Place de la Concorde

Landmark · Concorde / Madeleine (8th)Paris,France

The largest square in Paris, where the guillotine stood for two and a half years and a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk stands now.

Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris and one of the loudest, an open octagon with traffic running round every side. In the middle stands an obelisk from the temple at Luxor, about 3,300 years old, raised here in October 1836 in front of a crowd of two hundred thousand. Two fountains and a ring of eight seated stone women, one for each of eight French cities, stand around it. Crossing to the middle takes patience. The square was drawn as a setting for a statue of Louis XV on horseback. In 1792 a crowd pulled that statue down and the guillotine went up in its place. Over the next two and a half years more than a thousand people were beheaded where you are standing, among them Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Danton and Robespierre. Carts took the bodies to a pit outside the square, and the government then renamed it Concorde, meaning agreement. No king, emperor or republic could later agree on whose statue belonged in the middle, which is how a stone from Egypt became the one thing nobody objected to.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Getting to the middle takes more than one crossing — Traffic runs round every side and the central island is reached only at the marked crossings, so allow time and do not cut across.
Come at the end of the day — the square faces west along the Champs-Élysées, so late sun runs down it and strikes the obelisk from the side, picking out its edges.
Early morning is the only quiet hour — This is a working traffic circle and the noise never fully stops, but before eight you can often have the island in the middle to yourself.
Expect building work for years — The city has begun a scheme to green the square and take traffic out of it, with the main work running from late 2026, so parts will be fenced when you come.
The grand side is the north side — Everything grand stands on the north side, where the two matching palaces are; the other three sides open onto the garden, the river and the avenue.

Things to do

1
Find the diagrams cut into the obelisk's base
Walk right up to the pedestal and go round all four sides. Cut into the stone are drawings of the timber gantry, the ropes and the winches used to raise the obelisk on this square in 1836. They were carved to show how the job was done, not to celebrate it. Then look up: the carving on the obelisk itself is about Ramesses the Second.
2
Walk round the eight statues of French cities
Eight stone women sit at the corners of the square, which is laid out as an octagon, and each one stands for a French city. Walk the whole ring and read the names, then look at where each statue is placed. Every city sits on the side of the square that faces towards it, so Brest and Rouen face north-west and Marseille faces south-east.
3
Compare the two fountains
The two fountains face each other across the obelisk. They are a matched pair with opposite subjects. The one towards the river is about the sea, with fish and tritons, the sea gods of Greek myth. The one towards the Madeleine is about rivers, with figures standing for the Rhône and the Rhine and for the crops their water feeds. Walk from one to the other and compare them.