Gustave Courbet and the Fall of the Vendôme Column

“The city of Paris,” the observant author Balzac said, “has a great mast, made entirely of bronze, with sculpted victories and Napoleon as its lookout.” He was right; the Vendôme Column at 44m anchors the Place Vendôme, an 18th-century architectural gem ringed by some of the 21st century’s most opulent jewelers and couturiers.  

The luxury boutiques of Dior, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Schiaparelli, and Chanel have addresses here. For over 20 years, Coco Chanel made her home at the Ritz Hotel at 15 Place Vendôme. The jewelers Boucheron, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, and Mikimoto pearls make the place a magnet for the world’s elite. It’s no coincidence that the Place Vendôme was the setting for the theft of the Black Pearl in the Netflix series Lupin, where the gentleman thief is filmed atop the Vendôme Column engineering a major jewel heist.

The oldest shop on Place Vendôme is the shirt maker Charvet. Now at number 28, the store has been on the Place Vendôme since 1877. The couture house Chéruit, once at #21 from 1906-1935, has returned to a new century. 

FIAC, the international company art fair now known as Paris+ par Art Basel, uses the Place Vendôme to host monumental and unusual works of art. The square has staged Alexander Calder’s Flying Dragon, a simple origami seemingly folded from a colossal piece of metal. The installation artist Yayoi Kusama displayed her Life of the Pumpkin Recites, All about the Biggest Love for the People there in 2019. 

In November 2023, the Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s aluminum Wave was part of Paris+ by Art Basel. (The art fair is now fully-immersed in preparation for the Paris edition of their program scheduled for autumn 2024.)  

In the spring of 2023, the Place Vendôme featured the installation of Bernar Venet’s Parabole de l’Histoire. On either side of the Vendôme Column, large metal beams were strewn onto cobblestones. Venet’s installation is a nod to the collapse of the Vendôme Column; because although the Place Vendôme seems to embody the untouchable chic Paris of fairy tales, the square was once the focus of furious revolt. 

King Louis XIV ordered that the Place Vendôme be built in the very heart of the city; the central setting would further serve to embody the range of the Sun King’s absolute power. Construction began in 1698 following the plans of the accomplished architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart. It was an aesthetically pleasing octagon of 213m by 224m framing an equestrian statue.

Once metaphorically called “a giant bronze exclamation point,” by President Adolphe Thiers, the present Vendôme Column was built for Napoleon, between 1806 and 1810 as a glorification of his victories. In those pre-Eiffel Tower days, the 44m Vendôme Column along with the Arc de Triomphe loomed on the Paris horizon as symbols of Napoleonic power.

Modeled on Trajan’s Column in Rome, the Vendôme Column was fitted with more than 400 bronze bas-relief plaques spiraling up to a statue of Napoleon in the guise of a Roman Emperor. The tower was built from the melted cannons seized from the Russian and Austrian armies. In 1833 the statue was replaced with one of Napoleon in his military gear. When his nephew Louis Napoleon, aka Napoleon III, took power, he replaced the statue with one of his uncle in a toga and a crown of laurels.

Gustave Courbet was a painter not content to rest on his artistic laurels – he had political ambitions. Through controversy and scandal, he fashioned for himself a public persona making him one of the most widely talked about artists of his day.  Courbet’s works, The Artists Studio, The Stone Breakers and Burial at Ornans were fantastically popular. Today perhaps he is best known as the painter of the controversial Origin of the World. However, Courbet’s calculated efforts to be an impertinent enfant terrible almost erased his reputation as a hero of French culture.  

In the years leading up to the 1870-71 Siege of Paris and the subsequent Paris Commune, Courbet’s paintings became more socialist, forcing bourgeois audiences to face the uncomfortable realities of France’s poor. In 1870 the State nominated Courbet for the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Courbet refused the medal, declaring his independence from any form of government. In a few months his reputation would be in tatters.  

At the onset of the war between France and the kingdom of Prussia in 1870, most painters fled Paris. But Courbet remained behind. He’d been made the head of the Arts Commission and took responsibility for the safety of the Louvre as the Prussian armies advanced closer to the capital. Under his direction, the museum’s masterpieces were removed to a secure coastal location. Other art was hidden in the museum’s basement; its walls fortified with sand bags.  

With the art treasures of Paris cached away, questions regarding the fate of the Vendôme Column arose. The fate of this symbol of imperial power had already been discussed. Courbet himself claimed, the Column was, “a monument devoid of any artistic value, tending by its character to perpetuate the ideas of wars and conquests.” Courbet’s agenda resembled 21st-century cancel-culture and his proclamations made him immensely popular with those opposed the current regime. In September of 1870, Courbet petitioned the French government: “Citizen Courbet,” as he now signed his letters, “expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorize him to disassemble this column.”  

However, when enthusiasm grew for tearing down the Column, Courbet quickly backpedaled, publishing a letter in the press insisting that he was not proposing the Column’s destruction, just its removal to a less conspicuous location, perhaps closer to Napoleon’s Tomb.  

The Franco-Prussian conflict was immediately followed by the Proclamation of the Commune of Paris. The Commune was a furious revolutionary government which Courbet joined with great enthusiasm. The question of the demolition of the Column resurfaced as a serious issue. The Commune decreed on April 12, 1871, as part of its scorched earth agenda, that the column in the Place Vendôme be demolished. 

Courbet was not yet an elected member of the Commune, but it was Courbet who had planted the idea in the minds of the Communards. Courbet’s detractors, who thought him a treasonous madman, threatened the artist with drowning and with daggers should anything happen to the Column. In the public eye Courbet became forever linked with the destruction that was to come.    

The destruction wasn’t spontaneous by any means. On April 18, 1871, the diarist Edmond de Goncourt wrote that the scaffolding had already been put up for the demolition of the Column. Another witness said that the pavement of the Place Vendôme had been prepared for the concussion with a bed of sand, branches and manure. 

On May 16, 1871 the Column was toppled by the Communards who used a system of cables, pulleys, and winches. Like the felling of a tree, the shaft had been axed with beveled cuts. The ropes attached to the tower were winched tightly and the Column crashed to the ground amid the cheers of thousands.  

On May 21 — six days after the Column fell — government troops entered Paris and started a bloody, week-long siege, known as the Semaine Sanglante. The Commune was suppressed, and thousands of Communards were rounded up and shot. Courbet, arrested at the house of a friend, was lucky to have escaped the firing squad.  

Ladies on the street bashed him with their umbrellas. Before his trial, Courbet found that he was much despised. Cartoonists lampooned Courbet as the sole perpetrator of the Column’s destruction. It was if he had pulled the ropes to topple the tower himself. Courbet and the Column were inextricably linked.  

On August 14, 1871 Courbet was prosecuted for “complicity in the destruction of monuments.” Despite his weak defense that he only wanted the Column relocated, Courbet was convicted of being a “toppler.” He seemed to have got off rather lightly; he was fined only 500 francs, and sentenced to six months imprisonment. Although he said he slept on the vermin-infested floor, part of his punishment was to make felt slippers. His ill health dictated his release on December 30 to a medical clinic, where he spent the remainder of his sentence.  

After Courbet’s sentence was completed, the newly-restored bourgeois government continued his persecution. Banned from Salons, it seemed his career in France was at an end. In 1873, the National Assembly voted to rebuild the Vendôme Column – with Courbet paying for its construction. The French government wanted him to cough up at least 323,000 francs. To avoid arrest, Courbet shrewdly moved to Switzerland with most of his paintings. While not drowning his sorrows in quarts of cheap Swiss wine, Courbet continued to paint in an attempt to raise the funds. Eventually he signed an agreement to contribute 10,000 francs a year for 32 years.   

The Column, completed without his help, was finished on December 28, 1875. In 1877 while in exile, Courbet died from liver failure. One witness to the Column’s destruction on May 16, 1871 claimed the tower’s toppling caused no great sound when it fell, but it held great repercussions for Courbet.