The July Column on the Place de la Bastille in Paris on a rainy July day. The column, built belatedly between 1833 and 1840 on the orders of King Louis-Philippe I, commemorates liberty gained in the July revolution of 1830, on a site once occupied by the notorious Bastille prison.
A 1808 plan by Napoléon to have an elephant-shaped monument erected on the square never advanced beyond a full-scale plaster model being built. The design had called for access to the top to be enabled by a staircase running up the interior of one of the animal's legs.
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