A bronze victory column in central Paris

A gilded spirit rose over the dead of 1830

The July Column, known in French as the colonne de Juillet, now stands as a gilded victory monument at the center of the Place de la Bastille.

In July 1830, Parisians rose against King Charles X, forcing him from the throne in three days of fighting remembered as the July Revolution. The new king, Louis-Philippe I, owed his crown to that uprising. In 1831, he laid the first stone of a monument to the men who died winning it for him.

The architect was Jean-Antoine Alavoine, who never saw it finished. Alavoine died in 1834, and his assistant, Joseph-Louis Duc, took over the entire project. Duc built the column that stands today, including its bronze drums and its spiral stair of 240 steps.

The base was not new. It had been built decades earlier, under Napoleon, to hold up a planned fountain shaped like a giant elephant. The elephant was never cast in bronze. Only a plaster model stood here for years, until it was torn down in 1846. Its stone foundation became the column's pedestal instead.

The column was dedicated on 28 July 1840, ten years to the day after the fighting ended. Hector Berlioz conducted a funeral symphony written for the occasion, marching backward in a National Guard uniform ahead of the procession. Inside the crypt, workers laid the bodies of 504 people killed in 1830.

Eight years later, Paris rose again. King Louis-Philippe fled the Tuileries Palace, and crowds dragged his throne here and burned it at the foot of the column. Close to 200 more dead from that uprising joined the crypt, bringing the toll beneath the monument to over 700.

Atop it all stands a gilded figure in mid-stride, one foot barely touching a globe. Sculptor Auguste Dumont cast it in 1836: a winged spirit holding a torch in one hand and a broken chain in the other. Paris calls it the Génie de la Liberté, the Spirit of Freedom.

Communards floated burning oil beneath the column

In May 1871, Paris fell into civil war between the national government and the revolutionary Paris Commune. Communards tried to bring the column down, the way they had already toppled the column in Place Vendôme. They floated a barge loaded with petroleum up the Canal Saint-Martin, which runs underground directly beneath the monument, and lit it under the vault that holds the column up. The column survived.

Grime of a century was cleaned from the bronze

The column got a full restoration for the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, cleaning more than a century of grime from its bronze drums and gilding.

Visitors began descending into the crypt below

The monument opened to visitors after another restoration. People can now climb inside and see the Canal Saint-Martin passing beneath their feet, and step down into the crypt where the dead of 1830 and 1848 still lie. Around the same time, the whole Place de la Bastille was redesigned. The old traffic circle gave way to a pedestrian peninsula planted with more than fifty new trees, with a staircase leading down toward the Arsenal marina.

One story about the crypt has nothing to do with revolutionaries at all. Guides sometimes repeat a claim that Egyptian mummies, brought home from Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, were mixed in by mistake with the bodies of the 1830 dead. It survives as local legend, the kind of tale that sticks to a monument built over an unmarked grave.