Place Vendôme

Its regular architecture by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the corners give the rectangular Place Vendôme the aspect of an octagon.

[3] The site of the square was formerly the hôtel of César de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, the illegitimate son of Henry IV and his mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées.

The plan did not materialize, and Louis XIV's Minister of Finance, Louvois, purchased the piece of ground, with the object of building a square, modelled on the successful Place des Vosges of the previous century.

When the state finances ran low, the financier John Law took on the project, built himself a residence behind one of the façades, and the square was complete by 1720, just as his paper-money Mississippi bubble burst.

The buyers were members of the exiled Condé branch of the House of Bourbon who later returned to the country to reclaim their land in the town of Vendôme itself.

When France established diplomatic relations with the short-lived Republic of Texas, the Texan legation was housed at Hôtel Bataille de Francès in 1 Place Vendôme.

[5] It was modelled after Trajan's Column, to celebrate the victory of Austerlitz; its veneer of 425 spiralling bas-relief bronze plates was made out of cannon taken from the combined armies of Europe, according to his propaganda.

[8] Karl Marx predicted the collapse of the Vendôme Column in his 1852 political pamphlet Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte.

After employing a series of ropes and quarry workers, observers saw that the statue... ...fell over on the heap of sand prepared for it, with a mighty crash.

An immense dust and smoke from the stones and crumpled clay rose up and an instant after a crowd of men, National Guards, Communards, and a sight-seeing Englishman flew upon it, and commenced to get bits of it as remembrance, but the excitement was so intense that people moved about as in a dream.

[14] After the suppression of the Paris Commune by Adolphe Thiers, the decision was made to rebuild the column with the statue of Napoléon restored at its apex.

[citation needed] At the centre of the square's long sides, Hardouin-Mansart's range of Corinthian pilasters breaks forward under a pediment, to create palace-like fronts.

In the 1920s, American architect, Alonzo C. Webb worked making advertisements and designs in English for some of the fashionable houses along the Place Vendôme.