Place de la Libération

The full story

The square was born of a great political building project. From 1668, the Estates of Burgundy, the assembly of the three orders of the Ancien Régime (nobility, clergy and third estate), met in Dijon every three years. To give them a hall, work began in 1681 on transforming the former ducal palace, a project lasting more than a century and entrusted to renowned architects, including Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The royal square was part of it: the architect Martin de Noinville laid it out from 1686 to 1692 for the town council, in front of the King’s Lodge. The historic monuments record for number 18 mentions ‘plans by Mansart, 1681’.

The king was meant to stand in the centre. On 18 May 1686, the Estates signed a contract at Versailles with Étienne Le Hongre, ‘ordinary sculptor of the king’s buildings’: a bronze equestrian statue twelve French feet high and thirteen long, for 90,000 livres. The model was finished in 1690, the year the sculptor died, and casting followed at once. Carried by the Seine and the Yonne as far as Auxerre, the statue then covered only 6 km by road before being stored away. Once in Dijon, it waited in the courtyard of the King’s Lodge, because the Estates no longer liked the planned base: the pedestal designed by Jacques-Ange Gabriel was completed in 1725, the year the City gives for the statue’s installation. The railing was only added in 1742, the inscriptions in 1747, and the pedestal was destroyed on 7 December 1792.

Nothing of the monument remains on the square, but the Musée des Beaux-Arts helps to picture it. A 48 cm bronze statuette there, attributed to Le Hongre and perhaps made in his workshop, shows a very similar model: the king as a Roman emperor, riding without stirrups, a baton of command in his hand. The museum bought it in 1973. It also holds a view of the square painted in 1781 by J.-B. Lallemand, with the statue in the centre and, in the background, the Sainte-Chapelle, destroyed after the Revolution.

In the 20th century, the buildings of the semicircle were protected: their roofs were registered as historic monuments in 1925 and their façades listed in 1937. On 11 September 1944, the day of the Liberation, Henri Drouot, a resident of Dijon, noted that the marble plaques bearing Marshal Pétain’s name had been torn down and replaced by handwritten signs reading ‘place De Gaulle’. Resistance fighters of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) paraded on the square. General de Gaulle’s name was considered for a while, but Georges Connes, elected mayor by the new town council on 22 September, finally chose ‘Place de la Libération’.