The Golden Dome & Napoleon's Tomb
Why is it significant?
Stop in the round square and look up at the dome. It rises above columns and statues and a crown of carved trophies, and the whole of it is covered in gold, flashing even on a grey day. This is the Dôme des Invalides, and under it lies the man you met as a cadet a few streets back.
Key Facts
| Place | The Golden Dome & Napoleon's Tomb |
|---|---|
| Address | Place Vauban, 75007 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85400, 2.31250 |
| Part of Walk | Iron, Glory and Gold: The Eiffel Tower, Trocadéro & Les Invalides in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in the round square and look up at the dome. It rises above columns and statues and a crown of carved trophies, and the whole of it is covered in gold, flashing even on a grey day. This is the Dôme des Invalides, and under it lies the man you met as a cadet a few streets back.
The church was built for Louis XIV by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the architect of Versailles, and finished in 1706. It was meant as a royal chapel, perhaps even a tomb for the Bourbon kings, attached to the veterans' hospital you will see next. Instead, history handed it to a different dynasty. The gold you see was renewed for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, with around twelve kilos of gold leaf.
Napoleon died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic in 1821 and was buried there in a valley under a plain slab. Nineteen years later King Louis-Philippe, hoping to borrow some imperial glory, asked Britain to give the body back. On the 15th of December 1840 the coffin was carried through Paris in freezing cold, past hundreds of thousands of people, and brought here. They call it the Return of the Ashes, although there were no ashes. When the coffin was opened on Saint Helena, witnesses said the emperor's face was astonishingly well preserved.
Inside, you look down over a circular balustrade into an open crypt, where a massive sarcophagus of red quartzite stands on a green granite base. Napoleon lies inside it in a series of coffins nested one inside the other, like Russian dolls. Because the tomb sits below floor level, every visitor has to lower their head to see it... and guides love to say that was entirely deliberate.
Around him rest his brothers Joseph and Jérôme, his son, and the hearts and bodies of French marshals. It took twenty years to finish the crypt, and the emperor was moved into his final sarcophagus only in 1861. Now walk east around the corner, to a quiet mansion with a garden full of bronze figures.