Arc de Triomphe
Napoleon's triumphal arch — climb it for the city's best avenue-spoke view.
Napoleon commissioned this arch in 1806, the morning after Austerlitz, and it took thirty years to finish — long enough that he never saw it completed. What stands at the top of the Champs-Élysées today is 50 metres of limestone, twelve avenues radiating outward from its base like spokes from a hub, and at its foot an eternal flame that has burned since 1920 above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The view from the rooftop terrace is the reason to climb the 284 steps. Paris arranges itself around you in a way that no map quite prepares you for — the geometry of Haussmann's boulevards suddenly legible, the Eiffel Tower due southwest, the city's logic made visible all at once.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to go up at dusk, when the streetlights along the avenues switch on in sequence below you. They also linger at François Rude's bas-relief La Marseillaise on the arch's northeast pillar — the faces in it are worth more than a glance. Skip the lift; it won't take you to the top anyway.
Deals in Arc de Triomphe
Book directly at the provider
How Arc de Triomphe came to be
Napoleon laid the foundation stone on 15 August 1806 — his own birthday — and appointed Jean-François Chalgrin to design it in the Neoclassical idiom of ancient Rome. Construction moved slowly enough that when Napoleon brought his new bride Marie-Louise into Paris in 1810, only the foundations were complete; he had a full-scale wooden mock-up erected so she could see what it would become. Chalgrin died in 1811, and the project passed through several hands before Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury and Guillaume-Abel Blouet finally finished it under Louis-Philippe I.
The arch was inaugurated on 29 July 1836. Its four sculptural groups were carved by different hands — Jean-Pierre Cortot, Antoine Étex, James Pradier and François Rude, whose La Marseillaise remains the most studied of them. Beneath the arch, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was installed on Armistice Day 1920, and the eternal flame lit above it has not been extinguished since.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.