Vendôme Column
방돔 원주
A 44-metre commemorative column in the middle of the Place Vendôme in Paris. Napoleon I had it built in 1806–1810 to celebrate the battle of Austerlitz, faced with bronze from guns captured from the enemy and crowned with his own statue. On 12 April 1871 the Paris Commune decreed its demolition as a symbol of militarism and hatred between nations, and pulled it down on 16 May. It was rebuilt in 1873–1875.
In depth
The column was modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome. Its stone shaft was wrapped in a spiral of 425 relief plates cast from the bronze of Russian and Austrian guns captured at Austerlitz and in the campaign of 1805, and it was dedicated on 15 August 1810 as the "Column of the Grand Army". The statue on top changed with the regime: the restored monarchy took down Napoleon's statue in 1814 and raised the white flag, the July Monarchy put up a Napoleon in the dress of the "little corporal" in Louis-Philippe's presence in 1833, and Napoleon III replaced it in 1863 with a statue in the garb of a Roman emperor.
At the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852 Marx wrote that if the imperial mantle finally fell on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon would come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column. In September 1870 the painter Gustave Courbet petitioned the Government of National Defence to dismantle the column, without result. On 12 April 1871 the Commune decreed its demolition, declaring the imperial column "a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult of the victors to the vanquished". In his 1891 introduction Engels wrote that the Commune saw it as a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national hatred. Planned for 5 May, the anniversary of Napoleon's death, the demolition was put off by the military situation and carried out at half past five on the afternoon of 16 May to the cheers of the Parisians present.
After the Commune was crushed, in May 1873 President MacMahon's government decided to charge Courbet the cost of rebuilding, 323,091.68 francs. Courbet was allowed to pay 10,000 francs a year over 33 years but died in exile on 31 December 1877, the day before the first instalment fell due. The column was rebuilt in 1873–1875 and is now a historic monument. The "affair of the Place Vendôme" in the text of The Civil War in France refers not to the column but to the clash of 22 March 1871 between the National Guard and the "Friends of Order" demonstrators who marched on the Guard's headquarters in the square.