Place de la Bastille & the July Column

Why is it significant?

You are standing at the edge of a huge, roaring roundabout. In the middle rises a green bronze column some fifty metres tall, and on top, balanced on one foot, a gilded winged figure carrying a torch and a broken chain: the Spirit of Liberty, about to take flight over Paris.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing at the edge of a huge, roaring roundabout. In the middle rises a green bronze column some fifty metres tall, and on top, balanced on one foot, a gilded winged figure carrying a torch and a broken chain: the Spirit of Liberty, about to take flight over Paris.

Here is the first surprise: the column has nothing to do with 1789. It commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, the Three Glorious Days that drove out King Charles the Tenth, and the names of hundreds of people killed in that fighting are inscribed on its shaft. It was inaugurated in 1840, and the vault beneath it holds the remains of the dead of 1830, and later of the revolution of 1848.

The fortress itself stood just to the west, where rue Saint-Antoine enters the square. The Bastille was built from 1370 under King Charles the Fifth to guard the eastern gate of Paris, and became a state prison, where the king could lock up anyone with a simple sealed letter, without trial. Voltaire was held here twice. On 14 July 1789 a crowd looking for gunpowder stormed it. Inside, they found only seven prisoners. The governor was killed, and his head was paraded through the streets on a pike.

Demolition began almost at once. A building contractor named Pierre-François Palloy turned the fortress into a business: he sold its stones as souvenirs, and had little models of the Bastille carved from them and sent to every department of France... like the one you saw in the Carnavalet. Other stones went into the Pont de la Concorde. Look on the pavement at the corner of boulevard Henri-Quatre for a line of paving stones tracing the outline of the old towers. Napoleon later planned a colossal bronze elephant fountain here; only a plaster model was ever built, and Victor Hugo gave it to the street boy Gavroche as a home in Les Misérables.

And so the walk ends where modern France was born, with the opera house built for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989 watching over the traffic. You came from the strand where Parisians were hired and hanged, through palaces, archives, a market, a wall, a royal square and the memory of the deported... to the place where a crowd decided that no king could lock them up again.