Les Invalides
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40 free Les Invalides trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Les Invalides began as a king's promise to his old soldiers and became one of the most layered monuments in Paris. Behind the long façade and the famous Dome sit a working veterans' home, a cathedral, several museums and the tomb of an emperor. This quiz collects the fun facts people actually look for: who built the complex and why, how Napoleon's remains came home and what his sarcophagus is really made of, which commanders rest beside him, and what the place went through during the Revolution and two world wars. There are lighter surprises too, from an Olympic venue on the lawns to buildings abroad that copied the design. It suits visitors planning a trip, history fans, and anyone who likes a good story about Paris. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few facts worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which dictator had the coffin of Napoleon's son moved from Vienna to Les Invalides in December 1940?
Adolf Hitler
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.
Q 02Which part of the fortress engineer Vauban did Napoleon have reburied under the Dome of Les Invalides in 1808?
His heart
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.
Q 03In 2021 an artist hung a replica skeleton of which animal above Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides?
A horse
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.
Q 04Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, once pharmacist at Les Invalides, is famous for championing which food in France?
Potatoes
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.
Q 05Crowds who seized thousands of muskets from Les Invalides marched the same day on which stronghold?
The Bastille
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.
Q 06What material covers the Dome of Les Invalides, renewed in 1989 using about twelve kilograms of it?
Gold leaf
Gold leaf was reapplied to the Dome under Napoleon in 1807, and the 1989 regilding marked the bicentenary year of the Revolution.
Q 07Which American president's tomb in New York City has an interior modelled on Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides?
Ulysses S. Grant
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.
Q 08From which island were Napoleon's remains brought to Les Invalides in 1840?
Saint Helena
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.
Q 09Which French king founded Les Invalides in 1670 as a home and hospital for his army's veterans?
Louis XIV
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.
Q 10Which sport held its 2024 Olympic competition on the Esplanade, the lawns in front of Les Invalides?
Archery
Archery matches were shot with the Dome as their backdrop. The same lawns also served road cycling and the marathon events during the Games.
Q 11Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, reburied at Les Invalides in 1915, wrote which song for the Army of the Rhine?
La Marseillaise
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.
Q 12Which general founded the Order of the Liberation in 1940 and later moved it into Les Invalides?
Charles de Gaulle
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.
Q 13During the French Revolution, the Dome church of Les Invalides was renamed a temple to which Roman god?
Q 21The bronze statue of Napoleon in the main courtyard of Les Invalides once stood on top of which Paris monument?
The Vendôme Column
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.
Q 22The relief maps now at Les Invalides, scale models of fortified towns, were housed from 1700 in which royal palace?
The Louvre
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.
Q 23What did the governor of Les Invalides burn by the hundreds in 1814 to keep them from the invading armies?
Mars
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.
Q 14Completed in 1706, the Dome of Les Invalides is regarded as a prime example of which French architectural style?
Baroque
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.
Q 15Sixty bronze examples of which weapon, tracing 200 years of French history, line the main courtyard of Les Invalides?
Cannons
Cannons in the courtyard are cast with coats of arms and mythological figures, and recall royal and imperial victories down to the Second Empire.
Q 16Which French ruler sent his own son to fetch Napoleon's remains for burial at Les Invalides in 1840?
King Louis Philippe
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.
Q 17Which architect of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles designed the Dome church of Les Invalides?
Jules Hardouin-Mansart
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.
Q 18Which marshal, supreme commander of the 1918 victory, lies at Les Invalides in a tomb sculpted by Paul Landowski?
Ferdinand Foch
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.
Q 19Which ornate bridge, opened for the 1900 World's Fair, links the Esplanade of Les Invalides to the Grand Palais?
Pont Alexandre III
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.
Q 20Napoleon's sarcophagus at Les Invalides, long described as red porphyry, is actually carved from which stone?
Quartzite
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.
Captured flags
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.
Q 24Which composer's Requiem, scored with four extra brass groups, had its premiere at Les Invalides in 1837?
Hector Berlioz
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.
Q 25Which American city's City Hall has a dome inspired by Les Invalides that rises higher than the US Capitol?
San Francisco
San Francisco lost its old City Hall in the 1906 earthquake. Architect Arthur Brown Jr. looked to Paris for the replacement, finished in 1915.
Q 26Les Invalides inspired Charles II to found a Royal Hospital for army veterans in which London district?
Chelsea
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.
Q 27Napoleon's elder brother Joseph, buried at Les Invalides, was king of Naples and then of which larger country?
Spain
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.
Q 28During the Second World War, a family living at Les Invalides secretly sheltered whom under the Dome for three years?
Allied pilots
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.
Q 29Which insect, an emblem of Napoleon's empire, was sewn across the velvet pall on his coffin bound for Les Invalides?
Bees
Bees also covered the black velvet of the candlelit chapel built aboard the frigate that carried the coffin home, there embroidered in silver.
Q 30Which American sculptor's 1942 mobile in the shape of the Cross of Lorraine now hangs at Les Invalides?
Alexander Calder
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.