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In the Battle of Trocadero, Trocadero, a fortified position on the Bay of Cádiz in the south of Spain, was captured on August 31, 1823, by French forces led by the duc d'Angoulême. The goal was to intervene against the liberal Spanish who were rebelling against the autocracy of Ferdinand VII. Trocadero restored the autocratic Spanish Bourbon Ferdinand to the throne of Spain, in an action that defined the Restauration. The name "trocadero" means an emporium or place of trade.
The event was considered worthy of commemoration in Paris.
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The Place du Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement, is located on the hill of Chaillot bordering the Seine river. The "Seizieme" which connected Paris to the Bois de Boulogne remains the city's smartest district.
For the 1878 international exposition, the Palais du Trocadéro was built here. Its purposes included the holding of meetings of international organizations during the fair. The palace's form was that of a large concert hall with two wings and two towers; its style was a mixture of historical ones, generally called "Moorish" but with some Byzantine elements. The building proved unpopular, though the cost expended in its construction delayed its replacement for nearly fifty years.
The Place du Trocadéro and its terraced gardens in the formal French taste that looks back to André Le Notre is dominated by the Palais de Chaillot, built in 1937 for the Exposition Internationale de Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) in the classicizing "Moderne" style that expressed government authority from Washington to Rome to Moscow. The two wings frame the sunken pool on axis with the Eiffel Tower, itself a relict of a former Exposition. It was constructed from the basic pieces of the earlier structure, although the concert hall was destroyed. At the Palais, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948, now commemorated by a stone.
The vast building now houses the avant-garde Theatre National de Chaillot and museums including the ethnographic Musée de l'Homme, which has largely been relocated to a brand new museum on Quai Branly, and the naval Musée de la Marine's ship models.
- Commemorative stone dedication, October 17, 1987 (http://www.oct17.org/en/archiv%2003%20en/dalleuk.arch03ehtm.htm)
The stylish connotations of the Place du Trocadéro, inspired first the Trocadero Restaurant in London, and then multitudes of nightclubs and cinemas named "Trocadero".