Musée de l'Armée

The Musée de l'Armée occupies the Hôtel des Invalides, the veterans' hospital and barracks complex commissioned by Louis XIV in 1670, and holds roughly 500,000 objects spanning medieval armour to the Second World War. The collection includes one of the world's largest armour and edged-weapons rooms, Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign tent and personal effects, and an extensive department covering both world wars, including uniforms, weaponry, and the De Gaulle historial multimedia exhibit added in 2008. The museum's centrepiece, the Dôme des Invalides, houses Napoleon's tomb: a sequence of six nested coffins inside a red quartzite sarcophagus beneath Jules Hardouin-Mansart's gilded dome, completed in 1706 and among the most recognisable landmarks in Paris. Curatorially the museum is organised both chronologically and by department, with the medieval and Renaissance arms collection, the Napoleonic wing, and the two World War departments each following their own narrative arc, so visitors can follow either the whole sweep of French military history or focus on a single era. The Baroque structure of the Hôtel des Invalides itself, with its formal courtyards and the soldiers' church of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides, remains largely as built, while the museum's interior galleries were substantially modernised in phases through the 2000s to improve lighting, climate control for textiles, and multilingual interpretation. The site still functions in part as a veterans' institution, which shapes the museum's tone as one of commemoration alongside display.