page_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe
section_title: Monuments and architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe / Monuments and architecture
context_page_description: Paris during the reign of King Louis-Philippe was the city described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Its population increased from 785,000 in 1831 to 1,053,000 in 1848, as the city grew to the north and west, while the poorest neighborhoods in the center became even more crowded.
  The heart of the city, around the Île de la Cité, was a maze of narrow, winding streets and crumbling buildings from earlier centuries; it was picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy and dangerous. A cholera outbreak in 1832 killed 20,000 people. Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine for fifteen years under Louis-Philippe, made tentative efforts to improve the center of the city: he paved the quays of the Seine with stone paths and planted trees along the river. He built a new street to connect the Marais district with the markets and began construction of Les Halles, the famous central food market of Paris, finished by Napoleon III.
  Louis-Philippe lived in his old family residence, the Palais-Royal, until 1832, before moving to the Tuileries Palace.
context_section_description: One of the great architectural projects of the reign of Louis-Philippe was the remaking of the Place de la Concorde.  An equestrian statue of King Louis XV had originally been the centerpiece of the Place; during the Revolution the statue was pulled down and replaced by a statue of the Goddess of Liberty  and the place was the site of the execution of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Louis Philippe wanted to erase all the revolutionary associations of site.  He selected Jacques Ignace Hittorff to design a new master plan, which was carried out in stages between 1833 and 1846.   First the moat of the Tuileries Palace was filled in. Then Hittorff designed the two Fontaines de la Concorde, one commemorating river navigation and commerce, the other maritime navigation and commerce.   On 25 October 1836, a new centerpiece was put in place: a stone obelisk from Luxor that weighed 250 tons and was brought to France on a specially-built ship from Egypt. It was slowly hoisted into place in the presence of Louis-Philippe and a huge crowd.  At each angle of the square's extended octagon Hittorff placed a statue representing a French city: Bordeaux, Brest, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Rouen and Strasbourg.  The face of the statue of Strasbourg, by the sculptor James Pradier, was said to be modeled after Juliette Drouet, the companion of Victor Hugo.
  In the same year, the Arc de Triomphe, begun in 1804 by Napoleon, was finally completed and dedicated. Many old soldiers from the Napoleonic armies were in the crowd, and they called out "Vive l'Empereur", but Louis-Philippe was unperturbed. The ashes of Napoleon were returned to Paris from Saint Helena in 1840, and were placed with great ceremony in a tomb designed by Louis Visconti beneath the church of Les Invalides.
  Another Paris landmark, the July Column on the Place de la Bastille, was inaugurated on 28 July 1840, on the anniversary of the July Revolution, and dedicated to those killed during the uprising.
  Several older monuments were put to new purposes: the Élysée Palace was purchased by the French state and became an official residence; and under later governments, it has served as the residence of the Presidents of the French Republic. The Basilica of Sainte-Geneviève, originally built as a church beginning in the 1750s, then made into a mausoleum for great Frenchmen during the French Revolution, then a church again during the Bourbon Restoration, once again became the Panthéon, dedicated to the glory of great Frenchmen.
caption: A huge crowd watched as the Luxor Obelisk was hoisted into place on the Place de la Concorde on 25 October 1836.
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