Obelisk #14

On our tour of Egyptian Obelisks removed from Egypt we have arrived at the site of the Fanzone where I believed I was going to watch the Rugby World Cup Final last year. My lying son had tickets to the Stade de France instead, so it was a very pleasant 60th birthday surprise. The fanzone was set up in the Place de la Concorde in Paris which is of course dominated by the Parisian Obelisk, one of a pair of Luxor obelisks.

The Luxor pair are an excellent example of how the Egyptians arranged the Obelisks in pairs, but the stones themselves were not necessarily identical in height or size. The Luxor pair were commissioned by Ramesses the Great for the Luxor Temple. This is a temple dedicated to the renewal of pharaonic rule rather than to any specific God or Gods. The temple predated Ramesses II by about 150 years and may have been commissioned by either Amenhotep III or his son Amenhotep IV. Subsequent rulers added chapels and improvements to the temple. It was in this tradition that Ramesses added the pair of Obelisks around 1250 BC.

The obelisk remaining in Luxor is the tallest of the two and was situated nearer to the temple entrance. The shorter obelisk was placed on a taller pedestal further from the entrance. To those approaching the temple this created an optical illusion making them look symmetrical.

For the first time in this series since Obelisk #1 we are dealing with an Obelisk that was not removed in Ancient times by the Romans. Instead we begin with the French revolution. It was during the reign of terror that the guillotine was erected from 1792 to 1793 in what is now the Place de la Concorde. Of the 2,500 people guillotined in Paris in this period about half of them lost their heads in this plaza. It was also here that the big name acts were on stage: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Philippe d’Orleans, Danton, Lavoisier and Malesherbes to name but a few. It was here the celebrated Tricoteuses had their knitting circle as the tumbrils rolled. Concord is the French word for peace and it was the Directory who renamed the square the Place de la Concorde to mark the end of the Reign of Terror.

In 1793 a little known Corsican artillery officer made a name for himself at the siege of Toulon. In 1795 Napoleon was in Paris when the mob rose up against the Convention. His name was put forward to lead the troops and the riot was quelled with what he termed “a whiff of grapeshot”. Napoleon’s success in defending the Convention was rewarded by sending him to Italy in 1796. He transformed a ragged barefoot rabble into a highly respected army. In the process he enriched many of the French troops who profited from the rich booty of the wealthiest part of the Austrian Empire. Napoleon became the darling of the French army.

In 1798 Napoleon took the French fleet and his army to Egypt. As he was defeating the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids Horatio Nelson was making his own name by sinking the French Fleet stationed in Aboukir Bay in what the English call the Battle of the Nile. The French expedition began a European love affair with all things Egyptian. Napoleon sent archeologists and scientists deep into Egypt to secure antiquities and to document the temples and tombs. When Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the Rosetta Stone the race to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics began.

As early as 1799 General Desaix wrote to Napoleon telling him of the two magnificent obelisks at Luxor and extolling how greatly they would glorify Paris when shipped there. By 1800 engineers were drawing up the plans for shipping the obelisks to France and erecting them in Paris. The ignominious end to the Egyptian Expedition put an end to these plans.

Louis VIII attempted to secure the Cleopatras Needle in Alexandria for France, to no avail. Subsequently Louis’ younger brother King Charles X built an Egyptian museum and tried to source an obelisk for it. At this stage the Rosetta Stone comes back into the picture (it was not a red herring, it was a Chekov’s gun). The man credited with deciphering hieroglyphs, Jean Francois Champollion, was on site in Luxor. In a sidebar to the Great Game Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Ottoman Egypt, was courting the favour of both Britain and France. He restored Ottoman rule to Egypt after the French expedition, but then established it as a family dynasty. He was a clever diplomat who played all sides as the modern European powers circled the bed of the sick man of Europe: the Ottoman Empire. Muhammad Ali Pasha is seen as the man who established the modern state of Egypt.

Initially he offered the Luxor obelisks to the British. Champollion whispered into the ear of the French Consul-General Mimault who suggested the Pasha instead offer the British the Obelisk of Hatshepsut in the temple of Karnak. Champollion knew it was nigh-on impossible to remove Hatshepsut’s obelisk without causing damage to the temple. Meanwhile the Pasha offered the Luxor obelisks to the French in 1830.

By this stage Charles X was king no more. The second French revolution AKA the July revolution is the one immortalized in the famous Delacroix painting of the bare breasted Liberty leading the people. Charles was out and his cousin Louis-Philippe was in.

The specially designed Obelisk transporter The Luxor was constructed and in 1831 conveyed the lesser of the two obelisks to Paris. It arrived in 1833 and was erected in 1836. The massive cost of moving the obelisk put an end to French ambitions to move both obelisks. It was decided that the erection of the Obelisk would help diffuse the troubling significance of the former site of the guillotine. So it was raised in its current position in Place de la Concorde.

The pedestal it stands upon was originally designed for an equestrian statue of Louis XVI which was destroyed in the July revolution. The original Egyptian pedestal featured baboons with large testicles deemed too obscene for public viewing.

At last France had the obelisk it coveted for 37 years and much more importantly, England did not…

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