Arc de Triomphe

Napoleon Bonaparte had a flair for the dramatic, promising his soldiers after the 1805 victory at Austerlitz that they would return home walking beneath triumphal arches. He originally wanted this enormous monument dropped right on the former site of the Bastille in the east of Paris. His minister of the interior, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, quietly pointed out the exorbitant cost of that location and steered the project toward the Place de l'Étoile in the west. This empty, star-shaped intersection offered much better lines of sight. Architect Jean-François Chalgrin won the commission, but only after a bitter feud with his collaborator Jean-Arnaud Raymond over whether the columns should be freestanding or attached to the walls. The argument became so heated that Raymond was forced to resign. Laying the first stone in August 1806 generated almost no public interest, and the building process dragged on for years. By 1810, the stone pillars barely cleared a few metres. Napoleon was about to marry Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria and wanted her to enter the capital through his grand project, which posed a significant logistical problem. Chalgrin solved this by erecting a full-scale replica out of timber scaffolding, stucco, and painted canvas. The imperial procession passed beneath this convincing illusion, though the architect himself died the following year with the real stone structure nowhere near finished. Regimes rose and fell while the site sat incomplete. Construction stalled entirely after the disastrous Russian campaign and the fall of the Empire. The masonry only saw fresh mortar when King Louis XVIII decided to commandeer the project for his own military campaigns in Spain. It fell to King Louis-Philippe to finally finish the job in 1836, dedicating the stonework to all who fought for France between 1792 and 1815. A massive military review was planned for the unveiling on the 29th of July. After surviving an assassination attempt just weeks prior, the king decided to stay home. Two government ministers quietly slipped out at seven in the morning and unveiled the massive block of stone with zero fanfare. Despite that hushed opening, the arch soon became the default stage for the most theatrical moments in Paris. Napoleon's ashes passed beneath the vault in 1840 on their way to Les Invalides. When Victor Hugo died in 1885, his coffin lay in state right on the pavement, shrouded in black crepe, before moving to the Panthéon. The monument has even seen airborne traffic. In August 1919, pilot Charles Godefroy steered a Nieuport 17 biplane straight through the central gap, capturing the public imagination and securing a famous photograph by Jacques Mortane. Today, the eternal flame over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier requires a daily relighting ceremony at half past six in the evening. To reach that ritual, modern crowds shuffle through a slightly cramped pedestrian tunnel to safely bypass the roaring traffic outside, emerging right beside the heavy carved masonry.