Arc de Triomphe

The story

The arch stands on a low hill where twelve avenues meet. It is fifty metres high and forty-five wide, which made it the largest arch of its kind in the world when it was built. It took thirty years, three kings and one emperor to finish.

The work ran from 1806 to 1836. In China these are the reigns of Jiaqing and Daoguang of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), the years just before the Opium War.

Close by, with a page of its own: Musée d'Orsay, Sacré-Cœur.

What is here

The ground under the arch is free. The ticket is for the stair, the room at the top and the roof.

If you have one minute

Under the vault, by the flame

Look down. A bronze slab is set in the paving, and at its head a flame burns in a bronze shield shaped like the mouth of a cannon. The words say: here lies a French soldier who died for his country, 1914–1918.

Nobody knows who he is. That is the point. About 1.4 million French soldiers died in that war, and several hundred thousand of them were never identified. He stands for all of those.

The flame was lit on 11 November 1923. Every evening at half past six, veterans and schoolchildren come to turn it up again. They have not missed one evening, not even the day the German army entered Paris in 1940.

Now look up. The walls inside the arch are covered with names: generals of the Revolution and of Napoleon. Where a name is underlined, the man died in battle.

Things people often get wrong

"Napoleon rode through it in triumph." He never saw it. When he married in 1810 the walls were a few metres high, and a full-size model of wood and painted cloth was put up over them for the day. He passed under the finished arch only in 1840, in his coffin.

"The parade on 14 July goes through the arch." It starts in front of it and goes round. Since the Unknown Soldier was buried, troops do not walk over him. The last parade to pass under was the victory march of 14 July 1919.

"You can cross the road to reach it." Do not try. Twelve avenues pour into the circle and there are no lanes. A tunnel leads under the road from the top of the Champs-Élysées.

"There is only one triumphal arch in Paris." There are three on one straight line: a small one by the Louvre, which Napoleon did see finished, this one, and the hollow white cube at La Défense, built in 1989.

People who stood here

• Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor of the French, 1769–1821)After his victory at Austerlitz he told his soldiers they would go home under arches of triumph. He laid down the plan in 1806. On 15 December 1840 his body, brought back from Saint Helena, was drawn under the arch in the snow.
• Jean-François Chalgrin (architect, 1739–1811)He designed it on the model of the arches of Rome, but with no columns, and about twice their size. He died when the walls were five metres high.
• François Rude (sculptor, 1784–1855)He carved the group on the right as you face the arch from the Champs-Élysées: volunteers of 1792 setting off to war under a winged woman who shouts them on. The French call it La Marseillaise. His wife posed for the shouting face.
• Victor Hugo (French writer, author of Les Misérables)His father was one of Napoleon's generals, and his name is not on the walls. Hugo said so in a poem in 1837. On the night of 31 May 1885 Hugo's own coffin lay under the arch, which was hung with black cloth, and two million people came.
• Auguste Thin (soldier, 1899–1982)On 10 November 1920, in the fortress of Verdun, this private of twenty-one was shown eight coffins and given a bunch of flowers. He laid it on the sixth. He said he had added up the figures of his regiment's number, 132.
• Charles Godefroy (pilot, 1888–1958)On 7 August 1919 he flew a small biplane through the arch, with about three metres to spare at each wingtip. The airmen were angry that they had been made to march on foot in the victory parade.
• Charles de Gaulle (leader of Free France, later president)On 26 August 1944, the day after Paris was freed, he relit the flame and then walked down the Champs-Élysées through a million people. The square has carried his name since 1970.
• John and Jacqueline Kennedy (president of the United States and his wife)They stood at the flame on their visit to Paris in 1961. Two years later, when her husband was killed, she asked for a flame like it on his grave at Arlington.
• Erich Maria Remarque (German novelist, author of All Quiet on the Western Front)His novel Arch of Triumph (1945) is about a German doctor hiding in Paris without papers in 1939. It ends in the blackout, with the arch gone into the dark. It was filmed in 1948 with Ingrid Bergman.
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude (artists)Christo first drew the arch wrapped in cloth in 1962, when he was a young refugee from Bulgaria living in a maid's room nearby. It was done in September 2021, sixteen months after his death, with 25,000 square metres of silver-blue fabric and red rope. It stayed sixteen days.
• Tom Cruise (American film actor)In Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) he rides a motorcycle the wrong way round the arch against the traffic, without a helmet. The circle was closed for the shot early on a Sunday morning.

Go deeper: seven stops, from the tunnel to the roof

Stops 1 to 4 are free. Stops 5 to 7 need the ticket.

1. The star

From the air the square is a star with twelve points, which is why Parisians still call it the Étoile. Five roads met here when the arch was built. The other seven were cut in the 1850s, when the city was rebuilt.

Cars entering the circle have right of way over cars already in it, the reverse of nearly every other roundabout in France.

Take the tunnel. Its entrances are on the right-hand pavement at the top of the Champs-Élysées and on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.

2. The four groups

Each leg of the arch carries one great group of figures. On the side of the Champs-Élysées, the right-hand one is Rude's: the Departure of the Volunteers. Look at the order of the men, from the boy at the front to the old man behind, and at the woman above, whose mouth is wide open. You can almost hear her.

The left-hand group shows Napoleon in a toga being crowned by Victory. It is correct, calm and forgotten. Rude's is the one that people remember, and it shows no emperor at all.

On the other side, facing west, are Resistance, for the invasion of 1814, and Peace, for 1815. A monument begun to celebrate victories ends with a defeat and a peace.

3. The tomb and the flame

The soldier was brought here on 11 November 1920 and buried on 28 January 1921. A large flag often hangs in the vault above him.

Round the tomb, set in the ground, are bronze plaques. One marks the return of Alsace and Lorraine in 1918. One gives the words of de Gaulle's radio appeal from London on 18 June 1940.

On 11 November 1940, under German occupation, several thousand students walked up the avenue to this spot with flowers. It was one of the first open acts of defiance in Paris. Many were arrested.

4. The names

On the inner walls are the names of 660 officers, and on the faces of the piers the names of battles. The big shields round the top carry thirty more victories.

Families fought for decades to have a name added. One name that never was added is that of General Hugo, the poet's father.

Je ne regrette rien devant ton mur sublime Que Phidias absent et mon père oublié !

Before your sublime wall I regret nothing but that Phidias is absent and my father forgotten!

Victor Hugo, the last lines of "À l'Arc de Triomphe", 1837, in Les Voix intérieures; our translation

Phidias carved the Parthenon. Hugo is saying the sculpture is not good enough, and his father is missing.

5. The stair

A spiral of 284 steps climbs inside one leg. There is a lift, kept for visitors who cannot manage stairs.

Near the top is a room inside the upper part of the arch, with a small display on how it was built and on the men who are named below.

6. The roof

The roof is a flat terrace. Walk round it and count twelve avenues. To the east the Champs-Élysées runs down to the obelisk, the gardens and the Louvre.

To the west the same straight line runs on to the towers of La Défense and the great hollow cube. The line is eight kilometres long and was begun as a garden path for a king in the 1600s.

The Eiffel Tower is to the south. This is the best high view of Paris that includes it.

7. The same shot, and the sun

The same shot: for the arch square on, as in the opening of many films, stand on the traffic island in the middle of the Champs-Élysées at the first crossing below the arch, and use a long lens. In Breathless (1960) Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg walk down this avenue while she sells newspapers.

Twice a year, for a few evenings around 10 May and 1 August, the sun sets exactly inside the arch as seen from the Champs-Élysées.