Charles Rochet offered to cover the cost of the 15-ton group's erection in order to facilitate its location on a suitable Parisian site.

On Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's recommendation and after some controversy, the Paris municipal council accepted the offer in January 1879 and endorsed the Parvis Notre-Dame as a "provisional" location.

[1] Unlike many bronze statues in Paris and elsewhere, the monument was spared by the German occupiers during World War II because of Charlemagne's salience in their own nationalistic ideology.

Roland carries his trademark olifant, a double-headed axe (technically a labrys but known in 19th-century France as a francisca and mythically associated with the ancient Franks), and his legendary Durendal, modeled on the sword of the same name kept at the Royal Armoury of Madrid.

[4] The composition abounds in political and nationalistic symbolism, reflecting the Rochet brothers' intent to claim Charlemagne's legacy for France and Napoleon III in alignment with the ideology of the Second French Empire.

Simultaneously, the presence of Roland and Oliver anchor Charlemagne in French territory and tradition against the competing claims of Belgium, then a young nation in search of iconic heroes of its own, and especially of Germany, which was starting its unification process at the same time as the statue was being designed.