Place de la Concorde

Designed in 1763 by architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel to honour King Louis XV, the square originally held an equestrian statue of the king before the Revolution swept that away and replaced it with a guillotine. Renamed Place de la Révolution, it became the primary site of public executions during the Terror, including Louis XVI in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette that October, along with roughly 1,100 others over a two-year span. The current, deliberately conciliatory name — Place de la Concorde, meaning 'harmony' — was adopted in 1795 as the Revolution's violence subsided.

At the square's centre stands the Luxor Obelisk, a genuine 3,300-year-old red granite Egyptian monument gifted to France by Egypt's ruler Muhammad Ali in the 1830s in exchange for a mechanical clock (still, notoriously, non-functional, installed at Cairo's Citadel). Moving the 227-tonne, 22.5-metre obelisk from Luxor to Paris took nearly two years and was a major feat of 19th-century engineering; it was finally raised in front of a huge crowd, including King Louis-Philippe, on 25 October 1836.