Arc de Triomphe

Based on Wikipedia: Arc de Triomphe

The Sword That Broke on the Day of Verdun

On the day the Battle of Verdun began in 1916—one of the bloodiest confrontations in human history, where hundreds of thousands would die—something strange happened at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The sword held by the allegorical figure of the Republic in one of the monument's great sculptural groups snapped off and fell.

Workers rushed to cover the damage with tarpaulins. Not because they were worried about the sculpture. They were worried about what people would think it meant.

This is the kind of monument the Arc de Triomphe is: one where a broken stone sword could seem like an omen from the gods, where the line between art and prophecy feels thin, where a nation's entire sense of itself gets carved into limestone and displayed at the center of its capital city.

An Arch Built for a Man Who Never Saw It Finished

Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned the Arc de Triomphe in 1806, fresh off his crushing victory at Austerlitz. He was at the peak of his power, master of most of Europe, and he wanted something to match his ambitions. Not just any triumphal arch, but the largest one the world had ever seen.

The Romans had invented the triumphal arch as a form—most famously the Arch of Titus in Rome, which commemorates the conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Napoleon's architects, led by Jean-François Chalgrin, took that ancient model and supersized it. The Arc de Triomphe stands nearly 50 meters tall and 45 meters wide. For comparison, the Arch of Titus is about 15 meters tall. Napoleon wasn't interested in subtlety.

But here's the irony: Napoleon never saw it finished.

Just laying the foundations took two years. By 1810, when Napoleon wanted to bring his new bride Marie-Louise of Austria into Paris through the western approach, the arch was nowhere near complete. So he had workers build a full-scale wooden mockup, essentially a theatrical prop, so the Empress could pass under something that looked like a triumphal arch even though the real one was still just a construction site.

The architect Chalgrin died in 1811. Napoleon himself was defeated and exiled by 1815. The monument sat unfinished during the Bourbon Restoration, with the returned monarchy showing little enthusiasm for completing a giant tribute to the man they'd replaced. Construction didn't resume until 1823, and the arch wasn't completed until 1836, under King Louis-Philippe—thirty years after Napoleon ordered it built, and fifteen years after he died in exile on the remote island of Saint Helena.

The Emperor's Last Parade

Napoleon did eventually pass under the Arc de Triomphe. It just took a while.

On December 15, 1840, nearly two decades after his death, Napoleon's remains were brought back to France from Saint Helena. The funeral procession passed under the completed arch on its way to Les Invalides, where his body still rests today in an elaborate tomb. The man who commissioned the monument as a celebration of his living glory finally saw it—as a corpse making its last journey through the city he once ruled.

The final cost of construction came to about 10 million francs, which translates to roughly 65 million euros or 75 million dollars in modern currency. But cost is a strange thing to measure for a monument like this. What's the price of a symbol?

Where Twelve Roads Meet

To understand the Arc de Triomphe, you have to understand where it sits.

The monument stands at the center of the Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly called the Place de l'Étoile—the Place of the Star. The name comes from the configuration of twelve grand avenues that radiate outward from the circular plaza, creating a star pattern when viewed from above. The most famous of these avenues is the Champs-Élysées, which runs eastward toward the Louvre.

This isn't just impressive urban design. It's the centerpiece of what's called the Axe historique, or historic axis—a deliberate sequence of monuments stretching in a straight line from the courtyard of the Louvre, through the Tuileries Garden, up the Champs-Élysées, through the Arc de Triomphe, and continuing westward to the modern Grande Arche in the La Défense business district. It's one of the most ambitious pieces of urban planning in any city, a four-mile line of symbolic architecture cutting through the heart of Paris.

The Arc de Triomphe sits at the exact point where three of Paris's administrative districts—called arrondissements—meet: the 8th to the east, the 16th to the south and west, and the 17th to the north. Paving stones in different colors trace the star pattern across the plaza, with each point reaching toward the center of one of the twelve avenues. If you stand at the arch and look down any of these roads, you're looking down a corridor that stretches for kilometers, perfectly aligned with the monument at its hub.

A Stone Textbook of French Military History

The Arc de Triomphe isn't just big. It's covered in stories.

On the attic—the upper section of the monument, above the main frieze—thirty shields are engraved with the names of major French victories from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Battles like Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram. On the inside walls, the names of 660 military officers are inscribed, including 558 generals who served under Napoleon. Those who died in battle have their names underlined.

The most striking features are the four massive sculptural groups at the base of the arch, one on each pillar. Three of them commemorate specific moments in Napoleon's career: The Triumph of 1810, celebrating the Treaty of Schönbrunn; The Resistance of 1814, commemorating France's defense against the allied invasion; and The Peace of 1815, marking the Treaty of Paris that ended the wars.

But the fourth and most famous sculpture isn't about Napoleon at all.

It's called The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, but everyone calls it La Marseillaise, after the French national anthem. Created by the sculptor François Rude, it depicts the moment when ordinary citizens rallied to defend the young French Republic against the invading armies of monarchist Europe. At the top of the composition, a winged figure representing Liberty calls the volunteers forward, her mouth open in a war cry, her sword raised.

This is the sword that broke in 1916.

The face of Liberty from this sculpture was later used as the design for the belt buckle of the Marshal of France, the highest military rank in the French army. During World War I, the image was used on recruitment posters and war bond campaigns. A sculpture from 1836, depicting events from 1792, was still doing propaganda work in 1915.

Flying Through the Arch

On August 7, 1919, three weeks after the Paris victory parade celebrating the end of World War I, a pilot named Charles Godefroy did something that seemed impossible. He flew a Nieuport biplane—a small, nimble fighter aircraft—directly through the main vault of the Arc de Triomphe.

The vault is about 29 meters high and 15 meters wide. The wingspan of a Nieuport biplane is about 8 meters. That leaves very little margin for error, especially when you're flying through an enclosed space with stone walls on every side and unpredictable air currents swirling through the passage.

Godefroy wasn't actually the pilot originally chosen for this stunt. That was Jean Navarre, a famous French ace who had shot down twelve German aircraft during the war. But Navarre died on July 10, 1919, when he crashed his plane near Villacoublay while practicing for the flight. Godefroy took his place and succeeded where Navarre never got the chance to try.

The entire flight was captured on newsreel film, which is why we have clear footage of it today. Godefroy was never officially punished for the unauthorized stunt—the authorities seemed to recognize that prosecuting a war hero for a daring act of aviation bravado in the immediate aftermath of victory would be poor politics.

The Tomb That Changed Everything

After World War I, something changed about the Arc de Triomphe. It stopped being just a monument to French military glory and became something more solemn: a memorial to the dead.

On November 11, 1920—the second anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war—the body of an unknown French soldier was interred beneath the arch. The original plan had been to bury him in the Panthéon, the traditional resting place for French national heroes. But a public letter-writing campaign convinced the government that the Arc de Triomphe was the right location.

An eternal flame burns at the tomb, rekindled every evening at 6:30 PM in a ceremony that has continued for over a century. The inscription on the slab reads, in French: "Here rests a French soldier who died for the Fatherland, 1914-1918."

This tomb changed the protocol for military parades. Before 1920, victorious armies would march through the arch as a symbol of triumph. After the interment of the Unknown Soldier, all parades—even victory celebrations—go around the arch rather than through it. When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, even Adolf Hitler observed this custom when he visited the monument. When Charles de Gaulle led the liberation parade in 1944, he did the same. The tomb made the space beneath the arch sacred ground.

An Eternal Flame Travels to America

In June 1961, President John F. Kennedy visited Paris with his wife Jacqueline. They laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and stood before the eternal flame with President Charles de Gaulle.

Two and a half years later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

When planning her husband's burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Jacqueline Kennedy remembered that flame in Paris. She requested that an eternal flame be placed at the President's grave—the first eternal flame at any grave in Arlington. She personally lit it during the funeral ceremony on November 25, 1963.

Today, millions of visitors see that flame at Kennedy's grave. Few of them know that it exists because a young widow remembered standing in the cold November air of Paris, watching firelight flicker beneath a triumphal arch, and thought her husband deserved the same kind of memorial.

Taller Arches, Different Stories

For over a century, the Arc de Triomphe was the tallest triumphal arch in the world. That changed in 1938, when Mexico completed the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City, which stands 67 meters high compared to the Arc's 50 meters. But the Mexican monument started life as an unfinished legislative palace and was only converted into a revolutionary memorial later—it's more of a repurposed building than a purpose-built arch.

A more direct challenger appeared in 1982: the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, North Korea. It was explicitly modeled on the Paris original and built slightly taller at 60 meters. The North Korean government commissioned it to commemorate Kim Il-sung's resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II. It's one of many examples of how authoritarian regimes in the 20th century borrowed the visual vocabulary of Napoleonic glory to legitimize their own rule.

The Grande Arche de la Défense, completed in Paris in 1989, is technically an arch and stands 110 meters tall. But it's really a modernist office building in the shape of a hollow cube, designed to complete the Axe historique rather than to celebrate military victory. Whether you count it as a triumphal arch depends on how strictly you define the category.

Wrapped in Silver and Blue

For two weeks in September 2021, visitors to Paris saw something unprecedented: the Arc de Triomphe wrapped in silvery-blue fabric and red rope, looking like an enormous gift package sitting at the heart of the city.

This was the posthumous realization of a project that artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude had first conceived in 1962. For nearly sixty years, they worked to get permission to wrap the monument, creating countless drawings, models, and proposals. Both artists died before the project was completed—Jeanne-Claude in 2009, Christo in 2020—but their team carried it forward according to their plans.

The wrapping used 25,000 square meters of recyclable polypropylene fabric and 3,000 meters of red rope. The entire installation took 12 weeks to construct and was on display for just 16 days before being removed. It cost about 14 million euros, entirely funded by the sale of Christo's preparatory artwork rather than public money.

Some Parisians were outraged by the project. Others loved it. But for those two weeks, the Arc de Triomphe did something it rarely does: it looked new. After 185 years of being the same immutable stone monument, it became strange again, a thing you had to look at twice to understand.

The Yellow Vests and the Ransacked Museum

Not all encounters with the Arc de Triomphe have been peaceful.

In late 2018, during the yellow vest protests that swept across France in response to fuel tax increases and economic inequality, demonstrators descended on the monument. They sprayed graffiti on the stone surfaces, smashed displays, and ransacked the small museum inside the arch. The image of protesters climbing on the monument, with "Macron resign" spray-painted nearby, became one of the defining visuals of the movement.

This wasn't the first time the arch had been caught up in political violence. In 1995, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria planted a bomb near the monument as part of a broader campaign against French targets; the explosion wounded 17 people.

Monuments to national glory have a way of becoming targets when people feel that the nation has failed them.

When France Won the World Cup

But the Arc de Triomphe has also been the site of pure celebration.

On July 12, 1998, France hosted the FIFA World Cup final at the Stade de France and defeated Brazil 3-0. Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, scored two goals and became an instant national hero. That night, images of the players and celebratory messages were projected onto the Arc de Triomphe in huge illuminated displays.

Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the Champs-Élysées. The streets around the monument became a sea of blue, white, and red. For one night, the arch built to commemorate long-ago military victories became the backdrop for something gentler: the joy of a country that had just watched its team win at the beautiful game.

The Weight of Stone and Memory

The Arc de Triomphe is, at its core, a very simple thing: a big stone arch with some sculptures on it. You could describe its dimensions (49.54 meters high, 44.82 meters wide, 22.21 meters deep), list its architects (Chalgrin, Goust, Huyot, Blouet), catalog its decorations, and still miss what it means.

It was built to celebrate Napoleon's victories, but he never ruled long enough to see it finished. It bears the names of French generals and battles, but the tomb beneath it honors an unknown soldier whose name was deliberately lost so that he could represent everyone who died unnamed. It was designed as a monument to military triumph, but today every army that passes goes around rather than through, as if the space beneath the arch were too sacred to violate.

In the Substack article that prompted this exploration, the author writes about President Trump's effort to demolish historic federal buildings. The connection might seem distant—what does a Parisian arch have to do with Washington office buildings?—but it's about what we choose to preserve and what we choose to destroy, about how monuments become containers for meaning that their original builders never intended.

When Robert C. Weaver became the first Black Cabinet member in American history, the building that now bears his name was just another federal structure. When the Unknown Soldier was interred at the Arc de Triomphe, the monument was already 84 years old and had been built for entirely different purposes. Meaning accrues. Symbols evolve. The stones stay the same, but what we see in them changes.

That's why the workers rushed to cover La Marseillaise with tarpaulins when the sword broke in 1916. They weren't just hiding a damaged sculpture. They were trying to control what people would think it meant—and they failed, because we're still talking about it over a century later, still wondering if it was an omen, still letting a random accident of material failure carry symbolic weight.

Monuments are strange that way. We build them to say one thing, and they end up saying everything that happens around them.