Palais de Chaillot & the Human Rights Terrace

Why is it significant?

Walk out onto the wide stone terrace between the two pale, curving wings of the palace, and there it is, filling the whole sky in front of you... the Eiffel Tower, framed like a picture someone has hung for you on purpose. Everyone gasps here. Go ahead. It is allowed.

Key Facts

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Walk out onto the wide stone terrace between the two pale, curving wings of the palace, and there it is, filling the whole sky in front of you... the Eiffel Tower, framed like a picture someone has hung for you on purpose. Everyone gasps here. Go ahead. It is allowed. The building around you is the Palais de Chaillot, and it is younger than it looks. It was built for the International Exhibition of 1937, on the foundations of an older and much stranger palace, the Trocadéro of 1878, a Moorish fantasy with two minaret-like towers that Parisians had grown tired of. Look up at the façades and you will find lines of golden letters. They were written by the poet Paul Valéry, and one of them warns, roughly, that it depends on the passer-by whether this building is a tomb or a treasure. The name Trocadéro has nothing to do with Paris at all. It comes from a fort near Cádiz in Spain, captured by French troops in 1823, and a royal government that wanted a victory to celebrate gave its name to this hill. And at dawn on the 23rd of June 1940, a few days after the fall of France, Adolf Hitler stood exactly where you are standing, on his only brief visit to the city, and was photographed with the tower behind him. It is one of the most chilling tourist photos ever taken. Eight years later this same building gave the world its answer. In 1948 the young United Nations held its General Assembly inside the Palais de Chaillot, and on the 10th of December it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt had steered the drafting, and the French jurist René Cassin shaped much of the text. That is why the terrace under your feet is officially called the Esplanade of Liberties and Human Rights. So this is a place of two photographs... one of conquest, one of a promise. Now take the steps down through the gardens towards the river, and stop beside the long stretch of fountains, where in 1937 two dictatorships stared at each other across the water.