Place des Victoires

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General view

Statue of Louis XIV in the center of the Place des Victoires

The Place des Victoires is a circular place in Paris, located a short distance northeast from the Palais Royal and straddling the border between the Ier arrondissement and the IIe arrondissement.

At the center of the place is an equestrian monument in honor of King Louis XIV, celebrating the paix de Nimègue concluded in 1678-79. A marshal of France, François de La Feuillade, vicomte d'Aubusson, on his own speculative initiative, demolished the old private mansions around the area; Feuillade's project was soon taken over by the Bâtiments du Roi and entrusted the royal architect, Jules Hardouin Mansart, with redeigning a more superb area, still ringed with private houses, to accommodate a majestic statue of the triumphant king. Mansart's design, of 1685, articulated the square's unified façades according to a formula utilised in some Parisian hôtels particuliers, of colossal pilasters linking two floors, standing on a high arcaded based with channeled rustication; the faċades were capped with sloping slate "mansard roofs", punctuated by dormer windows.^[1] But at the unveiling of the monument, these projected façades were presented painted on canvas.^[2] By 1692, the Place des Victoires was pierced by six streets, and the circular plan functioned as a joint that harmonized their several axes.

An engraving of 1710 exaggerates the scale of the Place des Victoires

The original statue, of Louis XIV crowned by Fame and trampling the Triple Alliance underfoot, in gilt bronze, stood on a high square pedestal applied with bas-relief panels and effusively flattering inscriptions; bronze figures were seated at the corners. The sculptor was Martin Desjardins,^[3] part of the team that was cooperatively at work at the Château of Versailles and its gardens.

Desjardins' monument

The king permanently abandoned Paris, and Louis' imperial ambitions in Europe were deflated by wars and crushed at the treaty of 1697, which the military architect Vauban termed "a humiliating disaster for the king".^[4] "During the course of the eighteenth century," Rochelle Ziskin has noted, "critics would suggest that the arrogance of representation at the Place des Victoires had serious political consequences and may have been a factor in provoking war." The grandiose memorial that had begun to embarrass Louis XIV himself^[5] was destroyed in 1792, in the French Revolution.

It was not until 1828 that the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII commissioned the current equestrian statue, sculpted by François Joseph Bosio. Louis XIV, dressed as a Roman emperor, sits on a proud horse skilfully pulled up on its hind legs. An iron gate circles the square, surrounding the 12 meter-high statue.

Bosio's Louis XIV

The area around the Place des Victoires is now an upscale neighbourhood. The designers Kenzo, Cacharel, Thierry Mugler and others have branches at the Place des Victoires.

[edit] Notes

^ Rochelle Ziskin, "The Place de Nos Conquêtes and the Unraveling of the Myth of Louis XIV" The Art Bulletin 76.1 (March 1994:147-162) p. 152, note 23; illus. 155 fig. 11.
^ Ziskin 1994:154, note.
^ An engraving of Desjardins' monument is illustrated in Ziskin 1994:56 fig. 12.
^ Quoted in J. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York) 1968:487.
^ In a memorandum of 1699, permitting the installation of an equestrian statue in Paris, Louis' secretary specified the king's desire for a plain pedestal, "nothing, in a word, that resembles the reliefs, slaves and inscriptions of the Place des Victoires" (quoted in Ziskin1994:161 and note 51..