The July Column

This guide to the July Column in Paris starts with three days of Parisian barricade fighting in July 1830 that toppled a king, and the bodies of the fallen buried inside the column itself. It follows a mix-up during the 1840 reburial, when workers exhuming remains from the Louvre gardens folded an unexpected body in among the revolutionaries. Above them, sculptor Auguste Dumont's gilded Genie de la Liberte leaps skyward, unveiled at a ceremony led by composer Hector Berlioz. Look up at the torch and broken chain the figure carries.