Most historians who have written on French colonial urbanization have presented the creation of the Étoile Square in Beirut as an example of military planning that stamped a French ‘Haussmannian’ model onto the city’s urban fabric. More recently, others have offered contingencies and historicized explanations. In their attempt to approach the topic from the side of the colonized—as opposed to the colonizer—they have emphasized social and political aspects tied to the resistance of local communities and their adaptation of the original plan. However, both this literature only presents a somewhat superficial and limiting reading that fails to assess the project in terms of its planning aspects. This study provides a more nuanced and complicated story of the creation of the square, challenging colonial literature and existing interpretations which tend to see the radial plan and the ‘étoile’ as the unequivocal imprint of French military planning in Beirut. Looking at the tradition of radial planning in Europe, particularly in France, this study argues that the radial plan has a long history of transformation in which it has lost its military association before its nineteenth-century application in Paris and, a century later, in colonial contexts like Beirut. The paper will first demonstrate that, because of the shift in focus towards creating straight thoroughfares and street intersections which organize and facilitate traffic, the radial plan employed by Haussmann in nineteenth-century Paris was a traffic node that is only secondarily an urban square. It has ceased to be an archetype of an urban square that typified an ideal Renaissance model with a dominant center as the common panoptical viewpoint from which single-point perspectives branched out for controlling the urban landscape. Subsequently, the paper will discuss how the Étoile plan in Beirut did not follow a comprehensive model, à la Haussmann. Examining the planners’ background and the way of integrating the star-shaped plan in its urban context, the paper will demonstrate how the planning methods implemented in Beirut by Frères Danger coincide more with Pierre Patte and Marc-Antoine Laugier’s ideas of urban embellishment that have guided piecemeal interventions in eighteenth-century Paris than with Haussmann’s larger and more comprehensive procedures.