Elephant of the Bastille

At 24 m (78 ft) in height, the model itself became a recognisable construction and was immortalised by Victor Hugo in his novel Les Misérables (1862) in which it is used as a shelter by the street urchin Gavroche.

He wanted to create a significant triumphal structure to demonstrate his military prowess and began the process of designing a 24 m (78 ft)[5] bronze elephant.

In the Imperial decree of 24 February 1811, he specified that the colossal bronze elephant be cast from the guns captured at the Battle of Friedland.

Alavoine, realising the need to show how the finished work would look, recruited Pierre-Charles Bridan to create a full-size model using plaster over a wooden frame.

Nearby residents began to complain that rats were inhabiting the elephant and searching for food in their homes; and from the late 1820s, petitioned for demolition.

There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it.