Champs de Mars and Around
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Champs de Mars and Around
Parading back from the Eiffel Tower, the Champs de Mars have been open fields ever since they were used as a mustering ground for royal troops – hence their name "the Martial Fields". After 1789 they became the venue for the great revolutionary fairs, including Robespierre’s vast "Fête of the Supreme Being" in 1794, while the Second Empire turned them into a giant industrial exhibition area, which explains the location of the Eiffel Tower. At the far southern end lie the eighteenth-century buildings of the Ecole Militaire, originally founded in 1751 by Louis XV for the training of aristocratic army officers – including the “little corporal”, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The quartier surrounding the Ecole Militaire is expensive, elegant and classic. The Y-shaped UNESCO building (M° Ecole Militaire) is the controversial exception. It was built in reinforced concrete in 1958 by, appropriately, an international team, and was designed from the outset to showcase art and culture. You can tour the building if you book in advance and bring ID and two passport photos (Tues at 3pm in English; free; call 01.45.68.16.42). You get to see artworls by Giacometti, Calder, Le Corbusier, Miró and Picasso, as well as the Noguchi Garden of Peace, which contains the Nagasaki angel – a rare survivor of the atomic atrocities of August 1945. Alternatively, come for one of the regular exhibitions or evening concerts, which could take in anything from “colours and impressions of Albania”, and “three days of Bolivian crafts and culinary delights” to Algerian can’ music and Tchaikovsky dances.
Behind the UNESCO building, the Avenue de Sae continues the grand line on to the southeast towards the giant Necker hospital, passing through the Place de Breteuil, a huge roundabout – even by Parisian standards – centered on a monument to Louis Pasteur, the much-loved discoverer of vaccination and, of course, pasteurization. A modest figure seated and wrapped in a cloak, Pasteur seems overawes by his situation, uncertain whether to look back towards the Ecole Militaire, or north up the other grand axis towards Les Invalides. His role as the saver of millions of lives is represented by the Grim Reaper cowering beneath him, while healthy lambs and children gambol all around. You can visit a museum devoted to him about ten minutes’ walk south, in the 15e.
