The Avenue of Parades
Why is it significant?
Stop at the edge of the pavement and look both ways. Uphill, the arch, framed perfectly at the end. Downhill, the long slope towards the obelisk of Concorde and, far beyond, the Louvre. Seventy metres from shopfront to shopfront, almost two kilometres long.
Key Facts
| Place | The Avenue of Parades |
|---|---|
| Address | Avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.87040, 2.30670 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the edge of the pavement and look both ways. Uphill, the arch, framed perfectly at the end. Downhill, the long slope towards the obelisk of Concorde and, far beyond, the Louvre. Seventy metres from shopfront to shopfront, almost two kilometres long. This is less a street than a national stage, and every great moment of modern France has been played on it.
On the fourteenth of July 1919, the victorious armies of the First World War marched down here, led by the marshals Joffre and Foch, with a column of disabled veterans at the head of the parade. Ever since, the Bastille Day military parade has made the Champs-Élysées its home, with tanks rolling past the cafés and jets painting the sky blue, white and red.
But the avenue has also seen the opposite. On the fourteenth of June 1940, German troops paraded down it after Paris fell, past shuttered windows and almost empty pavements. For four years the occupiers marched here every day at noon. Parisians who lived through it remembered that silence as one of the worst moments of their lives.
And then, on the twenty-sixth of August 1944, the day after the liberation of Paris, Charles de Gaulle walked down this same avenue on foot, a head taller than everyone around him, with a crowd of perhaps a million people pressing in on both sides. There were shots fired later that afternoon, at Notre-Dame, but the image that stayed was of one man walking.
Joy comes here too. Since 1975 the Tour de France has finished on these cobbles, the riders circling up and down the avenue. In 1998 and again in 2018, after France won the football World Cup, the crowds were so dense you could not see the road. Now turn right into one of the side streets heading towards the river, and you will reach the most elegant street in Paris.