Napoleon's arch took thirty years to build and he never saw it finished
Napoleon ordered the Arc de Triomphe in 1806, fresh from victory at Austerlitz. The foundations alone took two years, so for his 1810 wedding entry into Paris he had a full-size wooden mock-up built. The stone arch was finished only in 1836, under King Louis Philippe, long after Napoleon's fall.
Jean-François Chalgrin designed it, taking inspiration from the Arch of Titus in Rome, but he died in 1811 and others took over. Work stopped during the Bourbon Restoration and restarted only in 1823. The final bill came to about 10 million francs. At 49.54 metres high it was the world's tallest triumphal arch until Mexico City's Monument to the Revolution was completed in 1938. It stands at the hub of twelve avenues, the star that gave the square its old name, Place de l'Étoile.
Its surfaces are a roll call of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Thirty shields list major victories, and the inner walls carry the names of 660 officers, those killed in battle underlined. The most celebrated sculpture, François Rude's Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, known as La Marseillaise, was used to recruit soldiers early in the First World War. Plans to crown the top never worked out: a plaster chariot group by Alexandre Falguière stood there from 1882 to 1886 until the weather ruined it.
Since 1920 the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has lain beneath the vault, after a public letter-writing campaign overturned a plan to bury him in the Panthéon. Out of respect for the tomb, victory parades now go around the arch rather than through it; both Hitler in 1940 and de Gaulle in 1944 followed the custom. When Jacqueline Kennedy asked for an eternal flame at her husband's grave in 1963, she was remembering the one she had seen here in 1961.
The arch has had odd moments. On 7 August 1919 Charles Godefroy flew a biplane through the main vault. Legend says La Marseillaise's sword snapped off on the day the Battle of Verdun began, and the relief was quickly covered up. In 2021 it was wrapped in silvery blue fabric, a project Christo and Jeanne-Claude had planned since the early 1960s.
Source: Arc de Triomphe
