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les InvalidesNapoleon Bonapart's Tomb

Les Invalides

military museum
 
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Les Invalides in Paris, France consists of a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement, now containing museums and monuments, all relating to France's military history, as well as an hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's original purpose. It is also the burial site for some of France's war heroes.

Les Invalides

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King Louis XIV initiated the project by an order dated November 24, 1670, as a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers: the name is a shortened form of hôpital des invalides, the hospital for invalids. The architect of Les Invalides was Liberal Bruant. The selected site was suburban in the 17th century. By the time the enlarged project was completed in 1676, the river front measured 196 meters and the complex had fifteen courtyards, the largest being the cour d'honneur ("court of honor") for military parades.

Then it was felt that the veterans required a chapel, in which Jules Hardouin Mansart assisted the aged Bruant, and finished it in 1679 to Bruant's designs after the elder architect's death. Daily attendance was required.

Shortly after the veterans' chapel was completed, Louis XIV had Mansart construct a separate private royal chapel, the church of St. Louis des Invalides, often referred to as the Dôme des Invalides from its most striking feature. Inspired by St. Peter's Basilica in Rome the original for all Baroque domes; it is one of the triumphs of French Baroque architecture. Mansart raises his drum with an attic storey over its main cornice, and employs the paired columns motif in his more complicated rhythmic theme of || u ||. The general program is sculptural but tightly integrated, rich but balanced, consistently carried through capping its vertical thrust firmly with a less emphatically ribbed and hemispherical dome. The domed chapel is centrally placed to dominate the court of honor. It was finished in 1708.

The interior of the dome was painted by Le Brun's disciple Charles de La Fosse (1636 - 1716) with a Baroque illusion of space seen from below (sotto in su perspective, the Italians were calling it). The painting was completed in 1705.

The most notable tomb at Les Invalides is that of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) in the crypt under Mansart's dome. Napoleon was initially interred on Saint Helena, but King Louis-Philippe arranged for his remains to be brought to St Jerome's Chapel in Paris in 1840. A renovation of Les Invalides took many years, but in 1861 Napoleon was moved to the most prominent location under the dome at Les Invalides.

A popular tourist site today, Les Invalides is also the burial site for some of Napoleon's family, for several military officers who served under him, and other French military heroes such as: