About This Location
Step onto the edge of Place de la Concorde and take a breath before crossing. This is Paris at its biggest and boldest - an octagonal square so wide that it can feel like an open-air stage. It also happens to be the largest square in the city, which is why the views here seem to stretch in every direction. Start by finding the center. The tall pink granite needle is the Luxor Obelisk, more than 3,000 years old, once standing at the entrance to the Luxor Temple in Egypt. It was offered to France in the 1820s and raised here on 25 October 1836, in front of huge crowds. If you look at the base, you can spot carved diagrams showing how the engineers lifted it into place. Now listen to the water. The two monumental fountains on either side were designed to balance the obelisk and were completed in 1840. One celebrates France’s rivers and inland navigation, the other the seas and maritime trade. Up close, the details get playful - bronze figures, shells, fish, and shimmering basins that catch the light. Walk your eyes to the corners of the square. Eight large statues sit on pedestals around the edges, each representing a major French city: Brest, Rouen, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lille, and Strasbourg. They are easy to miss because the space is so big, but they are part of what makes the square feel like a compass of France. Now look at the matching classical buildings on the north side. On one side is the Hôtel de la Marine, built in the 1700s and later used for the Navy Ministry for generations. Opposite it is the Hôtel de Crillon, one of the famous hotels of Paris, in a near-identical façade that makes the whole north edge feel like a royal backdrop. Between them, Rue Royale points straight toward the Madeleine church, like a corridor cut through the city. This beautiful place also carries a hard history. During the French Revolution it was renamed Place de la Révolution, and the guillotine stood here. King Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793, and Marie Antoinette on 16 October 1793, along with many others during the Terror. Later, the name “Concorde” was chosen as a gesture of reconciliation, as if the city tried to heal the memory of what happened on this ground. One last small detail hides in plain sight. Around the end of 1999 and into 2000, markings were added around the obelisk to turn it into the gnomon of a giant sundial for the millennium - a reminder that this square is always being reinterpreted, even when the stones stay the same. A practical note before moving on: the traffic here is intense and crossings are long. Watch signals carefully, keep close to your group, and ignore anyone trying to stop you with petitions or “free” gifts.