Musée de l'Armée — Les Invalides & Napoleon's Tomb

Louis XIV commissioned Les Invalides in 1670 as a hospital and retirement home for wounded and elderly soldiers — a strikingly progressive gesture for its time — and construction of the complex, including Jules Hardouin-Mansart's soaring gilded dome, continued into the early 1700s. The dome remains one of the most recognisable silhouettes on the Paris skyline, visible from across the city.

The Musée de l'Armée occupies much of the complex and covers French military history from antiquity through the World Wars, with strong armour, weaponry and uniform collections, but the building's single most visited feature sits beneath the dome itself: the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose remains were returned from Saint Helena in 1840 and finally interred here in 1861 in a monumental red quartzite sarcophagus, itself set within six further nested coffins, ringed by a circular gallery of relief sculptures depicting his reign.