Place Vendôme Totally Explained

Everything about Place Vend Me totally explained

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. The Place Vendôme Column at the center was erected by Napoleon to commemorate the battle of Austerlitz.

History

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 Conquêtes, to be renamed Place Louis le Grand, when the conquests proved temporary; an equestrian statue of the king was set up in its center.
The site of the square was formerly the hôtel of César, duc de Vendôme, the illegitimate son of Henri IV and his mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées. Mansart bought the building and its gardens, with an idea of converting it into building lots as a profitable speculation. The plan didn't materialize, and Louis XIV's minister of finance, Louvois, purchased the piece of ground, with the object of building a square, modelled on the successful Place des Vosges of the previous century. Louvois came into financial difficulties and nothing came of his project, either. After his death the king purchased the plot and commissioned Mansart to design a housefront that the buyers of plots round the Place would agree to adhere to. When the state finances ran low, the financier John Law took on the project, built himself a residence behind one of the façades, and the square was complete by 1720, just as his paper-money Mississippi bubble burst. Law suffered a major blow when he was forced to pay back taxes amounting to some tens of millions of dollars. With no way to pay such an amount he was forced to sell the property he owned on the square. The buyers were members of the exiled Bourbon-Condé family who later returned to the country to reclaim their land in the town of Vendôme itself. Between 1720 and 1797 they acquired much of the square, including a freehold to parts of the site on which the Hôtel Ritz Paris now stands and in which they still maintain apartments. Their intention to restore a family palace on the site is dependent on the possible intentions of the adjacent Justice Ministry to expand its premises.

The Place Vendôme Column

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 refounded to provide the bronze for the recast equestrian statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. A replacement statue of Napoléon, however, was erected by Louis-Philippe, and a better, more augustly classicizing one by Louis-Napoléon (later Napoléon III). During the Paris Commune in 1871, the painter Gustave Courbet proposed the column to be disassembled and re-erected in the Hôtel des Invalides. Courbet argued that:
"Inasmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise him to disassemble this column." This project wasn't adopted, but, on April 12, 1871, the dismantling of the imperial symbol was voted, and the column taken down on May 8, with no intentions of rebuilding it. The bronze plates were preserved. After the assault on the Paris Commune by Adolphe Thiers, the decision was taken to rebuild the column with its statue of Napoléon. On his own previous proposition, Gustave Courbet was condemned to pay part of the expenses, which would have ruined him had he not died the week before the first payment came due.
Features
At the centers of the square's long sides, Mansart's range of Corinthian pilasters breaks forward under a pediment, to create palace-like fronts. The arcading of the formally rusticated ground floors doesn't provide an arcaded passageway as at Place des Vosges. The architectural linking of the windows from one floor to the next, and the increasing arch of their windowheads, provide an upward spring to the horizontals formed by ranks of windows. Originally the Place was accessible by a single street and preserved an aristocratic quiet, except when the annual fair was held there. Then Napoléon opened the Rue de la Paix, and the 20th century filled the Place Vendôme with traffic.
The Place Vendôme has been famous for its fashionable and deluxe hotels: The Hôtel Ritz Paris, which is the Ritz, the Park Hyatt Vendôme, and the Bristol, which Edward VII preferred, now called the Vendôme. Many famous dress designers have had their salons in the square. Since 1718, the Ministry of Justice, also known as the "Chancellerie", is located at the Hotel de Bourvallais located at numbers 11 and 13. Right on the other side of the Place, number 14 houses the Paris office of JP Morgan, the investment bank. Place Vendôme was a 1998 movie starring Catherine Deneuve.
Famous residents

Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849), Polish composer, at Place Vendôme, nb 12;
Countess de Castiglione (1837-1899), Italian courtesan, at Place Vendôme, nb 26, in the 1880s.
Coco Chanel, fashion designer, at Place Vendôme, nb 15 (Hôtel Ritz Paris)

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