After Austerlitz, on 2 December 1805, Napoleon promised his soldiers they would come home under arches of triumph. He signed the decree on 18 February 1806, and ground was broken on 15 August that year — his thirty-seventh birthday. The arch was finished in 1836. He had been dead for fifteen years.
He only ever saw a fake one
In 1810 Napoleon was bringing his new empress, Marie-Louise, into Paris in ceremonial procession, and the arch was nowhere near complete.
So a full-scale mock-up in wood and painted canvas was put up on the site, and the imperial couple passed beneath that. It is the only version Napoleon ever saw.
He died on Saint Helena in 1821. The finished arch was completed in 1836 under the July Monarchy, and in December 1840 his remains passed under it for real, on the way to Les Invalides. He went through it once, in a coffin.
It was nearly at the Bastille
There was a serious argument about where to put it.
The Interior Minister, Jean-Baptiste Nompère de Champagny, wanted the Place de la Bastille, for the revolutionary associations. The architects Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and Jean-Arnaud Raymond objected that the irregular street pattern there would wreck the neoclassical geometry.
On 9 May 1806 Napoleon sided with the architects, and chose the western end of the Champs-Élysées — which also gave him a clean sightline from his residence at the Tuileries.
That decision created the Axe historique, the straight line that now runs from the Louvre courtyard through the Tuileries, up the Champs-Élysées, through this arch and out to the towers of La Défense.
The elephant
In 1758, half a century earlier, the architect Charles-François Ribart de Chamoust submitted a 100-page proposal to Louis XV for what should close the western view of the Champs-Élysées.
It was a building in the shape of a giant elephant, over 25 metres tall, on a colonnaded base. Inside were circular salons on three levels, an early form of air conditioning, and furniture that folded into the walls. Visitors would enter by a spiral staircase descending from the animal's belly. The trunk was engineered as a drainage spout for a fountain.
The King turned it down, apparently reading it as a joke at Hannibal's expense rather than a tribute. The research rates the account high confidence. There is a version of Paris with an elephant at the top of the Champs-Élysées.
There is no steel in it
A persistent modern assumption is that something this size must have a hidden metal frame.
It does not. The Arc de Triomphe is pure load-bearing masonry — Lutetian limestone and Château-Landon stone, held up by weight distribution and classical engineering, with no iron or steel in the core structure.
The flame
Beneath the vault is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, interred on 28 January 1921, standing for the roughly 1.4 million French dead of the First World War. The slab reads ICI REPOSE UN SOLDAT FRANÇAIS MORT POUR LA PATRIE 1914–1918.
The Flame of Remembrance was lit on 11 November 1923 by the Minister of War, André Maginot. It was the first eternal flame in Western Europe since the sacred fire of the Vestal Virgins was extinguished in 391 AD.
It has been ceremonially rekindled every single evening at 6.30pm by associations of veterans, without interruption — including throughout the German occupation of Paris. If you are here in the early evening, this is the thing to stay for. It is not a tourist event.
Two things that came from that flame
Jacqueline Kennedy attended the ceremony during a state visit in 1961 and was deeply affected by it. It is the direct inspiration for the eternal flame at President Kennedy's grave at Arlington.
And on 14 July 1919, at the victory parade, the pilots were ordered to march on foot with the infantry, which they took as an insult to their service. Charles Godefroy answered it by flying a Nieuport biplane straight through the arch. There is film of it.
Details in the stone
- One hundred granite bollards ring the monument, joined by heavy cast-iron chains. They were put in under the July Monarchy to stand for the Hundred Days — Napoleon's escape from Elba to his defeat at Waterloo. The research rates that medium confidence.
- 660 generals are named on the inner walls, and the list was fought over. Several were left off for political reasons as regimes changed.
Four things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| Napoleon saw the finished arch | False | He saw a wood-and-canvas mock-up in 1810 and died in 1821. It was completed in 1836 |
| There is a steel frame inside | False | Entirely load-bearing stone masonry, with no iron or steel core |
| The flame has burned since Roman times | False | Lit on 11 November 1923. The Vestal fire it evokes went out in 391 AD |
| It was always meant for this spot | Nearly not | The Place de la Bastille was seriously proposed; the architects won the argument on geometry |
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for Arc de Triomphe — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.