Yes, Mary Stuart aka Queen of Scots was also Queen of France for a while too. The sign at the bottom notes that these are a series of sculpture of famous queens and other women of power and influence through the ages. Taken in the Jardins de Luxembourg, adjacent to the Palais de Luxembourg where France’s Senate now convenes, but which Louis XIII seems to have built for his Mom, Marie de Medici (another woman of power), after her husband passed and left her queen mum instead of queen :-), as it were.
Place de la République gained its current name in 1879, nine years into the third French republic. The 3rd republic, in case you want to keep track, replaced the Second Empire, which had been founded by a descendant of Napoleon. Boney had himself launched the first empire when he decided he was emperor after all and all this “republic” business was too much of an impediment to his ambitions. But back to the square you see above: It gained its current form as a lovely pedestrian zone after a promise made during the mayoral campaign of 2008. Indeed, Paris has become far more bike and pedestrian friendly than it was when I spent more time there between 2005 and 2008.
Hence my walk noted in the previous post: all the photos I’m showing you in this post are from that walk. The column you see in the gallery below is on the Place de la Bastille. The place (square) is named after that infamous prison whose storming began the real (first) French revolution. But the column actually commemorates the July (second) Revolution in 1830. That revolution’s outcome was that an unpopular Bourbon King was removed from office with head still on neck, and sent over to England for a merry golden parachute retirement. He was then replaced by a cousin from the non-patrilineal Orleans rather than Bourbon branch. Said cousin and his branch of royals seemed more popular at the time. They ruled in this second iteration of “constitutional monarchy” – often called the July Monarchy, it seems – until they grew unpopular enough to spark the 1848 (third) revolution, which ushered in the second republic. (The first republic was most of the 15 years from the storming of the Bastille and arrest + beheading of the King & Queen and very, very many more, until Boney declared himself emperor in 1804.)
Keeping up with it all, so far? (They’re currently on the fifth, just to be clear. Governance has never been easy, anywhere, let’s be realistic about this fact even if politicians often aren’t…)
Saint Laurent church, which I just happened upon after deciding that rather than sort out tickets for a bus from Gare du Nord down to my hotel by Gare de Lyon, I’d enjoy the walk on that sunny first vacation afternoon of freedom, back in a city I do so love.
Even before I made it into Switzerland, was seeing lovely landscapes from my train window that contained lovely eminences that can much more easily be called mountains than anything NL contains 🙂
A thing I took on board differently during this recent Paris visit is how much royal stuff is still very prominently visible in and around the city, even though it’s going on 150 years since the last time the formal government was a royal one. NL, by contrast, remains formally a monarchy yet somehow doesn’t center royal stuff in quite the same way. This is the Conciergerie, on Ile de la Cite, during one of my morning walks along the Seine. It’s where Marie Antoinette, amongst others, was imprisoned from arrest until trial and removal for the guillotine. Quite a bloody history this place – and Paris at large – has! So to end on a sweeter note, below, the gardens of the Palais Royal complex, to which we’ve introduced you before.
Place de la République gained its current name in 1879, nine years into the third French republic. The 3rd republic, in case you want to keep track, replaced the Second Empire, which had been founded by a descendant of Napoleon. Boney had himself launched the first empire when he decided he was emperor after all and all this “republic” business was too much of an impediment to his ambitions. But back to the square you see above: It gained its current form as a lovely pedestrian zone after a promise made during the mayoral campaign of 2008. Indeed, Paris has become far more bike and pedestrian friendly than it was when I spent more time there between 2005 and 2008. 
(so much world, so little time....) 