Iron, Glory and Gold: The Eiffel Tower, Trocadéro & Les Invalides in Paris

From the terrace where human rights were proclaimed to Napoleon's tomb under a golden dome: the tower Paris hated, the parade ground of a revolution, a cadet called Bonaparte, and Rodin's secret garden

Paris · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Palais de Chaillot & the Human Rights Terrace

   Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, 75016 Paris, France

   Listen · 2:27

   Walk out onto the wide stone terrace between the two pale, curving wings of the palace, and there it is, filling the whole sky in front of you... the Eiffel Tower, framed like a picture someone has hung for you on purpose. Everyone gasps here. Go ahead. It is allowed.

   The building around you is the Palais de Chaillot, and it is younger than it looks. It was built for the International Exhibition of 1937, on the foundations of an older and much stranger palace, the Trocadéro of 1878, a Moorish fantasy with two minaret-like towers that Parisians had grown tired of. Look up at the façades and you will find lines of golden letters. They were written by the poet Paul Valéry, and one of them warns, roughly, that it depends on the passer-by whether this building is a tomb or a treasure.

   The name Trocadéro has nothing to do with Paris at all. It comes from a fort near Cádiz in Spain, captured by French troops in 1823, and a royal government that wanted a victory to celebrate gave its name to this hill. And at dawn on the 23rd of June 1940, a few days after the fall of France, Adolf Hitler stood exactly where you are standing, on his only brief visit to the city, and was photographed with the tower behind him. It is one of the most chilling tourist photos ever taken.

   Eight years later this same building gave the world its answer. In 1948 the young United Nations held its General Assembly inside the Palais de Chaillot, and on the 10th of December it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt had steered the drafting, and the French jurist René Cassin shaped much of the text. That is why the terrace under your feet is officially called the Esplanade of Liberties and Human Rights.

   So this is a place of two photographs... one of conquest, one of a promise. Now take the steps down through the gardens towards the river, and stop beside the long stretch of fountains, where in 1937 two dictatorships stared at each other across the water.

2. 2. Warsaw Fountain & the Pavilions of 1937

   Jardins du Trocadéro, Avenue Gustave V de Suède, 75016 Paris, France

   Stand beside the long rectangular basin running down the slope, with its row of stone pools stepping towards the Seine. On a summer afternoon the water cannons fire jets in a great horizontal volley towards the river, and children squeal at the spray. This is the Warsaw Fountain, and it is the most cheerful place on this walk to tell one of its darkest stories.

   In the summer of 1937 this whole slope belonged to the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life. Forty-odd nations built pavilions along the river, and the organisers made a decision that sounds unbelievable now... they placed the pavilion of Stalin's Soviet Union and the pavilion of Hitler's Germany directly facing each other, right at the foot of this hill, on either side of the axis that runs to the bridge.

   The Soviet building was crowned by a huge stainless steel statue, the Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, two figures striding forward with a hammer and a sickle raised high. Opposite stood Albert Speer's German tower, a block of stone pillars topped by an eagle with a swastika. Speer later claimed in his memoirs that he had sneaked a look at the Soviet plans and designed his tower as a wall to stop those charging figures in their tracks. Two buildings, glaring at each other across a fountain... two years before the war.

   And a short way off, in the pavilion of the Spanish Republic, then fighting for its life in a civil war, hung a brand-new painting in black, white and grey. Pablo Picasso had made it in a few weeks after German planes bombed a Basque town that April. It was called Guernica. Many visitors at the time walked past it unimpressed. Today it is one of the most famous paintings on earth.

   The pavilions were all taken down when the fair closed. The steel couple went home and still stands in Moscow. Only the palace above you, and this fountain, remain from that strange summer. Carry on down to the river and walk out onto the bridge, straight towards the iron feet of the tower.

3. 3. Pont d'Iéna: Napoleon's Victory Bridge

   Pont d'Iéna, 75016 Paris, France

   Step onto the bridge and stop halfway across. In front of you the tower rises so close that you have to tip your head right back. Behind you the palace spreads its arms. And beneath you the Seine slides past with tour boats turning in their own wake.

   This is the Pont d'Iéna, begun under Napoleon in 1808 and named after the Battle of Jena, where in 1806 he crushed the Prussian army. Naming a bridge in the heart of Paris after a defeat of Prussia seemed a fine idea at the time. Look along the sides and you will see carved imperial eagles on the piers, Napoleon's symbol, still keeping watch over the river.

   Then the wheel turned. In 1814 and again in 1815, after Napoleon's fall, Prussian troops occupied Paris, and their commander, Marshal Blücher, had not forgotten Jena. He wanted the bridge blown up, and the story goes that his engineers actually began to lay charges. The restored king, Louis XVIII, is said to have declared that he would have himself carried onto the bridge and sit there, so that if it went up, he would go with it. Whether he really said it or not, the bridge survived, and for a while it was diplomatically renamed after the military school instead.

   At each corner stands a stone horseman, added in the 1850s under Napoleon the Third: a Gaul, a Roman, a Greek and an Arab warrior, each holding a rearing horse. And in 1937, for the exhibition you just heard about, the bridge was widened so that the crowds could flow from one bank to the other. It still carries more pedestrians than almost any bridge in the city, most of them walking backwards, phones raised.

   Notice too how perfectly everything lines up. The palace, the bridge, the tower, the long lawn and the military school beyond it all sit on a single axis, as if one architect had planned it in a day. In fact it took more than a hundred and fifty years. Cross to the other bank and walk in beneath the tower itself.

4. 4. The Eiffel Tower: The Monster Paris Learned to Love

   Avenue Gustave Eiffel, 75007 Paris, France

   Walk in under the tower and stand in the middle, between its four enormous legs, and look straight up into the lattice. From here it is not a postcard any more. It is a machine... a forest of iron girders, criss-crossed and riveted, climbing away from you into the light.

   It was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. The first sketch did not come from Gustave Eiffel at all, but from two engineers in his company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with the architect Stephen Sauvestre softening it with those great arches. Eiffel bought out their rights, put his name and his fortune behind it, and his workers raised it in just over two years: some eighteen thousand iron parts held together by around two and a half million rivets. At three hundred metres it was the tallest structure humans had ever built, and it kept that title for four decades.

   And Paris was horrified. In February 1887, before the tower had risen more than a few metres, a newspaper published a protest signed by artists and writers, among them Guy de Maupassant, the composer Charles Gounod and Charles Garnier, architect of the Opera. They called it useless and monstrous, a gigantic black factory chimney. The legend says Maupassant later lunched regularly in the tower's restaurant, because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it.

   Now look towards the very top. Up there, above the third platform, Eiffel kept a small private apartment, with patterned wallpaper and wooden furniture. Paris society begged for invitations, and he turned nearly all of them down. One guest he did welcome, in September 1889, was Thomas Edison, who brought him a phonograph as a gift.

   The iron breathes, too. In summer heat the top can lean a few centimetres away from the sun, and the whole tower grows a little taller. It is repainted by hand roughly every seven years, in a colour officially called Eiffel Tower brown. Now walk out on the far side, onto the long green lawns, and turn round for the view that saved it.

5. 5. Champ de Mars: Parade Ground of the Revolution

   Champ de Mars, Allée Adrienne Lecouvreur, 75007 Paris, France

   Find a spot on the long lawns, turn round, and take in the whole tower from top to toe. Picnic blankets, a football, a couple taking a hundred selfies... this is the living room of western Paris. But the field itself is older than the tower by more than a century.

   The Champ de Mars, the Field of Mars, was laid out in the 1760s as a drill ground for the cadets of the military school at the far end. In August 1783 it saw something no one had seen before: the physicist Jacques Charles launched the first balloon filled with hydrogen from here. It drifted away for some forty-five minutes and came down in a village north of Paris, where, the story goes, terrified peasants attacked the strange hissing monster with pitchforks.

   Then came the Revolution. On the 14th of July 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Paris held the Festival of the Federation right here. Thousands of volunteers, aristocrats and laundresses side by side, had dug the earth banks around the field by hand in a few days. Hundreds of thousands watched as King Louis XVI swore to uphold the new constitution. It was the last day France felt truly united around him.

   A year later, in July 1791, a crowd gathered here to demand the king's removal, and the National Guard opened fire. Dozens died in what became known as the Champ de Mars massacre. The same lawn has hosted five Universal Exhibitions since then, and in the summer of 2024 it became an Olympic site, with beach volleyball played in a stadium at the tower's foot.

   And the tower itself was only ever meant to be temporary. Eiffel had permission for twenty years, until 1909, after which it could be dismantled. He saved it by making it useful: weather experiments, a wind tunnel, and above all a giant radio antenna. In the First World War its station listened in on enemy messages, and science, not beauty, kept it standing. Now walk the length of the lawns towards the grand building at the far end.

6. 6. École Militaire: Where Cadet Bonaparte Learned War

   1 Place Joffre, 75007 Paris, France

   In front of you rises a long, elegant façade of pale stone, with a central pavilion, tall columns and a square dome above them. It looks more like a palace than a barracks, and that was entirely the point.

   This is the École Militaire, the Military School, founded by King Louis XV in 1751. The idea is usually credited to two unlikely partners: the king's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and the financier Joseph Pâris-Duverney. They wanted a school where the sons of poor noble families could be trained as officers for free. The architect was Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the same man who would later design Place de la Concorde. And because the royal treasury was empty, the money had to be found elsewhere, partly from a lottery and partly from a tax on playing cards. Every game of cards in France was helping to build this.

   In October 1784 a fifteen-year-old cadet from Corsica arrived here, thin, proud, with a heavy accent that the other boys mocked. His name was Napoleone di Buonaparte. Most cadets needed two or three years. He finished in one, and left as a second lieutenant of artillery, ranked forty-second out of fifty-eight... not exactly a star pupil, in the official list.

   A legend claims that one of his teachers wrote in his report that he would go far if circumstances favoured him. Historians doubt the line was ever written. But circumstances did favour him, spectacularly. Barely twenty years later, that same cadet was crowned emperor, and his tomb now lies under the golden dome you will reach at the end of this walk.

   The building is still a military institution today, home to France's senior war college, so you will not get inside. In front of it, on the square, Marshal Joffre sits on his bronze horse, the general who stopped the German advance at the Marne in 1914. Now walk round the side of the school to the semicircular square behind it, where a very different kind of building speaks for peace.

7. 7. Place de Fontenoy & UNESCO

   Place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris, France

   Here the grand royal stone gives way to concrete. On one side of this half-moon square stands the back of the military school, all eighteenth-century dignity. On the other side, across the road, is a curving modernist building raised on concrete stilts. That is the headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations agency for education, science and culture.

   It was inaugurated in 1958, designed by three architects from three countries: the Hungarian-born American Marcel Breuer, the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and the Frenchman Bernard Zehrfuss. From above it forms a three-pointed star, a giant letter Y. Inside and in the gardens hang works by some of the great artists of the century, among them a mural by Picasso, and there is a Japanese garden by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It was meant to be a building where nations met as equals, in the city that had just lived through occupation.

   Now the name of the square. On the 11th of May 1745, at Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium, the French army of Louis XV defeated a coalition of British, Dutch and Hanoverian troops. Legend gives that battle one of history's most famous lines. As the two lines of infantry faced each other, a French officer is said to have raised his hat and called out: Gentlemen of England, fire first. Whether it was courtesy or cunning, since the side that fired first then had to reload under the enemy's volley, nobody can quite agree.

   Look at the street signs around you. The avenues running off this square are named after the men of that day: Avenue de Saxe, after Marshal Maurice de Saxe, who won the battle while so ill he was carried around in a wicker cart, and Avenue de Lowendal, after one of his generals. A whole corner of Paris is a monument to one morning in Flanders.

   From royal victory to world peace, all in one square. Now head east, along the quiet residential streets, towards the shining golden dome you can already see above the rooftops.

8. 8. The Golden Dome & Napoleon's Tomb

   Place Vauban, 75007 Paris, France

   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.

9. 9. Musée Rodin: The Thinker's Garden at Hôtel Biron

   77 Rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, France

   Through the railings of the garden, among the roses and clipped trees, you can glimpse a dark bronze man sitting on a rock, chin on his hand, lost in thought. Yes, that is The Thinker, and he has one of the most beautiful gardens in Paris all to himself.

   The mansion behind him is the Hôtel Biron, built in the 1720s for a financier who had made a dizzying fortune in the great speculation bubble of John Law's bank. It later took its name from a duke of Biron, a passionate gardener. In the nineteenth century it became a convent school for girls from wealthy families, run by nuns. Then, in the early 1900s, the French state took the building, and while it decided what to do with it, the empty rooms were rented out cheaply.

   And who moved in? Some of the most famous artists of the age. The young poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who had worked as Rodin's secretary, took a room here and wrote to his old employer about this wonderful place. Henri Matisse taught painting here. The dancer Isadora Duncan rehearsed here, and the teenage Jean Cocteau had a room too. And Auguste Rodin, already the most celebrated sculptor in the world, took over the ground floor and filled the garden with his work.

   Rodin made the French state an offer. He would give everything, his sculptures, his drawings, his collections, if they would turn the mansion into a museum of his work. Politicians argued for years. Some found his naked figures scandalous. The deal was finally accepted in 1916, Rodin died in November 1917, and the museum opened in 1919. He never saw it.

   If you go in one day, look for The Gates of Hell, a giant bronze doorway crawling with tormented figures, which he worked on for more than thirty years. The Thinker was born there, sitting above the door, meant to be the poet Dante contemplating his own creation. Now walk north along the boulevard and turn left, to the grand front of the old soldiers' home.

10. 10. Hôtel des Invalides: Louis XIV's Home for Old Soldiers

    129 Rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris, France

    Face the immense façade, nearly two hundred metres of stone, with rows of cannon lined up along the moat in front of it like sleeping dogs. It looks like a palace. It was built as a home for old and wounded soldiers... and it still is one.

    Before Louis XIV, a soldier who lost a leg or simply grew too old to fight was often left to beg in the street. In 1670 the Sun King decided that this was unworthy of his glory, and ordered a royal hospital for veterans. The architect Libéral Bruant built it in record time, and the first residents moved in around 1674. At its peak it housed several thousand men, with workshops, a church, kitchens and a strict, almost monastic routine. To this day a part of the complex is a working hospital for disabled veterans.

    Walk into the main courtyard one day and look up at the dormer windows on the roof. On one of them the sculptor carved a wolf peering out over the courtyard. The story goes that it is a pun on the name of the powerful war minister Louvois, who ran the project: loup voit, the wolf sees. A minister who was not allowed to put his name on the king's building found another way to sign it.

    Fast forward to the morning of the 14th of July 1789. A crowd of Parisians looking for weapons swarmed in here and carried off tens of thousands of muskets from the cellars. But muskets need powder, and the powder was kept somewhere else... in a fortress on the other side of the city called the Bastille. So in a sense, the French Revolution started its most famous day right here.

    Today the buildings also hold the Army Museum, one of the largest military museums in the world, with armour, cannons and Napoleon's own grey coat and famous hat. Look north and the green esplanade runs all the way to the river, one of the grandest open spaces in Paris. Now leave the soldiers behind and walk west along the Rue de Grenelle to the last stop, a street where Paris simply goes shopping for dinner.

11. 11. Rue Cler: A Village Market Street

    Rue Cler, 75007 Paris, France

    Turn into the narrow street and the grand monuments suddenly vanish. Instead there are crates of peaches and apricots stacked on the pavement, a fishmonger's ice glittering in the window, rounds of cheese stacked to the ceiling and the smell of warm bread drifting out of a doorway. Welcome to Rue Cler, where the most elegant arrondissement in Paris does its daily shopping.

    The street is named after a soldier, of course, this close to the Invalides. General Jean-Joseph Cler was killed at the Battle of Magenta in northern Italy in 1859, fighting for Napoleon the Third, and this whole corner of Paris is full of streets named after officers and battles. But very little about Rue Cler today feels military. Much of it is closed to cars, and the rhythm is set by delivery vans in the early morning and by queues at the bakery just before lunch.

    This is the place to understand how Parisians actually eat. Nobody does one big supermarket shop. You buy bread at one counter, often twice a day, cheese at another, fruit from a third, and a bottle of wine from the shop on the corner, and you chat with every one of them. The cheesemonger will ask when you plan to eat it, tonight or on Sunday, and choose a different piece accordingly. Shopkeepers here know which neighbour likes a well-done baguette and which one wants it pale.

    Watch the old ladies of the quarter with their wheeled shopping trolleys. Many of them have lived in these streets for decades, in apartments with views of the tower, and they navigate the morning rush with the precision of generals. Do not get between one of them and the last tarte aux fraises.

    You began this walk on a terrace where the rights of every human being were proclaimed, and passed a tower, a cadet, an emperor and a sculptor. It is only fitting to end where ordinary Paris simply lives. Pick up something to eat, wander back towards the Champ de Mars, and find a spot on the grass in front of the tower... that is the most Parisian dinner there is.