Why go
This chapter makes several central sites more legible. Place de la Concorde was the Place de la Révolution during the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, while the Louvre’s public role grew from revolutionary collecting. It is essential context for seeing how political rupture changed both the city and its institutions.
The full story
The Revolution reorganised Paris and challenged royal authority. A city charter created new municipal structures, while political conflict soon intensified into the Reign of Terror. Prison massacres, arrests and executions marked the city, and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined at what was then the Place de la Révolution, now Place de la Concorde. The upheaval also changed the fate of buildings and collections. Church and aristocratic property was confiscated as national property, and many churches were closed. Scholars and historians gathered statues and paintings from demolished churches at the former Couvent des Petits-Augustins to preserve them. Paintings went to the Louvre, where the Central Museum of the Arts opened near the end of 1793; the other collection became the Museum of French Monuments. For visitors, the point is not only to seek revolutionary memorials. It is to see how a political break remade the meaning and ownership of Paris’s artistic and religious heritage.