Louis XIV Victory Monument

The Louis XIV Victory Monument was an elaborate trophy memorial celebrating the military and domestic successes of the early decades of Louis XIV's personal rule, primarily those during the Franco-Dutch War of 1672–1678, on the Place des Victoires (Victories' Square) in central Paris. It was designed and sculpted by Martin Desjardins between 1682 and 1686 on a commission by François d'Aubusson, Duke of La Feuillade. The monument's centerpiece, a colossal statue of Louis XIV crowned by an allegory of victory, was destroyed in 1792 during the French Revolution. Significant other parts of the monument have been preserved and are now mostly kept at the Louvre. Together with the two triumphal arches, the Porte Saint-Denis (1672) and Porte Saint-Martin (1674), and echoing the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles (decorated 1680–1684), the Victory Monument marked the high point of public exaltation of Louis XIV's military glory and European dominance in the urban landscape of Paris, before the setbacks and exhaustion that would come later in his reign with the Nine Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession.

Monument data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).