From a distance it looks like a Greek temple that has dropped into the middle of Paris: no cross on the roof, no bell tower, just a continuous colonnade running all the way round the building. And for eight years, between 1806 and 1814, there was meant to be no altar inside those columns: Napoleon had requisitioned the building to make a monument to the glory of his Grande Armée, not a church.
The project began as an ordinary church under Louis XV, the Revolution interrupted it halfway through, and when work started again it no longer resembled anything religious. Worship only came back when the Empire fell, and the building you visit today is the compromise between those two ideas, held together by eighty years of building work.
Entry is open and free, every day, 9:30-19:00: there’s no ticket office to work into your itinerary here, but there is a Mass that fills the nave at half past twelve from Monday to Friday, one on Saturday evening and two on Sundays.
What happens to a building whose purpose changes twice before it has even been finished?
Let’s go!
1. Seventy years to decide what it was
Louis XV laid the first stone on 3 August 1763, as part of the redevelopment of the area around what is now place de la Concorde. The architect Contant d’Ivry designed a Latin-cross church with a small dome, but work stopped as early as 1771 because of stability problems. His pupil Guillaume-Martin Couture took the site over in 1777 and redrew it as a Greek-cross temple with a colonnaded portico. Then came the Revolution: in 1791 work stopped altogether, and for fifteen years the future church stood as a ruin of squared stones.
It fell to Napoleon to decide what to do with it: on 2 December 1806 he decreed that the building would become a temple to the glory of his Grande Armée. The competition was won by Pierre Vignon, who threw out the earlier plans and redesigned everything as a classical temple modelled on the Olympieion in Athens. Vignon died in 1828 without seeing the temple finished, and his colleague Jean-Jacques-Marie Huvé carried the work through to the end. In that same 1806, after the victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon had already ordered the Arc de Triomphe for the same army.
2. Why you won’t see a cross
Why does a building dedicated to a saint have no cross on its roof?
Because for years it wasn’t meant to be a church, and the shape never changed afterwards. What you see is a peripteral temple through and through: 52 Corinthian columns, each 20 metres high, surround it on all four sides, and inside you find neither a transept nor side aisles. It measures 108 metres long and 43 wide, and stands 30 metres high: proportions designed for a secular monument, not a neighbourhood church. The City of Paris website puts it bluntly: the Madeleine has neither a cross nor a bell tower.
High up on the pediment there’s a large bas-relief by Philippe-Joseph-Henri Lemaire: the Last Judgement, with Christ at the centre and Mary Magdalene kneeling among the damned, a reminder of her past as a repentant sinner. Below it, cut into the stone, runs the Latin dedication: D.O.M. SVB INVOC. S. M. MAGDALENAE, “to God, the best and greatest, under the invocation of Saint Mary Magdalene”. Between the columns, in the shade, you find the bronze doors. Henri de Triqueti made them between 1834 and 1841, taking his inspiration from Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistery in Florence, and they are bigger than the bronze door of St Peter’s in Rome. They illustrate the Ten Commandments, with one Old Testament episode in each panel.
3. The station Paris never got here
In 1837 the building, still unfinished after seventy years of work, came close to becoming something else entirely: on 16 October 1837 Louis-Philippe approved a plan to make it the terminus of the first railway line in Paris, the one to Saint-Germain. Opposition from the people of the neighbourhood sank the plan, and the station was built a short distance away: it was the beginning of what you know today as gare Saint-Lazare.
The Madeleine kept its religious purpose. A law of 20 March 1842 moved worship into the new church, and on 24 July 1842 the building was inaugurated. The consecration proper, the liturgical ceremony that officially dedicates it to worship, only came on 9 October 1845, performed by Monsignor Affre, Archbishop of Paris: more than three years passed between the opening and the consecration.
4. What it keeps inside
Above the high altar, where you’d normally expect nothing more than a crucifix, there’s an enormous marble sculpture group: The Ravissement of Saint Mary Magdalene, by Charles Marochetti. The sculptor, born Carlo Marochetti in Turin in 1805, worked on it for over a decade and finished it in 1843. Magdalene is lifted upward, her hair loose and the rope belt still around her waist, held up from below by a kneeling angel: it’s the moment of ecstasy that legend gives her in her last years, when she lived as a hermit in Provence.
Look up at the half-dome of the apse and you find another story, this time painted: Jules-Claude Ziegler frescoed it between 1835 and 1837 with the History of Christianity, a sequence of figures that runs right up to the painter’s own day, Napoleon and Pope Pius VII signing the Concordat of 1801 among them. In the same building where the emperor had tried to do away with the Church, the Church paints him signing peace with Rome.
5. The Saint-Saëns and Fauré organ, and the view that ends the visit
Above the entrance, in the gallery, stands the great organ built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1846: it still has 46 of its 48 original stops. Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré both played it as titular organists, and since 1979 the post has been held by François-Henri Houbart. One Sunday a month, at 16:00, the parish puts on a free recital, with a voluntary offering at the end; outside orchestras and choirs also stage paid concerts here, with the price and programme published each time by the individual promoter.
And if you go out and look down the steps, what do you see?
One of the longest vistas in Paris: rue Royale runs straight down to place de la Concorde, with the Luxor obelisk at its centre, and beyond the bridge you can see the colonnaded façade of the Assemblée Nationale, built deliberately in the nineteenth century on the same axis as the Madeleine. Further off, just beyond the obelisk, the gilded dome of the Invalides comes into view. Right on that square, in one of the two twin palaces designed by Gabriel, stands the Hôtel de la Marine, which is worth a stop of its own.
Practical information
Figures checked on 8 October 2026 on the official website lamadeleineparis.fr and on paris.fr. Opening hours and the concert programme change: check again before you leave.
From here on
From the steps of the Madeleine, with the square and the river ahead of you, the most natural move is to keep going to the far end of rue Royale: on place de la Concorde you find the Hôtel de la Marine, whose rooms housed the French Navy for two centuries. And if it’s a Sunday afternoon, it’s worth coming back for the organ recital: the instrument Saint-Saëns and Fauré played isn’t a detail to skip.
Photographs: façade by Callaway Kosine-de Suzannet (CC BY 3.0); nave domes by Mbzt (CC BY 3.0); statue of the Ravissement by Delfin Le Dauphin (CC BY-SA 4.0); view along rue Royale by JLPC (CC BY-SA 3.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
