🏛️ Arc de Triomphe

Read the surfaces closely and the arch becomes a carved index of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The names of 128 battles fought between 1792 and 1815 line the inner walls of the vault, while the pillars carry the names of some 660 commanders — among them 558 generals of the Republic and the Empire. Look for the ones that are underlined: those mark the officers killed in action, a distinction most visitors miss entirely. Thirty sculpted shields ring the attic above, each engraved with a single major victory — Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram, Marengo — so the whole upper storey reads as a roll call of the campaigns that paid for the monument.

Beneath the vault, the twentieth century added its own inscription. A bronze plaque set flush into the pavement over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier reads Ici repose un soldat français mort pour la patrie 1914–1918 — "here lies a French soldier who died for the homeland." It is the most-visited spot on the monument, and the reason the eternal flame beside it has not been allowed to go out since it was first lit in 1923, the first such flame rekindled in Europe since antiquity.

Jean Chalgrin modelled the arch on the Roman Arch of Titus but built it at roughly twice the size: 50 metres tall, 45 metres wide and 22 metres deep, with a central vault soaring nearly 30 metres. Four monumental sculptural groups anchor the pillars, and a good guide names each in turn. Facing the Champs-Élysées, François Rude's Le Départ de 1792 — universally known as La Marseillaise — shows a winged Liberty screaming the volunteers of the Revolution into battle; beside it, Jean-Pierre Cortot's Le Triomphe de 1810 crowns Napoleon in Roman dress. On the avenue de la Grande-Armée side, Antoine Étex carved the darker bookends, La Résistance de 1814 and La Paix de 1815.

Above the groups, a continuous frieze wraps the whole monument with hundreds of figures marching off to war and returning in triumph, while six large relief panels record set-piece episodes such as the fall of Alexandria and the Battle of Aboukir. The climb to the top is a 284-step spiral staircase — there is no public elevator, and the lift that exists is reserved for visitors with reduced mobility — and the terrace 46 metres up opens the classic Paris panorama: straight down the Champs-Élysées toward the Louvre Museum one way and out to the towers of La Défense the other, best photographed in the hour before sunset.