Napoleon never saw the Arc de Triomphe. He saw a copy: a structure of wood, canvas and plaster, painted in trompe-l’œil and put up in a hurry in 1810. It was meant to last a single day, the day he and his new wife, Marie Louise of Austria, would parade beneath it on their triumphal entry into Paris. The real arch, the one you see today, was finished fifteen years after his death.
Today the arch closes off the long vista of the Champs-Élysées from place Charles-de-Gaulle, in the middle of a square where twelve streets meet. Beneath its vault, since 1921, lies the tomb of a soldier whose name nobody knows. And if you want to climb to the top, there’s one thing you should know right away: the lift is out of service for maintenance indefinitely, and the only way up to the terrace is on foot, 284 steps.
How does a monument become the symbol of an empire if the man who wanted it never sees it finished?
Let’s go!
1. An arch Napoleon never saw finished
Napoleon ordered the monument in 1806, after the victory at Austerlitz, to honour his Grande Armée. He gave the project to Jean-François Chalgrin, assisted by Jean-Arnaud Raymond. Chalgrin died in 1811: the site lost the architect who had conceived it when it had barely risen from the ground. In December of that same 1806 Napoleon had also decreed that the Madeleine, by then a building site left idle for fifteen years, should become a temple to the glory of the same army.
When Napoleon fell, in 1814, work stopped altogether: the restored Bourbons were in no hurry to finish a monument to Napoleonic glory, and the site stood idle until 1823. Work resumed, stopped again in 1830 after the July Revolution, and it fell to Louis-Philippe to close the job: in 1832 he commissioned the architect Guillaume-Abel Blouet to complete it, with a new dedication to the armies of the Revolution and the Empire together. The arch was inaugurated on 29 July 1836, after thirty years of building, with a ceremony so low-key that eleven people were there to watch.
Work it out: Napoleon died in 1821. The only arch he ever really saw was the one of wood and painted canvas from 1810.
2. Four reliefs, and only one that everybody photographs
Why does only one of the four sculpted groups at the base of the arch end up on every postcard?
Because it’s the only one that breaks the rules. Le Départ des volontaires de 1792, known as La Marseillaise, was carved by François Rude between 1833 and 1836 on the pier that faces the Champs-Élysées. Above the group flies a winged female figure who cries the alarm with her sword raised; below her a bearded warrior in armour drags a nearly naked young man along with him, while other soldiers crowd around them with spears and shields. Rude’s subject is the mass levy of 1792, when around two hundred thousand men marched off to defend a France that had only just become a republic, and he tells it by mixing antique armour with the nude bodies of classical sculpture: that freedom is what makes the group livelier than the other three, all carved to the conventions of the day.
Next to La Marseillaise, on the same side, Jean-Pierre Cortot signed Le Triomphe de 1810: it celebrates the height of the Empire and the marriage to Marie Louise, the very one for which the fake arch had been built in 1810. On the opposite side, towards avenue de la Grande-Armée, Antoine Étex signed both remaining reliefs: La Résistance de 1814, on the national defence against that year’s invasion, and La Paix de 1815, on the return of peace after the Treaty of Paris. Four different episodes of the same twenty-year war, carved into the same stone.
3. Two hundred and eighty-four steps, because there’s no lift today
The official site doesn’t mince words: take your time on the way up, and remember to stay hydrated. The terrace, almost fifty metres above the square (the arch is 49.54 metres high), is reached by a narrow spiral staircase with no landings to rest on and no windows for a good long stretch, then a small space with an exhibition room on the history of the monument and, finally, the last steps out into the open.
There is a lift, two in fact, but you can’t use them today: they’re out of service for maintenance indefinitely, says the official site, and even when they work they aren’t meant for people who simply want to dodge the effort. They’re reserved for visitors with reduced mobility, pregnant women and anyone travelling with small children, and one of the two cabins has a door only 75 centimetres wide.
Once you’re at the top, the view is 360 degrees: on one side the Champs-Élysées run straight down to place de la Concorde, on the other avenue de la Grande-Armée points towards the skyscrapers of La Défense. If you’ve already been up the Eiffel Tower, from up here you’ll recognise the same skyline seen from the opposite angle, with the tower itself, this time, as the landmark in the background: you can read the practical details of the tower in the dedicated article.
4. A soldier with no name, and a flame that has burned since 1923
Why does a man whom France chose never to name lie beneath an arch dedicated to armies and battles?
Because he stands for all the others. The Unknown Soldier was laid beneath the vault of the arch on 11 November 1920, on the second anniversary of the armistice, with the definitive burial set for 28 January 1921. He isn’t a writer, he isn’t a general: he’s a soldier chosen precisely because he has no name, so that he can represent the millions of First World War dead who did have a name, but whom nobody could write on the tomb. He is the exact reverse of the Panthéon, which holds eighty-one burials, thirty-five of them figures chosen one by one by the Republic: here, beneath the arch, Paris decided to choose no one.
Since 1923 a flame has burned above the tomb that, the official sources say, has never gone out. The minister André Maginot lit it for the first time on 11 November of that year; it is the work of the ironworker Edgar Brandt and the architect Henri Favier. Every evening, at 18:30, an association that brings together hundreds of French veterans’ and ex-servicemen’s organisations rekindles it with a small public ceremony, open to anyone who happens to be in the square at that moment.
One thing worth knowing before you arrive: you don’t need a ticket to see the tomb and the flame. They’re at the level of the square, open to everyone, while you only pay to go into the monument and climb to the terrace.
5. The square with twelve streets, and the name that changed
The twelve streets that now meet beneath the arch, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel, come from the nineteenth-century town planning ordered by Baron Haussmann and designed by the architect Jacques Hittorff, who ringed the square with identical buildings. It’s from here, seen from above, that the square gets the name Parisians still call it by: place de l’Étoile, the square of the star.
The official name has been different since 1970, though. Charles de Gaulle died on 9 November of that year, and a few days later, on 13 November, the square was renamed place Charles-de-Gaulle in his honour. The double name still lives on today: the metro and RER stop is called Charles-de-Gaulle-Étoile, and on maps you’ll find both forms, depending on how old they are.
Practical information
Figures checked on 8 October 2026 on the official website of the Centre des monuments nationaux, paris-arc-de-triomphe.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Photographs: the façade by dconvertini (CC BY-SA 2.0); the relief of La Marseillaise by Jebulon (CC0); the view from the terrace by Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0); the flame of the Unknown Soldier by David McSpadden (CC BY 2.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
