that still stand along the avenue. His panorama, a rotunda forty metres across, opened in May 1839 with Jean-Charles Langlois's Burning of Moscow. The banquet held on the Champs-Élysées on 22 February 1848 was the starting point of that year's revolution.

Napoleon III chose the park for the first Exposition Universelle held in Paris, in 1855, whose Palace of Industry covered thirty thousand square metres where the Grand Palais stands today. In 1858 his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, had the formal French garden recast as a "picturesque" English one, the ailing elms replaced by chestnuts. Charles Garnier built the Théâtre Marigny in 1883, and the Universal Exposition of 1900 left the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais behind.

German troops paraded in victory down the avenue in 1871 and again in 1940; the Allied victory in the First World War was marked there in 1919, and after the liberation of Paris the French 2nd Armoured Division marched on 25 August 1944 and the US 28th Infantry Division on 29 August 1944. The 14 July military parade passes down it each year, reviewed by the president of the Republic, and from 1975 to 2023 the Tour de France finished on it.

On 16 March 2019, during the gilets jaunes demonstrations, about 1,500 protesters looted or set fire to some eighty shops, restaurants and a bank along the avenue. Some 3,000 vehicles an hour drive its eight lanes and nitrogen dioxide runs at twice the level the World Health Organization recommends; since 2016 it has been closed to motor traffic on the first Sunday of each month. In 2021 the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, announced a €250 million scheme to halve the space given to cars and create "tunnels of trees", with work starting in earnest only after the 2024 Paris Olympics and completion sought by 2030.