Place des Vosges & Victor Hugo's House
Why is it significant?
Step out from the arcades into the square and turn slowly around. Thirty-six houses, nine on each side, red brick and white stone under steep blue-grey slate roofs, all resting on a continuous arcade; in the middle, a garden of lime trees, four fountains and a marble king on horseback.
Key Facts
| Place | Place des Vosges & Victor Hugo's House |
|---|---|
| Address | Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85570, 2.36550 |
| Part of Walk | Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille |
| Generated | Generated |
Step out from the arcades into the square and turn slowly around. Thirty-six houses, nine on each side, red brick and white stone under steep blue-grey slate roofs, all resting on a continuous arcade; in the middle, a garden of lime trees, four fountains and a marble king on horseback. It is the oldest planned square in Paris, and the model for squares all over Europe.
Before the square, there was a royal palace here, the Hôtel des Tournelles. In 1559, in a tournament on rue Saint-Antoine, King Henry the Second was struck in the eye by the lance of Gabriel de Montgomery, captain of his Scottish guard, and died ten days later in the Tournelles. His widow, Catherine de' Medici, could not bear the place, and it was pulled down. For decades the site was a horse market.
Henry the Fourth commissioned the square in 1605 but was assassinated in 1610 and never saw it finished. It was inaugurated in April 1612 with a spectacular three-day festival, the Carrousel, celebrating the engagement of the young Louis the Thirteenth to Anne of Austria. It was called Place Royale, and only in 1800 was it renamed after the Vosges, the first department of France to pay its taxes in full. And look closely: on some façades the bricks are not bricks at all, but paint on plaster, a seventeenth-century economy.
Nobles flocked here, and so did trouble. In 1627, defying Cardinal Richelieu's ban on duelling, the count of Montmorency-Bouteville fought a duel in this square in broad daylight. Richelieu had him beheaded. The year before, Madame de Sévigné, whose house you saw earlier, was born at number 1 bis.
And in the southeast corner, at number 6, Victor Hugo lived from 1832 to 1848. Here he wrote plays and poems, received half of literary Paris, and began the novel that would become Les Misérables. His apartment has been a museum since 1903. Leave the square through the arch beneath the King's Pavilion on the south side, along rue de Birague, then turn left on rue Saint-Antoine and walk to the great open space at its end.