Place Vendôme is a square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris located to the north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Église de la Madeleine. It is the starting point of the Rue de la Paix. Its regular architecture by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the corners give the rectangular Place Vendôme the aspect of an octagon.

After some false starts, the Place was laid out in 1702 as a monument to the glory of the armies of Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque and called Place des Conquetes, to be renamed Place Louis le Grand, when the conquests proved temporary; an equestrian statue of the king was set up in its center.

Napoleon erected the present column, modelled after Trajan’s Column, to celebrate

the victory of Austerlitz; its spiralling veneers of bas-relief bronze plates (by the sculptor Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret) were made out of cannon taken from the combined armies of Europe, according to his propaganda. (The usual figure given is hugely exaggerated: 133 cannon were actually captured at Austerlitz.) After the Bourbon restoration the statue of the Emperor was pulled from the top of the column and refinished as a statue of Henri IV, which can be inspected on the Pont Neuf. A replacement statue of Napoleon, however, was erected by Louis-Philippe, and a better, more augustly classicizing one by Louis-Napoleon. The column was pulled down by Communards in 1871, with the painter Gustave Courbet at their head, but was set up again in the early days of the Third Republic, and there it remains.

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