Place de Wagram

The Place de Wagram features a central bronze statue of a soldier mid-stride, surrounded by the quiet traffic of the seventeenth arrondissement. It marks the site of the Battle of Wagram, a hard-fought Napoleonic victory in eighteen oh nine against the Austrian Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte famously stood on the battlefield while his artillery commander, General Lauriston, concentrated a massive battery of over one hundred cannons to break the Austrian line. That specific concentration of firepower redefined how nineteenth-century armies fought their wars.