Tomb of the Invalides — 2 avril 1861

Twenty years after the return of the ashes, the red quartzite sarcophagus designed by Visconti at last received the body beneath the dome of the Invalides, in the presence of Napoleon III. Six nested coffins rest in an open crypt that the visitor can only look at by bowing. The monument completed the transformation of a contested memory into national liturgy.

Twenty years of waiting

Napoleon's will asked that his ashes rest 'on the banks of the Seine, among the French people' he had so loved. The return of the ashes, on 15 December 1840, had brought him back to Paris, but the tomb did not exist: the coffin was placed provisionally in the Saint-Jérôme chapel of the Invalides.

The competition opened in 1841 was won by Louis Visconti, who proposed a radical solution: to dig an open circular crypt beneath the dome rather than raise a monument. The works, which required cutting through the floor of the church, would take nearly twenty years.

The sarcophagus

The block, long called porphyry, is in fact a red quartzite quarried in Karelia, on the shore of Lake Onega, and brought by sea and river to Paris. It rests on a base of green granite from the Vosges.

Inside, six successive coffins fit one within another — tinplate, mahogany, two of lead, ebony and oak. Around the crypt, twelve figures of Victory by Pradier and ten bas-reliefs by Simart sum up the reign by its institutions rather than its battles: the Code, the Concordat, the University, the Court of Accounts.

A national liturgy

The body was placed in the sarcophagus on 2 April 1861, at a restricted ceremony, in the presence of Napoleon III. Forty years had passed since the death on Saint Helena.

The arrangement is conceived for the gaze. The crypt being open and below, the visitor who wishes to see the tomb must lean on the balustrade and bow the head: the architecture imposes the gesture of reverence without writing it down. What the Restoration had forbidden anyone to name had become, in half a century, the most visited monument in Paris along with the Eiffel Tower.