Inauguration of the Vendôme column

Decided upon after Austerlitz, the column of the Grande Armée was openly copied from Trajan's in Rome: the same height of some forty-four metres, the same shaft wrapped in a sculpted helix, the same statue at the top. Work began in 1806 on the Place Vendôme, from which the equestrian statue of Louis XIV had been torn down in 1792.

The bronze came from guns taken from the enemy during the campaign of 1805; tradition counts twelve hundred of them. The story of that campaign unwinds in a spiral over nearly three hundred metres of bas-reliefs, after drawings by Bergeret executed by some thirty sculptors.

The inauguration took place on Saint Napoleon's day, the Emperor's feast and the Assumption. A statue by Chaudet crowned the column: Napoleon as Caesar, draped in the antique manner, laurel-crowned, holding the globe and a victory.

With the Carrousel arch, finished in 1808, and the Arc de Triomphe still in its foundations, the column composed an imperial Paris made of Roman references. The regime cast itself as heir to the ancient Empire rather than to the kingdom of France.

In April 1814 the statue was taken down and melted; a white flag, then a fleur-de-lys, replaced it. Louis-Philippe had a Napoleon in greatcoat and bicorn — the 'little corporal' — put back in 1833, which Napoleon III replaced in 1863 with a copy of Chaudet's Caesar.

On 16 May 1871 the Commune had the whole column pulled down as a 'monument of barbarism'; the painter Courbet, who had backed the measure, would be prosecuted to pay for its rebuilding. Re-erected as early as 1873, the column is today the oldest of the great imperial monuments of Paris — and the one most often overthrown.