Place Vendôme

Place Vendôme is a perfect octagon of gray stone architecture, centered on a towering bronze column topped by a statue of Napoleon. King Louis the Fourteenth commissioned this square to showcase his grandeur, but it originally featured a different statue of him, which revolutionaries pulled down and smashed during the French Revolution. Napoleon eventually used the melted bronze from captured enemy cannons to cast the spiraling bas-reliefs that wrap around the current column today. It remains an island of rigid, uniform royal symmetry.