Louis XIV Victory Monument
Together with the two triumphal arches, the Porte Saint-Denis (1672) and Porte Saint-Martin (1674), and echoing the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles (decorated 1680–1684), the Victory Monument marked the high point of public exaltation of Louis XIV's military glory and European dominance in the urban landscape of Paris, before the setbacks and exhaustion that would come later in his reign with the Nine Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession.
[2] Prominent courtier François III d'Aubusson, Duke of La Feuillade planned the Place des Victoires as both a property development project and a celebration of Louis XIV following the Treaties of Nijmegen, which in the late 1670s had put an end to his previous career as a military leader.
[1] While not much is known about the details of the planning process, it is probable that Louis XIV's entourage, if not the king itself, was involved in the definition of its program of monarchical glorification, so that the monument eventually appears as a hybrid of private initiative and official project.
[3]: 10 The iconographic program echoes that of the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles and includes several of the same episodes, even though the depictions on the Victory Monument make less systematic use of allegory.
He offered it to the king in 1683 and it was placed in the Versailles Orangerie in 1684, where it remains to this day after having been altered during the Revolution and subsequently restored by Jean-François Lorta [fr] in 1815–1816.
[4] That statue served as an inspiration for that on the Victory Monument, even though the king's attire differs: ancient Roman in Versailles, versus coronation garb in Paris.
[1] At the center of the square, the monument itself stood and consisted of three sections: a base with larger-than-life bronze statues of prisoners and military spoils; a square pedestal with four bronze reliefs commemorating specific events; and a colossal gilded statue of Louis XIV in coronation robe, trampling on Cerberus, with an allegory of Victory standing behind him on a globe and holding a laurel wreath above his head.
[6] Between them were scattered broken weapons and military emblems, including an imperial ensign that anachronistically combines the SPQR motto of Ancient Rome with the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire.
Desjardins was also commissioned to produce four circular medallions (tondi) in bronze for the base of the monument, but only two were eventually installed there while the other two were replaced by inscriptions: The Destruction of Heresy, referring to the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 that revoked the Edict of Nantes of 1598 and led to the expulsion of France's Protestants or Huguenots; and The Abolition of Duels, referring to Louis's various initiatives starting in 1662 and especially his ordinance of 1679 by which he attempted to put an end to duels as a form of private justice in the French nobility.
Ambassadors from Muscovy in 1668 (Pyotr Potemkin), 1681 (Pyotr Potemkin and Stefan Volkov) and 1685 (Semyon Erofeevich Almazov and Semyon Ippolitov), of Guinea in 1670 (Matteo Lopes, on behalf of the Kingdom of Allada), of Morocco and Fez in 1682 (Mohammad Temim, on behalf of Ismail Ibn Sharif), of Siam in 1684 (led by Bénigne Vachet [fr], preceding the grander embassy of 1686), and of Algiers in 1683 (Djiafar-Aga-Effendi, during the French-Algerian War).
[8] At the same time, the entire project was criticized for the unrestrained adulation of Louis XIV and humiliation of fellow European nations that were inherent in the program.
[1] François-Timoléon de Choisy similarly mocked the elevation of Louis to godlike status as a hubristic echo of pagan Roman emperor-worship.
[9] Anonymous poems, pamphlets and caricatures were circulated both in France and abroad, lambasting the monument and not least the "immortal man" dedicace, which, by denying the monarch's mortality, put into question his responsibility before God.
La Feuillade's son donated their twelve precious marble columns to the Theatines congregation of Paris, then established on what is now Quai Voltaire, for their unfinished church.
This monument bears no visual relationship with Desjardin's original, even though its program overlaps especially as the 1672 crossing of the Rhine is represented on one of Bosio's two bronze reliefs on the pedestal.
In 1993, in the context of the museum's expansion known as the Grand Louvre project, they were transferred, together with other preserved parts of the monument, to their current location in the newly created Cour Puget, where they dominate the courtyard's lower section.
