Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris

Down the most famous avenue in Paris: Napoleon's arch, the street of victory parades, the palaces of 1900, a tsar's bridge, the square of the guillotine and Monet's Water Lilies

Paris · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Arc de Triomphe: Napoleon's Arch and the Unknown Soldier

Place Charles de Gaulle, 75008 Paris, France

From the pavement at the top of the Champs-Élysées, look at the arch towering over the most chaotic roundabout in Europe, where cars from twelve avenues swirl around it with no lanes at all. Use the underground passage to cross, never the road... and come and stand beneath it.

Napoleon ordered this arch in 1806, after his victory at Austerlitz, and promised his soldiers they would come home beneath triumphal arches. It was a promise he could not keep. When he married Marie-Louise of Austria in 1810, the arch was barely above its foundations, so a full-size mock-up of wood and painted canvas was put up for the wedding procession. The real one was only finished in 1836, under King Louis-Philippe, long after Napoleon had died in exile.

He did pass beneath it in the end. In December 1840 his remains, brought back from Saint Helena, were carried under the arch on their way to the Invalides, before a huge, frozen crowd. In 1885 Victor Hugo's coffin lay in state here overnight, under a veil of black. And in 1919, a pilot named Charles Godefroy flew a biplane straight through the arch, a stunt nobody has dared to repeat.

Now look down at the floor. Under the vault lies the Unknown Soldier, a French soldier of the First World War whose name will never be known, buried here in January 1921. Since November 1923 a flame has burned over his tomb, and every single evening, without exception, veterans' associations come to rekindle it. It was rekindled even during the German occupation.

Look up at the great sculpted group facing the avenue, the Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 by François Rude, known to everyone as La Marseillaise, with a winged figure screaming above the soldiers. The twelve avenues around you were laid out as a star under the Second Empire, which is why Parisians still call this place l'Étoile. Now walk down the avenue, on the right-hand pavement, towards the red awnings on the corner of the Avenue George V.
2. Fouquet's and the Belle Époque Champs-Élysées

99 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris, France

On the corner of the Avenue George V, look for the red awnings and the golden lettering of Fouquet's. Waiters in long white aprons and a heated terrace facing the endless traffic. This corner has been the drawing room of the Champs-Élysées for over a century.

The avenue itself began as a garden idea. In 1667 André Le Nôtre, the gardener of Versailles, extended the view from the Tuileries westwards with double rows of trees across fields and marshes. For decades it was a muddy promenade where it was wise not to walk alone at night. Only in the nineteenth century did it fill with mansions, cafés and theatres, then with carriages and, at last, with motor cars. The poetic name, the Elysian Fields, the paradise of heroes in Greek myth, came in the early eighteenth century.

Fouquet's opened in 1899, when a waiter named Louis Fouquet took over a simple café and gave it his name with an English-style apostrophe, because English things were fashionable. First came the smart set of the Belle Époque, then actors, directors and producers. For decades the French film world held its big dinners here, including the one after the César awards.

Fouquet's has also lived through the political storms of the avenue. In 2007 a newly elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy, celebrated his victory here with rich friends, and the evening haunted him for the rest of his term. In March 2019, during the yellow vest protests, the restaurant was looted and set on fire. It reopened a few months later, and the awnings were red again.

The building is protected as a historic monument, precisely so that it could never be swallowed by yet another flagship store. On an avenue where rents are among the highest in Europe, that protection is the only reason a brasserie can still occupy such a corner. Now carry on down the avenue for a few blocks, keeping to this side.
3. The Avenue of Parades

Avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris, France

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.
4. Avenue Montaigne: From Widows' Alley to the New Look

Avenue Montaigne, 75008 Paris, France

Here the avenue is calmer, lined with chestnut trees, guarded by doormen in dark suits. Shop windows hold a single handbag each, lit like a jewel. It is hard to imagine that this was once one of the most disreputable lanes on the edge of Paris.

Until 1850 it was called the Allée des Veuves, the Widows' Alley. Some say widows came here to mourn discreetly, away from the eyes of the city. What is certain is that by the eighteenth century it was a dark track lined with dance halls and taverns, where it was not wise to walk at night. Then it was renamed after the philosopher Montaigne, and slowly turned respectable.

On the twelfth of February 1947, at number thirty, a young designer named Christian Dior showed his very first collection. After years of war, rationing and square shoulders, the women walked out in tiny waists and enormous skirts using metres and metres of fabric. The editor of an American fashion magazine exclaimed that it was a whole new look, and the name stuck. From that day the fashion houses came to this avenue, one after another.

A little further down the avenue stands a bare, white building with flat reliefs on its front: the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, built in 1913 by Auguste Perret in reinforced concrete, a scandal in itself at the time. On the twenty-ninth of May 1913, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring here, with Nijinsky's choreography. The music opened with a bassoon squealing in a register nobody had heard before, and the dancers stamped with their feet turned inwards.

Within minutes the audience was laughing, whistling, shouting and fighting, and the dancers could barely hear the orchestra. It became the most famous riot in the history of music, and a year later the same score was cheered in concert. Now head east through the quiet side streets, towards the giant glass roof you can see catching the sky above the trees.
5. Grand Palais: The Glass Nave of 1900

3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris, France

Stand back on the Avenue Winston Churchill and take in the façade: a long row of stone columns, mosaics glinting under the porch, and above it all a curved roof of glass and green steel. On the corners, bronze chariots seem ready to leap off the roof into the sky.

The Grand Palais was built in just three years for the World's Fair of 1900, the exhibition that was supposed to sum up a century of progress. Outside, it is a classical palace of stone, to reassure. Inside, it is pure engineering, a single nave of iron and glass so big that it held horse shows, car shows and even aviation shows. When it opened, it was said to have the largest glass roof in Europe.

Its history was not only glamour. During the First World War the nave became a military hospital, its galleries full of beds for the wounded. In the Second World War the occupiers used it as a depot for trucks, and in August 1944, during the battle for the liberation of Paris, it caught fire. Then in 1993 a piece of the glass roof fell into the nave, and the great hall was closed for more than a decade of repairs.

Under the glass, the cars came back, then the art fairs, the fashion shows, even a full-size ice rink. Fashion houses have built entire forests and beaches inside for a single show. And in the summer of 2024, after a long restoration, the nave hosted the Olympic fencing, the swords clashing beneath the same glass that had sheltered the horses of 1900.

The bronze chariots on the roof are by Georges Récipon, and they show Immortality outrunning Time on one side, and Harmony triumphing over Discord on the other. Hard to think of a better motto for a building that keeps reinventing itself. Now cross the avenue to the smaller, golden-gated palace facing it.
6. Petit Palais: The City's Golden Gift

Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris, France

In front of you, a monumental gate of gilded wrought iron, framed by a dome and a great arch of stone. Behind the gate, a staircase, a gallery of columns, ceilings swirling with painted clouds. Its big neighbour across the road was built to impress the crowds. This one was built to seduce them.

The Petit Palais was designed by Charles Girault for the 1900 World's Fair, where it housed a great exhibition of French art. The city of Paris kept it afterwards and turned it into its own Museum of Fine Arts. Girault was so successful that the Belgian king, Leopold the Second, later asked him to build monuments in Brussels. Look at the floors as you walk in: mosaics in every colour, laid by Italian craftsmen, curling under your feet like a carpet of stone.

Inside, the collections run from Greek vases to the paintings of the Belle Époque, with a whole roomful of works by Gustave Courbet, the painter who scandalised the nineteenth century by painting ordinary people as large as kings. His sleepy, sprawling young women on the banks of the Seine shocked the critics of 1857, and they are here.

But the real secret is in the middle of the building. Follow the galleries and you reach a semicircular garden courtyard, ringed by a colonnade with mosaic floors, with palm trees, a pool and a little café. On a summer afternoon it feels like a villa on the Riviera, a few steps from one of the busiest roundabouts in the city.

And the city has always kept its permanent collections free to enter, so this is one of the great bargains of Paris: a palace, a garden and Courbet, for nothing. Look up as you leave at the sculpted pediment over the entrance, where Paris is shown protecting the arts, an idea the building takes literally. Now walk down towards the river, to the most extravagant bridge in the city.
7. Pont Alexandre III: A Tsar's Bridge

Pont Alexandre III, 75008 Paris, France

Walk out onto the bridge and you are surrounded by gold: winged horses on tall stone pillars at each corner, cherubs, sea monsters, garlands, lamp posts dripping with bronze. Across the water the golden dome of the Invalides glows. This is the most theatrical bridge in Paris, and it was built for a diplomatic love affair.

In the 1890s France and Russia, a republic and an absolute monarchy, signed an alliance against the growing power of Germany. To seal the friendship, the young Tsar Nicholas the Second came to Paris in October 1896 and laid the first stone of this bridge himself, naming it after his father, Alexander the Third, who had made the alliance. A year later, the French president laid the first stone of a bridge in Saint Petersburg in return.

Now look over the side. The bridge crosses the Seine in a single steel arch, more than a hundred metres long, and it is astonishingly low. That was a strict condition: it must not block the view between the Champs-Élysées and the dome of the Invalides. The engineers had to make the arch so flat that it was one of the boldest of its time.

At the centre of the arch, on each side, look for two nymphs in hammered copper. Upstream, the nymphs of the Seine with the arms of Paris. Downstream, the nymphs of the Neva, the river of Saint Petersburg, with the arms of Russia. Two rivers, holding hands across Europe.

The alliance itself ended in blood: France and Russia went to war together in 1914, and three years later the son who laid this stone was overthrown, and in 1918 he was killed with his family. The bridge outlived the empire it celebrated. In 2024 the Olympic triathletes dived into the Seine just beside it. Now follow the riverside promenade upstream, the Cours la Reine, towards the great open square ahead.
8. Place de la Concorde: The Guillotine and the Obelisk

Place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris, France

Stand by the fountains and turn around slowly. The Champs-Élysées rising to the arch, the gardens of the Tuileries, the columns of the National Assembly across the river, the colonnades of two twin palaces. And in the middle, a pink granite needle covered in hieroglyphs, with a golden cap.

The square was laid out from the 1750s by Ange-Jacques Gabriel to frame a statue of King Louis the Fifteenth on horseback. It was called Place Louis the Fifteenth. The eight statues around the edge represent great French cities. When Strasbourg was lost to Germany in 1871, its statue was draped in black crepe, and the crepe stayed until 1918.

In 1792 the king's statue was torn down, the square renamed Place de la Révolution, and the guillotine set up here. On the twenty-first of January 1793 Louis the Sixteenth was executed in front of a silent crowd. Marie-Antoinette followed in October, then Danton, and in July 1794 Robespierre himself, the man who had sent so many others. Well over a thousand people died on this square. In 1795, as if to wash it clean, it was renamed Concorde, harmony.

The obelisk is over three thousand years old. It stood at the entrance of the temple of Luxor, and the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, offered it to France. Bringing it here took years and a specially built ship. On the twenty-fifth of October 1836, it was raised in front of an enormous crowd. Look at the pedestal: diagrams in gold show the machinery used to lift it. The golden cap was only added in 1998.

In return, France sent Egypt a clock, which still stands in the citadel of Cairo... and which, the story goes, never worked properly. An obelisk for a broken clock: not the best deal in history. Now walk to the corner of the Tuileries garden by the river, to the low building with the long windows.
9. Tuileries and the Orangerie: Monet's Water Lilies

Jardin des Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, 75001 Paris, France

Enter the Tuileries by the gate on the Concorde side and look along the gravel alleys: clipped chestnut trees, statues, green metal chairs around an octagonal pool. On your right, overlooking the river, a long, low, pale building with tall windows. Inside it, two oval rooms painted with water.

The name Tuileries comes from the tile works, the tuileries, that stood here before Catherine de Medici began a palace on the spot in 1564. Later, André Le Nôtre redesigned the garden in the 1660s, and the story goes that the writer Charles Perrault, the author of Puss in Boots, persuaded the king's minister to keep it open to the public. Parisians have strolled here ever since.

The palace itself is gone. In May 1871, during the last days of the Paris Commune, it was set on fire, and the ruins were cleared away in the 1880s. That is why the garden seems to open onto nothing at its eastern end, straight towards the Louvre: you are looking at the space where the palace stood.

The building on the riverbank, the Orangerie, was built in 1852 to keep the garden's orange trees warm in winter. On the day after the armistice of November 1918, the old Claude Monet offered France a gift to celebrate the peace: a series of enormous paintings of his water lily pond at Giverny. He spent the rest of his life on them. They were installed here in two oval rooms lit from above, and opened to the public in 1927, a few months after his death.

Monet wanted visitors to stand in the middle and be surrounded by water, light and willows, with no corner for the eye to rest on. He called it a refuge of peaceful meditation. Now come out of the garden by the Concorde gate and cross the square to the colonnaded palace on its northern side.
10. Hôtel de la Marine: The Royal Treasure House

2 Place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris, France

Look up at the long colonnade on the north side of the square. Behind those columns there is a loggia, a covered balcony, and from it you can see the whole of the Concorde, the river and the Eiffel Tower. For more than two hundred years only kings' servants and admirals stood up there.

The building was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the architect of the square, and it was the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne: the storehouse of the royal furniture, tapestries, weapons... and the crown jewels. The public was even allowed in, on certain days, to admire the royal treasures. In a way it was one of the first museums in Paris. The intendant who ran it lived here in style, and his apartments, with their silk walls and gilded panelling, have been brought back to life.

In September 1792, in the chaos after the fall of the monarchy, a gang of thieves climbed up the façade over several nights and walked off with most of the crown jewels. Some were found, like the great Regent diamond. Others vanished. A huge blue diamond, the French Blue, reappeared years later in London, re-cut... and is known today as the Hope Diamond.

From 1789 the building housed the Ministry of the Navy, for more than two centuries. It was here, in April 1848, that the decree abolishing slavery in the French colonies was signed, the work of Victor Schœlcher, who campaigned for it all his life. And from these windows, during the Revolution, officials could watch the guillotine working in the square below.

When the Navy left in 2015, the building was restored, and it opened to the public in 2021: gilded salons, the apartments of the eighteenth-century intendant, and that loggia with its view. Now walk up the Rue Royale, the straight street beside it, towards the giant temple at the end.
11. Rue Royale and La Madeleine

Place de la Madeleine, 75008 Paris, France

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.