Les Invalides was built for old soldiers and now holds Napoleon
Louis XIV ordered Les Invalides in 1670 as a home and hospital for worn-out veterans of his endless wars. The golden-domed complex in Paris later armed the crowd that stormed the Bastille, received Napoleon's body, and in 2024 served as the backdrop for Olympic archery and the marathon.
Architect Liberal Bruant designed the original complex on what was then the suburban plain of Grenelle. By 1676 its riverside front stretched 196 metres, with fifteen courtyards, the grandest used for parades. Veterans had to attend daily services in their own church, while Jules Hardouin-Mansart built a separate private royal chapel beside it, finished in 1706.
That chapel, the Dome, is a landmark of French Baroque. Reaching 107 metres with its lantern, it stands taller than Notre-Dame and every other church dome in Paris. It actually consists of two domes, one above the other: the lower one is open at its centre, so visitors look up through it at Charles de La Fosse's painted ceiling, lit by hidden windows to mimic an open sky. One historian has suggested it was first meant as a burial place for the Bourbon kings.
On 14 July 1789, rioters broke into the cellars and seized cannons and muskets, then carried them to the Bastille the same day. After Napoleon's remains came back from Saint Helena in 1840, he was entombed beneath the Dome, though the purple quartzite sarcophagus was only inaugurated in 1861, after its architect Louis Visconti had died.
Conscription after 1872 meant far fewer soldiers served the twenty years needed for admission, so the huge building outgrew its purpose. In 1905 two military museums merged into the Army Museum and most veterans moved to smaller homes, although about a hundred elderly or disabled former soldiers still live there. The veterans' church, hung with captured enemy flags, became the cathedral of the French armed forces in 1986.
Source: Les Invalides
