40 Fun Facts About Les Invalides

Which dictator had the coffin of Napoleon's son moved from Vienna to Les Invalides in December 1940?

Adolf Hitler ordered the transfer hoping to win French support for collaboration. Instead it helped set off a crisis at Vichy, where Pierre Laval was dismissed two days before the ceremony.

Which part of the fortress engineer Vauban did Napoleon have reburied under the Dome of Les Invalides in 1808?

His heart was moved to the Dome on Napoleon's orders, a century after Vauban died. He had been buried at Bazoches, the Burgundy village where he owned the château.

In 2021 an artist hung a replica skeleton of which animal above Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides?

It was a horse: the piece copied the bones of Marengo, said to be Napoleon's favourite mount, whose real skeleton sits in a London museum. The installation stirred controversy even though it was temporary.

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, once pharmacist at Les Invalides, is famous for championing which food in France?

Potatoes were known to the French only as hog feed until Parmentier, who had eaten them as a prisoner in Prussia, championed them. The religious community that owned his test garden at the hospital got his post abolished.

Crowds who seized thousands of muskets from Les Invalides marched the same day on which stronghold?

The Bastille was the next stop that same day, 14 July 1789, because the muskets came without powder or shot, and about 250 barrels of gunpowder were stored in the fortress.

What material covers the Dome of Les Invalides, renewed in 1989 using about twelve kilograms of it?

Gold leaf was reapplied to the Dome under Napoleon in 1807, and the 1989 regilding marked the bicentenary year of the Revolution.

Which American president's tomb in New York City has an interior modelled on Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides?

Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia lie side by side in matching red-granite sarcophagi, set in a lower-level crypt beneath a dome.

From which island were Napoleon's remains brought to Les Invalides in 1840?

Saint Helena, far out in the South Atlantic, had kept his body for 19 years in a spot known as the Valley of the Tomb.

Which French king founded Les Invalides in 1670 as a home and hospital for his army's veterans?

Louis XIV welcomed the first residents in person in 1674. The place grew into a small city of more than 4,000 boarders that was at once a hospice, barracks, convent and factory.

Which sport held its 2024 Olympic competition on the Esplanade, the lawns in front of Les Invalides?

Archery matches were shot with the Dome as their backdrop. The same lawns also served road cycling and the marathon events during the Games.

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, reburied at Les Invalides in 1915, wrote which song for the Army of the Rhine?

La Marseillaise took its name from the Provençal volunteers who brought it to Paris in 1792. Its author died in poverty, and his remains were moved on 14 July 1915, in the middle of the First World War.

Which general founded the Order of the Liberation in 1940 and later moved it into Les Invalides?

Charles de Gaulle signed the order into being at Brazzaville, then the capital of Free France, and stayed its only Grand Master. He brought it to the veterans' home in 1967.

During the French Revolution, the Dome church of Les Invalides was renamed a temple to which Roman god?

Mars, the god of war, took over the king's former chapel when the Revolution turned it into a temple. Napoleon then made the building a pantheon of military glories.

Completed in 1706, the Dome of Les Invalides is regarded as a prime example of which French architectural style?

Baroque taste for illusion shows in the ceiling: hidden windows light a painted upper shell, so visitors looking up through the open lower dome seem to see the sky.

Sixty bronze examples of which weapon, tracing 200 years of French history, line the main courtyard of Les Invalides?

Cannons in the courtyard are cast with coats of arms and mythological figures, and recall royal and imperial victories down to the Second Empire.

Which French ruler sent his own son to fetch Napoleon's remains for burial at Les Invalides in 1840?

King Louis Philippe put his third son, the Prince de Joinville, in command of the expedition. The prince had grumbled that it was a job fit for a carter or an undertaker.

Which architect of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles designed the Dome church of Les Invalides?

Jules Hardouin-Mansart was about thirty when the war minister handed him the unfinished chapel in 1676. He gave it separate entrances so the king and his veterans could attend the same Mass.

Which marshal, supreme commander of the 1918 victory, lies at Les Invalides in a tomb sculpted by Paul Landowski?

Ferdinand Foch got a tomb modelled on a 15th-century one, carved by the sculptor best known for Rio's Christ the Redeemer. He was moved into it in 1937, eight years after his death.

Which ornate bridge, opened for the 1900 World's Fair, links the Esplanade of Les Invalides to the Grand Palais?

Pont Alexandre III, named for a Russian tsar, crosses in one low span so that it would not block the view between the Champs-Élysées and the Dome.

Napoleon's sarcophagus at Les Invalides, long described as red porphyry, is actually carved from which stone?

Quartzite for the sarcophagus was quarried in Russian Karelia in 1848 with the personal permission of Tsar Nicholas I, then shipped to Paris by way of Kronstadt and Le Havre.

The bronze statue of Napoleon in the main courtyard of Les Invalides once stood on top of which Paris monument?

The Vendôme Column carried the statue from 1833 until 1863, when a copy of the column's first statue, the emperor in Roman dress, took its place. The bronze reached the courtyard in 1911.

The relief maps now at Les Invalides, scale models of fortified towns, were housed from 1700 in which royal palace?

The Louvre kept the models from 1700 until their gallery was given over to paintings in 1774. The collection was nearly destroyed before it found a new home three years later.

What did the governor of Les Invalides burn by the hundreds in 1814 to keep them from the invading armies?

Captured flags, 1,417 of them, were destroyed as the coalition armies reached Paris. Marshal Sérurier also burned the sword and sash of Frederick the Great rather than let them be taken.

Which composer's Requiem, scored with four extra brass groups, had its premiere at Les Invalides in 1837?

Hector Berlioz claimed the conductor put down his baton at a crucial moment to take a pinch of snuff, so that the composer had to rush to the podium and conduct the rest himself.

Which American city's City Hall has a dome inspired by Les Invalides that rises higher than the US Capitol?

San Francisco lost its old City Hall in the 1906 earthquake. Architect Arthur Brown Jr. looked to Paris for the replacement, finished in 1915.

Les Invalides inspired Charles II to found a Royal Hospital for army veterans in which London district?

Chelsea got its hospital in 1682, and its pensioners still wear scarlet coats on ceremonial days. The French idea it copied was to give old soldiers a home instead of a pension.

Napoleon's elder brother Joseph, buried at Les Invalides, was king of Naples and then of which larger country?

Spain was handed to Joseph in 1808, two years after Naples. When the empire fell he emigrated to the United States and lived on an estate in New Jersey.

During the Second World War, a family living at Les Invalides secretly sheltered whom under the Dome for three years?

Allied pilots were hidden by the Morin family, who lived on the premises, even though the occupying army had turned the site into a barracks.

Which insect, an emblem of Napoleon's empire, was sewn across the velvet pall on his coffin bound for Les Invalides?

Bees also covered the black velvet of the candlelit chapel built aboard the frigate that carried the coffin home, there embroidered in silver.

Which American sculptor's 1942 mobile in the shape of the Cross of Lorraine now hangs at Les Invalides?

Alexander Calder made the piece, known as France Forever, as a work of resistance during the war. It was declared of major heritage interest in 2019 and bought for the site in 2020.

Which painter's 1806 portrait of Napoleon enthroned in his coronation robes is displayed at Les Invalides?

Ingres met uniformly hostile critics when the picture was shown at the Salon that year, and his fellow painter David delivered a severe judgement on it.

In September 1914, about 600 Paris taxis were assembled at Les Invalides to carry troops to which battle?

The Marne front was about 50 kilometres away, and the drivers, following city regulations, dutifully ran their meters all the way there.

Which French decoration did Napoleon award for the very first time in a ceremony at Les Invalides in July 1804?

The Legion of Honour went that day to more than officers: cardinals, scientists, painters, musicians and even cooks were decorated in the chapel on 15 July 1804.

Which architect, who also converted the Salpêtrière arsenal into a hospice, drew the original plans for Les Invalides?

Libéral Bruant, one of the first eight members of the royal academy of architecture, could not complete the chapel, which passed to a younger man in 1676.

Which 17th-century French marshal became the first hero Napoleon reburied under the Dome of Les Invalides, in 1800?

Turenne was so admired that the revolutionaries who threw the royal bodies into a mass grave in 1793 spared his remains, which Napoleon moved to the Invalides in 1800.

Which French frigate, painted black for the mission, carried Napoleon's coffin home on its way to Les Invalides?

La Belle Poule sailed home prepared for battle: rumours of a rupture with Britain made her commander fear the coffin would be intercepted at sea.

Which architect designed Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides but died eight years before it was inaugurated?

Louis Visconti was picked after a competition that drew 81 architects, and he hollowed out an open circular crypt beneath the Dome for the sarcophagus.

Les Invalides shares which Paris arrondissement with the Musée d'Orsay and the Rodin Museum?

The 7th is also called Palais-Bourbon, after the seat of the National Assembly, which stands close to the Esplanade.

What was built in the 19th century to divide the Dome church of Les Invalides from the veterans' chapel behind it?

A glass wall completed a split that began with separate altars when the tomb went in. Before that, king and veterans had shared one Mass, entering by different doors as etiquette required.

Which Free French commander, whose armoured division helped liberate Paris in 1944, lies in a crypt at Les Invalides?

General Leclerc was killed in an air crash in Algeria in 1947 and made a Marshal of France after his death. His baton and his battered képi are displayed in the galleries.