Place de la Concorde

The square began as a setting for an equestrian statue of Louis XV, commissioned in 1748 by the merchants of Paris to mark his recovery from illness. Ange-Jacques Gabriel drew the plan and the work was finished by 1772: an octagon ringed by a moat twenty metres wide. Edmé Bouchardon's statue, dedicated on 20 June 1763, showed the king in Roman dress as victor of Fontenoy. Days after the dedication a placard appeared on it: "Oh, the beautiful statue! Oh, the fine pedestal! The Virtues are under the feet, and Vice is in the saddle!" On 30 May 1770 a falling rocket started a fire during the fireworks for the marriage of the dauphin to the Archduchess Marie-Antoinette, and 132 people were trampled or suffocated in the panic. Between 1760 and 1775 Gabriel built two matching palatial ranges on the north side; the eastern one became the royal Garde-Meuble.

On 12 July 1789 the busts of Jacques Necker and Philippe d'Orléans were paraded on the square; the next day a crowd took the weapons stored in the Garde-Meuble, among them two old cannon given by the King of Siam, which fired the first shots at the Bastille on 14 July. The statue of Louis XV was pulled down on 11 August 1792, and the Place Louis XV became the Place de la Révolution. The first guillotine executions there, in October 1792, were of thieves who had stolen the crown diamonds. Louis XVI was beheaded on 21 January 1793 and Marie-Antoinette on 16 October. A plaster Liberty by François-Frédéric Lemot went up on the empty pedestal and stood until 1800.

The guillotine was fixed on the square from 11 May 1793 until June 1794. Of the 2,498 people guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, 1,119 died here, among them Charlotte Corday, Madame du Barry, Danton, Lavoisier and, on 28 July 1794, Robespierre. On 25 October 1795, the Convention's last day, the government renamed the square the Place de la Concorde as a gesture of reconciliation.

The Bourbon Restoration of 1814 brought back the name Place Louis XV. The Terror and the royal family's execution left the square a political problem for the governments that followed: Louis XVIII proposed a monument to his brother Louis XVI, Charles X laid its first stone on 3 May 1826, and the square was renamed the Place Louis XVI that year. The monument was never raised, and the July Revolution of 1830, which brought fighting between insurgents and troops onto the square, restored the name Place de la Concorde.

Louis-Philippe settled the question with a monument that, in his words, "will recall no political event": the Luxor Obelisk, cut with hieroglyphs celebrating Ramesses II and taken from the entrance to the Luxor Temple, given to France by Muhammad Ali Pasha, the wali of Egypt. It reached Paris on 21 December 1833, and was hoisted into place before a large crowd and dedicated by Louis-Philippe on 25 October 1836.

Jacques Ignace Hittorff, made chief architect of the square in 1832 under Louis-Philippe, set eight statues of the major cities of France in 1838 on columns Gabriel had earlier placed around it. Between 1836 and 1840 he built two fountains nine metres high on the model of those in St Peter's Square in Rome, one for the seas bordering France and one for its rivers. In 1853, under Napoleon III, the deep moats around the square were filled in.

The square was the entry point for the Universal Exposition of 1900, which left the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais behind it, and for the 1925 exhibition of decorative and industrial arts that gave Art Deco its name. It held the victory celebrations at the end of the First World War and those of the Liberation of Paris, and, in 1934, a far-right demonstration that turned violent and left eleven dead and two hundred injured. On the Tuileries terrace overlooking the square, the Jeu de Paume was used by the Germans during the Second World War as a store for looted art. The whole square has been a classified historical monument since 23 August 1937 and belongs to the city of Paris.

In 1998 a gold-leafed pyramidion replaced the obelisk's original, believed stolen in the 6th century BC. The square remains the point from which the President of France watches the Bastille Day parade. In 2024 it held four Olympic sports and the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games. Vehicle traffic did not return to most of it afterwards, following Anne Hidalgo's announcement of partial pedestrianisation in January 2024, and a redesign adding 3.2 hectares of greenery is due to begin in 2026.