Rue Royale and La Madeleine
Why is it significant?
Walking up the Rue Royale, look for a dark red façade with a curved awning: Maxim's, open since 1893. And ahead of you, filling the end of the street, a Greek temple, surrounded by giant columns, with no cross and no bell tower in sight. That temple is a church. Mostly. Maxim's first.
Key Facts
| Place | Rue Royale and La Madeleine |
|---|---|
| Address | Place de la Madeleine, 75008 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.87010, 2.32450 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Walking up the Rue Royale, look for a dark red façade with a curved awning: Maxim's, open since 1893. And ahead of you, filling the end of the street, a Greek temple, surrounded by giant columns, with no cross and no bell tower in sight. That temple is a church. Mostly.
Maxim's first. In the Belle Époque it was where the dukes, the bankers and the most famous courtesans of Paris dined late into the night, under Art Nouveau woodwork and mirrors that are still there. In Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow, of 1905, the hero sings that he is going to Maxim's, where everyone knows him, and the name went around the world.
Now the Madeleine. Work on a church began here in the 1760s, then stopped with the Revolution. In 1806 Napoleon decided to turn it into a temple to the glory of his Grand Army, hence the columns, fifty-two of them, each about twenty metres high. When the arch at the Étoile took over that role, nobody knew what to do with it. In the 1830s there was even a proposal to make it the terminus of the first railway line out of Paris.
In the end it was consecrated as a church in 1842, dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Its organ was played by Camille Saint-Saëns and later by Gabriel Fauré, and its funerals are part of French history: Frédéric Chopin's in 1849, with Mozart's Requiem, and in 2017 the farewell to the rock singer Johnny Hallyday, with hundreds of thousands of people outside.
Climb the steps and turn around. Look down the Rue Royale: the obelisk, and beyond the river the columns of the National Assembly, built to answer the Madeleine like a mirror. From the arch to this doorstep, you have walked through two centuries of French triumphs and tragedies, along a single straight line. Paris planned it that way.