Trocadero. The Trocadero, site of the Palais de Chaillot, is an area of Paris, France, in the 16th arrondissement, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. It is also the name of the 1878 palace which was demolished in 1937 to make way for the Palais de Chaillot. The hill of the Trocadero is the hill of Chaillot, a former village. The place was named in honour of the Battle of Trocadero, in which the fortified Isla del Trocadero, in southern Spain, was captured by French forces led by the Duc d'Angoulême, son of the future King of France, Charles X, on 31 August 1823. France had intervened on behalf of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, whose rule was contested by a liberal rebellion. After the battle, the autocratic Spanish Bourbon Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne of Spain. François-Rene de Chateaubriand said To stride across the lands of Spain at one go, to succeed there, where Bonaparte had failed, to triumph on that same soil where the arms of the fantastic man suffered reverses, to do in six months what he couldn't do in seven years, that was truly prodigious! Nowadays the square is officially named Place du Trocadero et du 11 Novembre, although it is usually simply called the Place du Trocadero. The hill of Chaillot was first arranged for the 1867 World's Fair. For the 1878 World's Fair, the Palais du Trocadero was built here. The palace's form was that of a large concert hall with two wings and two towers; its style was a mixture of exotic and historical references, generally called Moorish but with some Byzantine elements. The architect was Gabriel Davioud. The concert hall contained a large organ built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll; the first large organ to be installed in a concert hall in France. The organ was inaugurated during the 1878 World Fair with a concert in which Charles Marie Widor played the premiere of his Symphony for Organ No. 6. The building proved unpopular, but the cost expended in its construction delayed its replacement for nearly fifty years. Below the building in the space left by former underground quarries, a large aquarium was built to contain fish of French rivers. It was renovated in 1937 but closed again for renovation from 1985 until 22 May 2006. The space between the palais and the Seine is set with gardens, designed by Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, and an array of fountains. Within its garden, the old palace contained two large animal statues, of a rhinoceros and an elephant, which were removed and stored during the demolition of the old Trocadero palace, and have been located next to the entrance of the Musee d'Orsay since 1986. For the Exposition Internationale of 1937, the old Palais du Trocadero was partly demolished and partly rebuilt and the Palais de Chaillot now tops the hill. It was designed in classicizing moderne style by architects Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, Jacques Carlu and Leon Azema. Like the old palais, the Palais de Chaillot features two wings shaped to form a wide arc; reclad and expanded, these wings and the pair of central pavilions are the only remaining portion of the former building. However, unlike the old palais, the wings are independent buildings and there is no central element to connect them: instead, a wide esplanade leaves an open view from the place du Trocadero to the Eiffel Tower and beyond. The buildings are decorated with quotations by Paul Valery, and sculptural groups at the attic level by Raymond Delamarre, Carlo Sarrabezolles and Alfred Bottiau. The eight gilded figures on the terrace of the Rights of Man are attributed to the sculptors Alexandre Descatoire, Marcel Gimond, Jean Paris dit Pryas, Paul Cornet, Lucien Brasseur, Robert Couturier, Paul Niclausse, and Felix-Alexandre Desruelles. The buildings now house a number of museums: the Musee national de la Marine and the Musee de l'Homme in the southern wing; the Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, including the Musee national des Monuments Français, in the eastern wing, from which one also enters the Theatre national de Chaillot, a theater below the esplanade. It was on the front terrace of the palace that Adolf Hitler was pictured during his short tour of the city in 1940, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. This became an iconic image of the Second World War. It is in the Palais de Chaillot that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. This event is now commemorated by a stone, and the esplanade is known as the esplanade des droits de l'homme. The Palais de Chaillot was also the initial headquarters of NATO, while the Palais de l'Otan was being built.
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