Champs-Elysees

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Twelve avenues radiate out from the place de l'Etoile (étoile meaning “star”), of which the best-known is the Champs-Elysées. Tree-lined and broad, it sweeps down from the Arc de Triomphe towards the place de la Concorde. Close up it can be a little disappointing, with its constant stream of traffic and its fast-food aoutlets and chain stores, but over the last decade or so it's begun to shed its tacky image and regained something of its former cachet. The avenue's renaissance started with a facelift in the mind-1990's, when the rows of trees that the Nazis removed during World War II were replanted and pavements were repaved. A number of exvlusive designers, such as Louis Vuitton, have subsequently moved in, luxury hotels gave appeared, among them Fouquet's Barriére, on the corner with avenue George V, formerly dowdy shops such as the Publicis drugstore and the Renault car showroom have undergone stylish makeovers and acquired cool bar/restaurants, while new fashionable cafés and restaurants in the streets around are constantly injecting fresh buzz and glamour.

The Champs-Elysées began life as a leafy promenade, an extension of the Tuileries gardens. It was transformed into a fashionable thoroughfare during the Second Empire when members of the haute bourgeoisie built themselves splendid mansions along its length and high society would come to stroll and frequent the cafés and theatres. Most of the mansions finally gave way to office blocks and the beau monde moved elsewhere, but remnants of the avenue's glitzy heyday live on at the Lido cabaret, Fouquet's café-restaurant, the perfumier Guerlain's shop, occupying an exquisite 1913 building, and the former Claridges hotel, now a swanky shopping arcade. One of the most opulent of the mid-nineteenth-century mansions also survives the Travellers Club at no. 25, once the residence of the famous courtesan, La Paiva, whose bathroom alone, it is said, was worthy of a Sultana in the Arabian Nights.

The Champs-Elysées occupies an important place in the national psyche and is a popular rallying point at times of crisis as well as celebration; crowds thronged here to greet Général de Gaulle as he walked down the avenue just after the Liberation in May 1944 and many turned out to support him agaim in 1968 in the wake of the students riots, while thousands congregated in 1998 to party all night after France won the World Cup. It's also the scene of annual processions on November 11 and Bastille Day, and the Tour de France ends here in July with a final flourish.