Place de la Concorde

This guide to Place de la Concorde in Paris opens on January 21, 1793, the morning Louis the Sixteenth was guillotined on this exact spot, and follows the square through the height of the Terror to its ironic renaming as Concorde two years later. It then turns to the pink granite obelisk at the square's center, a three-thousand-year-old gift from Egypt's viceroy, and the two-year voyage it took to bring it from Luxor to Paris. Listen for how an engineer risked his own life to raise it in 1836.