Place des États-Unis

Coordinates: 48°52′05″N 2°17′39″E / 48.868007°N 2.294083°E / 48.868007; 2.294083 (Place des États-Unis)

Place des États-Unis

Statue of Lafayette and Washington
Length 200 m (660 ft)
Width 60 m (200 ft)
Arrondissement 16th
Quarter Chaillot
From Avenue d'Iéna
To Rue Dumont-d'Urville
Construction
Completion 1866
Denomination 16 August 1881

The Place des États-Unis (French pronunciation: [plas dez‿e.taz‿y.ni], "United States Square") is a public space in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, about 500 m south of the Place de l'Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe.

It consists of a plaza, approximately 140 metres long and thirty metres wide, tree-lined, well-landscaped, and circumscribed by streets, forming a pleasant and shady vest-pocket park. The park is officially named Square Thomas Jefferson, but buildings facing it (on three sides) have Place-des-États-Unis addresses. The eastern end of the square, however, is capped by the Avenue d'Iéna and a confluence of streets known as the Place de l'Amiral de Grasse. These streets, all of which lead to the eastern end of Place des États-Unis, are the Rue Freycinet, Rue de Lübeck, Rue de Bassano, and the Rue Georges Bizet.

Other streets entering the Place des États-Unis include: the Rue de l'Amiral d'Estaing, which enters from the south; the Rue Galilée, which transits the western end of Square Thomas Jefferson; and the Rue Dumont d'Urville which enters the northwestern corner.

History

Name origin

The area around the Place des États-Unis was created by the destruction of the old Passy[1] water reservoirs. (They were reconstructed in 1866 on higher ground, in the triangle formed by three streets: Lauriston, Paul Valéry, and Copernic, about two hundred metres to the west-northwest.) The Place des États-Unis was originally called Place de Bitche to honor a village in the Moselle department in northeastern France that valiantly resisted a Prussian invasion during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

The square's name was changed when Levi P. Morton, the American ambassador, saw fit, in 1881, to establish his residence and his country's embassy there after abandoning unsuitable offices a few blocks away at 95, Rue de Chaillot. The similarity between the name of the Moselle village (Bitche) and the slightly off-color English word, bitch, made the Americans uncomfortable, so the chargé d'affaires prevailed upon the préfet for the Seine department to change the name to something less risible. The French official arranged for the name, Place de Bitche, to be transferred to another site in the 19th arrondissement, near the Pont de Crimée, and rechristened the square outside Mr. Morton's legation, Place des États-Unis.

The Statue of Liberty

On 13 May 1885, a bronze model of the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Bartholdi was erected in the center of the Place des États-Unis, directly in front of the American diplomatic mission.[2] Purchased by the Committee of Americans in Paris and offered to the City of Paris, the model was a fund-raising tool, displayed with the aim of inspiring support for the building of the full-sized statue and its transport across the Atlantic. The model remained in place until 1888.


Famed publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), impressed by the work Bartholdi had done in executing the Statue of Liberty, commissioned him to produce another statue, one emblematic of the French-American friendship. The subject matter, General George Washington and Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, comrades-in-arms during the American Revolutionary War, was an easy choice. The sculptor designed the bronze statue, which depicts Washington and Lafayette on a marble plinth, clothed in military uniforms, shaking hands; the French and American flags serve as a backdrop. Dedicated in 1895, the statue was installed in the Place des États-Unis. A few years later, Charles Broadway Rouss, the New York City department-store tycoon, purchased an exact replica of the Washington-and-Lafayette statue which he donated to the people of New York City for placement in Morningside Park in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Monument to Horace Wells

The Place des États-Unis (Square Thomas Jefferson) is the site of a monument to the American dentist, Horace Wells (1815–1848), who was a pioneer in the use of anesthesia. The monument was dedicated on 27 March 1910 during the tenth session of the FDI World Dental Federation, which was then known as the Fédération dentaire internationale. On the right side of the base of the monument, the sculptor, René Bertrand-Boutée, incised the medallion of the physiologist, Paul Bert, who was also an early experimenter in anaesthetics, respiration, and asphyxia.


Memorial to American Volunteers, Place des États-Unis, Paris.

On 4 July 1923, the President of the French Council of State, Raymond Poincaré, dedicated a monument in the Place des États-Unis to the Americans who had volunteered to fight in World War I in the service of France. The monument, in the form of a bronze statue on a plinth, executed by Jean Boucher (1870–1939), had been financed through a public subscription.[3] Boucher had used a photograph of the soldier and poet, Alan Seeger, as his inspiration, and Seeger's name can be found, among those of twenty-three others who had fallen in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, on the back of the plinth. Also, on either side of the base of the statue, are two excerpts from Seeger's "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", a poem written shortly before his death on 4 July 1916. Seeger intended that his words should be read in Paris on 30 May of that year, at an observance of the American holiday, Decoration Day (later known as Memorial Day):

They did not pursue worldly rewards; they wanted nothing more than to live without regret, brothers pledged to the honor implicit in living one's own life and dying one's own death. Hail, brothers! Goodbye to you, the exalted dead! To you, we owe two debts of gratitude forever: the glory of having died for France, and the homage due to you in our memories.

(Also see the article entitled, Lafayette Escadrille, for more information about Americans fighting on behalf of France during World War I.)

Notable buildings in the Place des États-Unis

Cleopatra costume created for Ida Rubinstein by Léon Bakst in 1909

Notes and references

  1. Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer had installed two steam-powered pumps (called "the Constantine" and "the Augustine") near the Place de l'Alma which drew water from the Seine and sent it uphill to be stored in the reservoirs of Passy. This arrangement, called "the fire pump of Chaillot", was in operation from 8 August 1781 until 1900.
  2. According to "Le Petit Journal" of 10 May 1885: "The City of Paris accepted this gift as proof of the brotherly bond between the two countries. The city council, en masse, witnessed the official dedication of the statue on May 13, at 2 o'clock, in the Place des États-Unis. For a few days, a temporary structure had been in place in front of the American embassy, and now workmen scurried to erect a pedestal to support a one-fifth-scale model of the statue destined for America. The metal-casting took place on Thursday, at three in the morning, in the workshop of M. Thiébault in the Rue de Villiers ... Choosing to install the statue in this place was dictated by reasons of convenience that anyone can understand: but it seems to us that it ought to be moved in the future. A statue of this importance, sixteen metres tall (including the pedestal), demands a considerable clear space surrounding it so that it may be more properly viewed, and the Place des États-Unis doesn't seem, to us, to satisfy these conditions."
  3. On 21 January 1917, thirteen days before the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany, an evening devoted to honoring the Americans serving as volunteers in French military units was held at the Comédie-Française in Paris. Hosted by the Under-Secretary of State in the military government, René Besnard, this ceremony marked the launch of a public subscription drive with the object of erecting a monument to the American volunteers.
  4. André de Fouquières, Mon Paris et ses Parisiens. Les quartiers de l'Étoile, Paris, Éditions Pierre Horay, 1953, p. 176
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