Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the square in 1699 for Louis XIV, and construction continued into the 1720s under his successor Robert de Cotte. It is the most disciplined of the great Parisian squares: an octagon with chamfered corners, organised entirely around uniform Corinthian-pilastered facades that the Crown imposed regardless of who built behind them.
The square measures approximately 224 metres on its long axis and 213 metres on its short axis, with each of the four diagonal corners chamfered at a forty-five degree angle to produce the characteristic octagonal plan. Every facade is a strict tripartite composition. A rusticated ground-floor arcade carries the building above. The piano nobile is articulated by paired Corinthian pilasters that run the full height of the second and third floors, framing arched windows. An attic storey with a balustrade caps the wall, and a steep slate-covered mansard roof rises behind it. The corner pavilions are slightly taller and pedimented, accenting the diagonal axes of the octagon. The decisive innovation of the design is that the facades were built first, as a state-financed urban screen, and the lots behind them were then sold to private buyers who built private hôtels particuliers to fit within the dictated frontage. This is one of the earliest examples of pure formal urbanism, an ensemble in which the public surface is decoupled from the private interior so that the city as a whole reads as a single composition. Hardouin-Mansart was effectively designing scenography for absolutism.
The Vendôme Column at the centre is a later addition. Napoleon erected it in 1810 to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz, modelling it on Trajan’s Column in Rome at near full scale, with a height of forty-four metres and a helical bronze relief wrapped around the shaft. The bronze was cast from 1,200 captured Austrian and Russian cannons. The column has been torn down, during the Commune in 1871, with Gustave Courbet famously implicated, and subsequently rebuilt and refitted. It remains the political weathervane of the square, while the facades have stayed exactly as Hardouin-Mansart left them.