Champ de Mars

This guide to the Champ de Mars in Paris opens with two very different crowds on the same patch of grass, a year apart: the joyful quarter million who built an amphitheater by hand for the 1790 Festival of Federation, and the fifty thousand who returned a year later to demand the king's removal. It follows Lafayette from a white horse leading a national oath to a much tenser return to this field, and the king's failed attempt to flee France. Picture the altar that once stood at the center as you cross the open lawn today.