place Vendôme

Place Vendome in the 1st arrondissement has been the most elegant square creation of Baroque Paris since its laying out from 1699. Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the octagonal plan and uniform town palaces with pilaster facades that Louis XIV had built to display his court. At its centre stood an equestrian statue of the Sun King, melted down during the Revolution. Napoleon replaced it in 1810 with the 44-metre Colonne Vendome, cast from the bronze of captured Austrian and Russian cannon and modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome. Today the square houses the Ministry of Justice, the Hotel Ritz where Hemingway caroused and Coco Chanel lived for decades, and the world's leading jewellers: Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef, Chaumet. Frederic Chopin died at number 12 in 1849.