Place Vendôme’s ordered façades frame a square whose political symbols have repeatedly changed. Planned for Louis XIV, renamed Place des Piques during the Revolution and centered on a Napoleonic column, it remains a public square in Paris’s 1st arrondissement.
Quick facts
Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the square’s plan and uniform façades after the original Place des Conquêtes project was abandoned; the 1699 scheme became a private development.
In 1793 Place Vendôme was renamed Place des Piques, and on 24 January a public funeral ceremony honored deputy Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau there.
The Vendôme Column was completed in 1810, pulled down during the Paris Commune in 1871, and reconstructed by 1875.
Get directions to Place Vendôme. Confirm the visitor entrance and current access with the venue before travelling.
Audio guide
Listen to this place’s guide.
Guide
At the centre of Place Vendôme, a bronze spiral tells one story; the façades around it tell another. The column celebrates Napoleon’s army, while the square’s measured architecture began as a royal project. Both have been altered by revolution and restored by later governments. The square is in Paris’s 1st arrondissement; the catalog’s Paris grouping accurately describes it.
Continue exploring
Discover the full story
Keep reading with a travel pass and explore every full guide and tour.
UpgradeMore places in Paris
Jardin des Tuileries
The Jardin des Tuileries links the Louvre with Place de la Concorde through formal beds, shaded groves, basins, sculpture and a long westward view. Created for a palace that was burned in 1871 and never rebuilt, the garden survives as a public landscape shaped by royal design, revolution and everyda
Palais Garnier
Palais Garnier’s grand staircase and richly decorated public rooms make the opera house a spectacle before performance begins. Designed by Charles Garnier and inaugurated in 1875, it joined stage machinery with the ceremonial social life of nineteenth-century Paris.
Place de la Concorde
Place de la Concorde occupies a ceremonial crossroads between the Tuileries, Champs-Élysées and Seine. Its obelisk, twin fountains and eight city statues frame a public square reshaped from royal monument to Revolutionary stage and later civic junction.
Musée de l’Orangerie
Musée de l’Orangerie was built as a winter shelter for the Tuileries’ orange trees, then became home to Monet’s Water Lilies and the Walter-Guillaume collection. Its daylight-filled oval rooms turn painting into an environment, while lower galleries connect it to modern art in Paris.
Musée d’Orsay
Musée d’Orsay occupies Victor Laloux’s former Gare d’Orsay, built for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Its glass roof, clocks and great nave preserve the experience of a railway terminus, now framing collections of art and design from 1848 to 1914.
Louvre Museum
Explore the Louvre as a fortress transformed into a royal palace and public museum. Medieval remains, the Grande Galerie, and I. M. Pei’s pyramid reveal how each era reshaped this Paris landmark.