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La Conciergerie, the modern Palais de justice, situated on the Ile-de-la-Cité. Among its more famous prisoners were Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday (the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat), and Georges Jacques Danton. During the Terror, the Conciergerie regularly housed the prisoners slated for execution. Moreover, this prison was one of the sites for the gruesome “September Massacres” (of 2-6 September, 1792). |
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The Palais du Louvre, the ancient seat of the French monarchy, where Louis XVI would reside after the “October Days” of 1789 until he was unseated by Danton and the Paris mob in the revolutionary journée of 10 August, 1792. The gardens depicted here no longer exist. They have been replaced by I.M. Pei's glass pyramids. The Louvre is located on the north side of the Seine, to the west of La Conciergerie. |
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The Place de la Concorde has a history, contrary to its name, of great discord. Built originally for Louis XV, it first took his name and then became later the Place Louis XVI, but during the revolutionary era it was known as the Place de la Révolution. As such it was the home of the guillotine that ultimately executed the king. Only in the final stages of the Revolution did the guillotine move to the Faubourg St. Antoine – and then only because the residents along the rue St. Honoré could no longer tolerate the stench of blood. The place de la Concorde, the largest in the city, lies to the west of the Tuileries Gardens that abut the Louvre. |
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The Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe, Napoléon's monument to himself; originally commissioned in 1806, the Arc was completed in 1836, shortly before Napoléon's body was itself returned to the city. As an example of civic architecture, the Arc brings unity to the chaos of la rive droit. Note, moreover, the conscious classicism of the arch, its self-conscious evocation of the grandeur of Imperial Rome. |
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A night view of Les Champs Élysées with the Étoile in the background. |
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The Hôtel des Invalides, now attached to the Musée de l'Armée. Built between 1671 and 1676, les Invalides was conceived as an old soldiers home. In the eighteenth century it would have continued to serve as a home for dispossessed soldiers, as well as an infirmary for the ill. |
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Chapel within the Hôtel des Invalides. Again, the overwrought grandeur here is conscious. (See below.) |
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Of course, the Hôtel des Invalides is best known for housing Napoléon's tomb. His remains finally returned to France in 1840 after lengthy negotiations with the British. The diminutive “Little General” now lies buried beneath many pounds of mahogany. |
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Obviously, la tour Eiffel did not exist in the eighteenth century (its construction was completed in 1889), but it sits atop the area that was in early modern times devoted to public military exercises. This area where Parisians now play soccer was then called the Champ de Mars. (The “field” is visible underneath the tower itself.) |
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The Château de Vincennes, one of many prisons in the eighteenth century. Denis Diderot, among others, was imprisoned here. The Bastille would have been similarly forbidding, but on 14 July the latter prison was for the most part empty. |