City Square sights in Paris
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Place du Tertre
Half a block west of the Église St-Pierre de Montmartre which once formed part of a 12th-century Benedictine abbey, is place du Tertre, once the main square of the village of Montmartre. These days it’s filled with cafés, restaurants, tourists and rather obstinate portrait artists and caricaturists who will gladly do your likeness. Whether it looks even remotely like you is another matter.
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Place de la Concorde
The 3300-year-old pink granite obelisk with the gilded top in the middle of Place de la Concorde once stood in the Temple of Ramses at Thebes (today’s Luxor) and was given to France in 1831 by Muhammad Ali, viceroy and pasha of Egypt. The female statues adorning the four corners of the square represent France’s eight largest cities.
In 1793 Louis XVI’s head was lopped off by a guillotine set up in the northwest corner of the square, near the statue representing Brest. During the next two years, a guillotine built near the entrance to the Jardin des Tuileries was used to behead 1343 more people, including Marie-Antoinette and, six months later, the Revolutionary leader…
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Place de l’Opéra
The site of Paris’ world-famous (and original) opera house. It abuts the Grands Boulevards, the eight contiguous ‘Great Boulevards’ – Madeleine, Capucines, Italiens, Montmartre, Poissonnière, Bonne Nouvelle, St-Denis and St-Martin – that stretch from elegant place de la Madeleine in the 8e eastwards to the more plebeian place de la République in the 3e, a distance of just under 3km.
The Grands Boulevards were laid out in the 17th century on the site of obsolete city walls and served as a centre of café and theatre life in the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the height of fashion during the belle époque. North of the western end of the Grands Boulevards is bd…
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Place de la Bastille
The Bastille, built during the 14th century as a fortified royal residence, is probably the most famous monument in Paris that no longer exists; the notorious prison – the quintessential symbol of royal despotism – was demolished by a Revolutionary mob on 14 July 1789 and all seven prisoners were freed. Place de la Bastille in the 11e and 12e, where the prison once stood, is now a very busy traffic roundabout.
In the centre of the square is the 52m-high Colonne de Juillet (July Column), whose shaft of greenish bronze is topped by a gilded and winged figure of Liberty. It was erected in 1833 as a memorial to those killed in the street battles that accompanied the July …
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Place des Vosges
Inaugurated in 1612 as place Royale, Place des Vosges is an ensemble of three dozen symmetrical houses with ground-floor arcades, steep slate roofs and large dormer windows arranged around a large square. Only the earliest houses were built of brick; to save time and money, the rest were given timber frames and faced with plaster, which was then painted to resemble brick.
The author Victor Hugo lived at the square’s Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée from 1832 to 1848, moving here a year after the publication of Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). His former house, the Maison de Victor Hugo, is now a municipal museum devoted to the life and times of the celebrat…
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Place Vendôme
Octagonal place Vendôme and the arcaded and colonnaded buildings around it were constructed between 1687 and 1721. In March 1796 Napoleon married Josephine, Viscountess Beauharnais, in the building at No 3. Today, the buildings surrounding the square house the posh Hôtel Ritz Paris and some of the city's most fashionable boutiques. The 43.5m-tall Colonne Vendôme (Vendôme Column) in the centre of the square consists of a stone core wrapped in a 160m-long bronze spiral made from hundreds of Austrian and Russian cannons captured by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. The statue on top depicts Napoleon in classical Roman dress.
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Place de la Madeleine
Ringed by fine-food shops, this square is named after the 19th-century neoclassical church in its centre, Église de Ste-Marie Madeleine. Constructed in the style of a Greek temple, what is now simply called ‘La Madeleine’ was consecrated in 1842 after almost a century of design changes and construction delays. It is surrounded by 52 Corinthian columns standing 20m tall, and the marble and gilt interior is topped by three sky-lit cupolas. You can hear the massive organ being played at Mass at 11am and 7pm on Sunday.
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