Place Vendôme

In 1677 a group of speculators including the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart first proposed a square on the ground of the hôtel de Vendôme, the mansion and gardens built for César de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, the legitimised son of Henry IV by Gabrielle d'Estrées. Financial difficulties ended that scheme. Hardouin-Mansart bought the mansion and its gardens himself, meaning to break them into building lots as a profitable speculation, and that plan did not materialise. In 1685 Louis XIV's minister of finance, François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, took the idea up, buying the hôtel de Vendôme and the convent of the Capucines then standing north of the rue Saint-Honoré. On their sites Hardouin-Mansart and Germain Boffrand proposed a broad rectangular square lined with public buildings: the royal library, the Mint, a hôtel des Académies and a hôtel des Ambassadeurs. The façades went up before the buildings behind them, and Louvois commissioned a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV from François Girardon for the centre. He then came into financial difficulties of his own, and after his death the king bought the plot.

In 1699 the public programme was abandoned in favour of a private operation. The king sold the ground to the city, the façades already built were demolished so that the square could be drawn in by some twenty metres on each side, and Hardouin-Mansart designed the uniform house front that the buyers of the plots had to keep to. Girardon's over-life-size king, shown in a Roman chlamys, was inaugurated at the centre on 6 August 1699; it is believed to have been the first large modern equestrian statue cast in a single piece. Begun as a monument to the glory of the armies of Louis XIV, the square was to have been the place des Conquêtes; it became the place Louis-le-Grand instead, when the conquests proved temporary, and kept that name until the Revolution.

When the state finances ran low the financier John Law took the project on, built himself a residence behind one of the façades, and had the square complete by 1720, just as his paper-money Mississippi scheme burst. Law was then required to pay back taxes on a scale he had no way of meeting, and had to sell the property he owned on the square.

The buyers were members of the exiled Condé branch of the House of Bourbon, who later returned to France to reclaim their land in the town of Vendôme itself. Between 1720 and 1797 they acquired much of the square, including a freehold over part of the ground on which the Hôtel Ritz Paris now stands, where they still maintain apartments. Their intention of putting a family palace back on the site depended on whether the neighbouring Justice Ministry meant to expand its premises.

Originally a single street served the square, which kept an aristocratic quiet except during the annual fair. The Foire Saint-Ovide settled there in 1764 and left in 1771 for the place Louis-XV, the future place de la Concorde, in the face of general discontent among the owners of the new hôtels particuliers. The financier and fermier-général Claude Dupin held no. 10.

On 10 August 1792, during the rising that forced the royal family out of the Tuileries to take refuge with the Legislative Assembly before their imprisonment in the Temple, the crowd pulled Girardon's Louis XIV down; a foot of it survives in the collections of the musée Carnavalet. Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau was assassinated at the Palais-Royal on 20 January 1793, the day after voting for the death of Louis XVI, and the painter Jacques-Louis David, put in charge of his funeral ceremony, laid him out at the centre of the square on the pedestal, naked and bloody under a plain sheet that left the wound showing, in a large neo-antique staging. The square was the place des Piques from 1793, and has carried the name place Vendôme since 1799.

In 1801 it was decided to open a road linking the square to the newly created rue de Rivoli, and it was named the rue de Castiglione. In 1806 the rue de la Paix was cut through on the site of the Capucines convent. The two streets overturned Mansart's arrangement of a square held apart from the traffic in the manner of the place des Vosges, and destroyed the convent portals that had closed its views to north and south. In 1829 gas lighting, invented by Philippe Lebon, was installed there, the first on a public thoroughfare in Paris.

The column was started in 1806 at Napoleon's direction and completed in 1810, on the spot where the statue of Louis XIV had stood, to designs by the architects Jacques Gondouin and Jean-Baptiste Lepère. It imitated Trajan's Column in Rome, with the same helical band of relief, and marked the victory of Austerlitz; known to the public as the colonne Vendôme, it was first called the Austerlitz column or the column of the Grande Armée. Its veneer of 425 spiralling bronze plates was said to have been cast from cannon taken from the combined armies of Europe, a count put as high as 1,200 guns, although the number actually captured at Austerlitz was 180. The plates were designed by the sculptor Bergeret and executed by a team of about thirty sculptors, among them François Rude and Lorenzo Bartolini.

Antoine-Denis Chaudet's statue of Napoleon went on top, in Roman dress and crowned with laurel. In 1816, taking advantage of the Allied occupying force, a mob got a cable round its neck and hauled at it with men and horses, and it refused to budge; one woman quipped that if the Emperor were as solid on his throne as the statue was on its column, he was nowhere near descending it. Accounts of the figure's removal differ: by one, the statue but not the column was pulled down after the Bourbon Restoration and melted to provide bronze for the recast equestrian Henry IV on the Pont Neuf; by another it was Casimir Perier who had it taken away in 1831, under the July Monarchy.

The replacement was a Napoleon in modern dress, in bicorn hat, boots and redingote, put up by Louis-Philippe: Charles Émile Seurre's Bonaparte as the petit caporal, inaugurated on 28 July 1833 by the king on horseback at the head of the National Guard. Under Louis-Napoléon, later Napoleon III, the column carried a more augustly classicising figure, a copy of the original effigy executed by Auguste Dumont and restored in 1864.

Karl Marx predicted the collapse of the Vendôme Column in his political pamphlet of 1852, Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte, which ends with the words: "But if the Imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will fall from the height of the Vendôme Column". During the siege of Paris the staff of the National Guard was installed on the square, at the hôtel de Ségur. On 22 March 1871, in the run-up to the founding of the Commune, demonstrators carrying banners declaring them "Friends of Peace" were blocked from entering the square by guardsmen who, after being fired on, opened fire on the crowd; at least twelve people were killed and many wounded.

The painter Gustave Courbet, president of the Federation of Artists and an elected member of the Commune, had objected that this monument to war stood on the rue de la Paix, and proposed that the column be taken apart and preserved at the Hôtel des Invalides, arguing that it was devoid of all artistic value and tended to perpetuate the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty. His project as proposed was not adopted, but on 12 April 1871 legislation authorised the dismantling of the imperial symbol, which the communards took for a symbol of the tyranny and militarism of Napoleon I. The column was brought down on 16 May, its bronze plates preserved, by a series of ropes and a gang of quarry workers; it fell onto a heap of sand prepared for it and, as observers described it, "broke up almost before it reached its bed, and lay on the ground, a huge mass of ruin". The square was renamed the place Internationale, in repudiation of the column's perceived glorification of national chauvinism and in celebration of the Communards' promotion of international fraternity.

After Adolphe Thiers suppressed the Commune, the decision was taken to rebuild the column with the statue of Napoleon restored to its apex, and for his part in the Commune Courbet was condemned to pay the cost, put at 323,000 francs in yearly instalments of 10,000 francs. Unable to pay, he went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland; the French government seized and sold his paintings for a minor amount, and he died in exile in December 1877. Dumont's work, once restored, was put back in place in 1873. The column was re-erected at the centre of the square in 1874, with a copy of the original statue on top.

Napoleon's rue de la Paix filled the square with traffic through the nineteenth century. It was only after the Palais Garnier opened on the far side of that street in 1875 that fashionable Parisian life began to gravitate around the rue de la Paix and the place Vendôme. In 1858 the couturier Charles Frederick Worth opened at 7, rue de la Paix, and his success drew in dressmakers, milliners, tailors, bootmakers and perfumers until the quarter was the centre of the trade; fashion houses stayed prominent until the years after the First World War, by which time the trade had begun moving towards the avenue d'Antin. Frédéric Boucheron was the first jeweller to settle on the square itself, in 1893, leaving the Palais-Royal quarter to be near Garnier's new opera house; he took the hôtel de Nocé, where the Countess Virginia de Castiglione, once the mistress of Napoleon III, gave up her entresol apartment in 1894 after living there in seclusion since the 1870s. Cartier followed on the rue de la Paix in 1899, Chaumet in 1902, Van Cleef and Arpels in 1906, and the watchmakers from Breguet in 1933 onwards.

Franz Mesmer, the German physician and discoverer of animal magnetism, lived at no. 16. Anne Lister, the English landowner and diarist, stayed in 1824 and 1825 at no. 24, a guesthouse kept by M. and Mme de Boyve, where she met Maria Barlow and carried on an affair with her. Frédéric Chopin lived, and died, at no. 12; Coco Chanel lived at no. 15, in the Hôtel Ritz Paris; and the singer Henri Salvador was at no. 6 from 1962 until his death in 2008.

The hôtel de Bourvallais at no. 13 is the seat of the Ministry of Justice, so closely identified with it that the ministry is sometimes called simply the place Vendôme. On 27 June 1918 that building and the corner of the square with the rue de Castiglione were hit in an attack by German aircraft. The inner staircase leading to the top of the column is no longer open to the public. A large part of the square's façades is classified as a monument historique, and about a hundred of the quarter's jewellery, watchmaking, hotel, finance and property businesses belong to the Comité Vendôme, an association formed to promote and protect its standing.