Louis XIV built Les Invalides in 1670 as a hospital and home for wounded soldiers. The building is vast, formal, and entirely serious about what it is for. Today it holds the most significant military museum in France and, at its centre, under the largest gilded dome in Paris, the tomb of Napoleon.
The Army Museum covers French military history from 1600 to 1850, the period that matters most for understanding how France became what it is. The collection of armour, weapons and campaign artefacts is exceptional, and the Napoleonic section remains the best account of the Empire anywhere in Paris.
What you will see
The tomb. Napoleon lies in six coffins nested one inside another, the outermost of red porphyry, in a crypt designed so that visitors look down on the Emperor from above, beneath Jules Hardouin-Mansart's dome church of 1706, one of the finest works of French Baroque architecture.
The collections. Royal armour from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, pieces made for Henri II and Louis XIII among them, and the Napoleonic galleries, the campaigns, the marshals, the objects carried on campaign, and portraits showing the general at every age.
Napoleon's tomb · the royal armour · the dome church
Pépin's advice
Focus on the Napoleonic section. The museum covers more ground than one visit can do justice to, and the Napoleonic galleries together with the tomb make for the most coherent single experience.
Arrive from the north. The approach from the Pont Alexandre III, across the esplanade, gives the building the scale it deserves, and is worth the extra five minutes on foot.
