Pierre-Adrien Pâris

He traveled in Italy, including visits to the Roman ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Paestum, of which he made many drawings and casts.

He was charged by the National Assembly with redeveloping the courtyard into an amphitheatre with graded seating, and installing the same set of gradients in the Tuileries, divided into two, facing a podium.

His close friendship with the king, and his attachments with the most radical Enlightenment thinkers, caused him a serious moral crisis during the French Revolution, during which he declined any work offered him,[5] and retired near Le Havre, at Colmoulins.

In 1806 he returned to Italy and the following year, he was acting director of the French Academy in Rome; he directed excavations at the Colosseum.

Following the Bourbon restoration he returned to France in 1817 and realised his plans for a monument to Louis XVI on the Place de la Concorde, which is the elliptical device with a declaration of the "Droits du Homme", which he had invented for the National Assembly at the Menus Plaisirs, and that Chateaubriand had incorporated without citing the author.