Elephant of the Bastille

The Elephant of the Bastille once loomed over the square as a colossal, twenty-four-meter-tall plaster beast. Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned the monument in eighteen hundred and eight to serve as a grand fountain, intending to cast it in bronze from cannons captured at the Battle of Friedland. While a full-scale model of wood and plaster was finished in eighteen hundred and fourteen, the collapse of the Empire drained the project of its funding and ambition.