What it is
Bellecour is Lyon's largest square and one of the largest in France: 63,000 square metres, a trapezium about 300 metres long. It is the kilometre zero of the roads out of Lyon, which is why it is treated as the city's centre.
The ground is covered in a red-orange gravel from the Beaujolais, which gives the square its colour. In the middle stands an equestrian statue of Louis XIV by François-Frédéric Lemot.
What else is here
In the south-west corner is a statue of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was born in Lyon, with the Little Prince. Pavilions on the south side house the tourist office.
The northern half is deliberately left empty — the city keeps it free for events, so on some days it is full of stages and fencing.
Getting it right
Start here, collect a map of which traboules are open, and walk north up the Presqu'île to the Terreaux.
From the archbishop's garden to a royal square
In Roman times this was alluvial land, an island or peninsula between the rivers, used for warehouses by merchants and boatmen. In the twelfth century the archbishop owned farmland and vines here, called the bella curtis, the beautiful garden, which gave the square its name. Abandoned, it turned back into marsh, and in the sixteenth century it was simply a meadow, the pré de Belle-court. In 1562 the Protestant Baron des Adrets camped his soldiers and artillery on it.
In 1604 Henri IV urged the city to buy the meadow for a public square, but a long lawsuit among the archbishop's heirs held things up. Louis XIII stayed in a house on the square in 1630, and when the young Louis XIV came to Lyon in 1658, his only visit, he ordered the city to preserve the open ground; the city bought it that December. It was named Place Louis-le-Grand and given a bronze equestrian statue of the king by Martin Desjardins, with facades designed by the royal architect Robert de Cotte. The lots on the Saône side were built up between 1717 and 1723, giving the square its final outline.
Revolution, empire and a new king on horseback
The Revolution left its marks. An altar of Liberty was raised on July 14, 1790, a guillotine was set up in 1792, and in 1793 the royal statue was melted down for cannon; after the siege of Lyon that year the east and west facades were destroyed. On June 21, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte, passing through after the victory of Marengo, laid the first stone of the new buildings, and Pope Pius VII crossed the square in 1804 and 1805, recorded by a plaque at number 3.
The statue you see today, also of Louis XIV, is by François-Frédéric Lemot and was unveiled on November 6, 1825; it narrowly escaped destruction in the revolutions of 1848 and 1870. The square's names track every change of regime: Place de la Fédération in 1790, Place de l'Égalité, Place Bonaparte in 1800, Place Louis-le-Grand again in 1814, and only under the Third Republic Place Bellecour.
The pavilions, the fountains and the war
The two pavilions date from 1852 and are by Tony Desjardins; the fountain basins and chestnut trees were added in the same period, when new streets were cut north from the square toward the Comédie and the Terreaux. In 1934 the Charité hospital beside the square was demolished except for the bell tower of its church, which still stands on what became Place Antonin-Poncet.
During the Second World War Marshal Pétain reviewed troops here on November 18, 1940, and the square was briefly renamed after him. The Gestapo set up at number 32, where many people were tortured. On July 27, 1944, a café used by the Nazis and the French Milice was bombed without casualties; in reprisal German soldiers executed five Resistance prisoners on the square that day.
Underneath and today
In 1963 Mayor Louis Pradel had a 2,000-space underground parking garage built beneath the square, which slightly domed its surface. The metro station came in 1978 on line A and was enlarged in 1991 for line D; Bellecour is now the busiest station on the Lyon metro. Between 2011 and 2013 the southern part was redesigned: the Second Empire fountains were moved, the kiosks renovated, giant LED streetlamps installed, and diseased chestnut trees replaced with lindens, the first tree planted on the square in the seventeenth century. Because the metro and the parking garage take up most of the ground below, adding more trees is difficult, and greening the square has become a recurring debate as summer heat waves grow more common; when the city held its first participatory budget in 2022, greening Bellecour was the project residents voted for most.
Sources
