You can see the gilded dome of the Invalides from half of Paris: it rises more than 110 metres, and for a long time it was the tallest building in the city. Beneath it lies the tomb of Napoleon, and all around, in the courtyards of the hospital Louis XIV built for his wounded soldiers, is the Musée de l’Armée.
The name is misleading. It is not a museum for uniform enthusiasts: it is a history of France told through objects, from Renaissance armour to an Enigma machine, and it holds paintings by Ingres and Vallotton. And it has a practical advantage that none of the big museums around here offers you: it opens every day, Mondays and Tuesdays included.
The ticket covers the Dôme church with the tomb, the collections, the current exhibition and two more museums inside the complex. The route I suggest has eight stops in chronological order, from the Renaissance to the Second World War, and it ends at the tomb.
How much did the Paris taxis really count in the Battle of the Marne?
Let’s begin!
1. The lion armour
Start in the wing of early arms and armour, from the 13th to the 17th century. The stop is a suit of parade armour from around 1540-1545, by Giovanni Paolo Negroli, a Milanese armourer and master of relief work.
It is called the lion armour because the lion’s head, a symbol of strength, recurs on the helmet, the shoulders, the elbows and the hands. It was not made for fighting: it has no visor and does not protect the legs. It is display armour, inspired by the heroes of antiquity, with its reliefs enriched by inlays of gold and silver.
In all likelihood it belonged to Francis I, king of France. Its proportions match his height, about 1.98 metres, and on the breastplate is the chivalric order of Saint Michael, the king’s own. It reached the museum in 1806, from the armoury of the princes of Condé at Chantilly.
2. The models of fortified towns
Inside the complex is a museum within the museum, covered by the ticket: the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, with the scale models of the fortified towns of France.
The rooms are dimly lit, and the towns emerge from the dark with their walls, houses and the mountains around them. Look for the model of Villefranche-de-Conflent, in the Pyrenees, and examine it closely: it is France seen the way a general saw it, from above and to scale.
3. Ingres’s Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne
In the wing devoted to the period from Louis XIV to Napoleon hangs a painting you know even if you do not know you know it, because it is in every school history book: Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, from 1806.
Napoleon sits facing you, motionless, in the costume of his coronation day. On his head is the laurel crown of the Roman emperors, on his mantle the golden bees he chose as his emblem, in his hands the sceptre topped by a statuette of Charlemagne and the hand of justice; at his side a sword inspired by Charlemagne’s. Every object says the same thing: this power descends from Rome and from the Frankish kings.
Yet in 1806 it was judged shocking, and it went almost a century without being exhibited.
4. The breastplate of carabinier Fauveau
What does a breastplate with a hole in it tell you?
The Battle of Waterloo, on 18 June 1815. This breastplate of iron covered in brass belonged to the carabinier Antoine Fauveau, and in the middle it has a hole, made by a cannonball.
The carabiniers were heavy cavalry, held in reserve. They did not take part in Marshal Ney’s great charge against Wellington’s British, which failed, but straight afterwards they were sent in a last desperate charge. They managed only to dent the British «wall», and half the men were left on the ground. Fauveau was one of them. In front of this case, Waterloo stops being a name.
5. The Marne taxi
In the wing of the two world wars is a small red and black car: a Renault taxi, registration 2862-G7.
In early September 1914 the German army was at the gates of Paris. The city’s military governor, General Gallieni, had the idea of requisitioning the taxis to take reinforcements to the front. On the evening of 6 September, at 22:00, 630 cars were gathered right here, on the esplanade des Invalides, and they carried the soldiers of two infantry regiments, four or five to a car, close to the fighting line.
The museum itself admits it: they counted for little. Those men were few compared with the battle, and most of the troops arrived by train. But the taxis became the symbol of the will to stop the invasion, and that is why one of them is in a museum. The one on display was restored in 2005, in its original colours.
6. Félix Vallotton’s Verdun
A painting with no one in it. In 1917, Félix Vallotton painted the Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest of the First World War, as a clash of forces: beams of coloured light crossing above flames and clouds of gas, and on the left the rain falling diagonally.
Vallotton, the museum’s entry explains, uses the tools of Cubism to paint a war in which man has disappeared behind the machines. The full title is almost a caption: Verdun. War Picture Interpreted, Black, Blue and Red Coloured Projections, Devastated Land, Clouds of Gas.
7. The armistice bugle and the Enigma machine
Two small objects close the two wars. The first is a bugle, the French army clairon. On 7 November 1918, at La Capelle, Corporal Pierre Sellier sounded the ceasefire from the running board of the first car of the German envoys arriving to negotiate the armistice. The dedication is still engraved on the bell: «Clairon de la victoire».
Who were the first to break the Enigma machine?
Not Alan Turing. The Enigma machine on display here is one of those the German army used to encrypt its messages, with three rotors for the army and four for the navy. The first to decipher its messages were three Polish mathematicians, Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski, and Turing at Bletchley Park built on their work. The same wing also holds a wartime BBC microphone.
8. The Dôme and Napoleon’s tomb
Go out and cross the courtyard to the south. The Dôme is the church by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, finished in 1706, and to me it is the finest piece of architecture at the Invalides.
Go in and lean over the balustrade. The tomb lies in an open circular crypt under the dome, and you look at it from above: a huge sarcophagus of red stone on a base of green stone, in the middle of a mosaic floor. Napoleon’s remains came back from Saint Helena in 1840, and since 1861 they have rested here. Then go down the stairs and walk around it: the gallery that surrounds the crypt is decorated with large white marble reliefs.
Practical information
Data checked on 22 September 2026 on the official website musee-armee.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The Musée Rodin is five minutes away on foot, on the other side of the boulevard des Invalides, and it costs less with the joint ticket. David’s painting of Napoleon’s coronation, the one with Joséphine kneeling, is at the Louvre. And from the esplanade des Invalides, walking along the Seine, in twenty minutes you reach the Musée du quai Branly. And if, after the Second World War rooms, you want to see where that story ends, at Denfert-Rochereau there is the Musée de la Libération, free, with Rol-Tanguy’s command post twenty metres below the square. And if what interests you about France’s wars is the sea rather than the land, the ship models and the figureheads are at the Musée national de la Marine, at the Trocadéro.
Photo credits: Dôme des Invalides by Thesupermat (CC BY-SA 3.0); Napoleon’s tomb by Shadowgate (CC BY 2.0); lion armour by Emeric84 (CC BY-SA 3.0); Marne taxi by G. Garitan (CC BY-SA 4.0); Fauveau’s breastplate by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); Musée des Plans-Reliefs by Ziko (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. Ingres’s portrait and Vallotton’s Verdun are in the public domain.
