Arc de Triomphe

Napoleon commissioned the arch in 1806, after his victory at Austerlitz, to honour the French armies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Architect Jean-François Chalgrin, working from the model of Rome's Arch of Titus, laid the foundations over two years; in 1810, when Napoleon entered Paris from the west with his new bride, Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, a full-scale wooden mock-up of the completed arch was erected for the occasion.

Chalgrin died in 1811, and the pillars stood barely a dozen metres high when his pupil Louis-Robert Goust took over the project. Work stopped under the Bourbon Restoration and did not resume until 1823, continuing under Goust and then Jean-Nicolas Huyot, overseen by Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, before Guillaume-Abel Blouet completed it in 1836 during the reign of Louis Philippe I, at a cost of around 10 million francs.

The arch was inaugurated on 29 July 1836. A military review had been planned, but after a further assassination attempt on Louis Philippe weeks earlier, the king cancelled it; the monument was instead unveiled quietly at seven in the morning, witnessed only by minister Adolphe Thiers and finance minister Antoine d'Argout, while a banquet for 300 guests replaced the parade.

Several schemes to crown the arch with a sculptural group were proposed and abandoned. For the return of Napoleon's remains to Paris on 15 December 1840, a procession that passed beneath the arch, architect Guillaume-Abel Blouet installed a temporary sculpture of the emperor on the summit, adapting a design he had drafted in 1834.

From 1882 to 1886, a plaster quadriga by Alexandre Falguière, Le Triomphe de la Révolution, was hoisted to the top to test its effect. The result was judged unconvincing, and the plaster deteriorated in the open air; it was removed, and the plan to crown the monument was abandoned for good. The Arc de Triomphe was classified as a historical monument on 6 February 1896.

On 7 August 1919, pilot Charles Godefroy flew a Nieuport biplane beneath the arch's main vault, an event captured on newsreel; the flight had originally been assigned to Jean Navarre, who died on 10 July 1919 in a crash while training for it.

France's Unknown Soldier of the First World War was interred beneath the arch on 11 November 1920 and laid in his final resting place on 28 January 1921; an eternal flame was first lit there on 11 November 1923. Since the interment, victory marches (including the Germans in 1940 and the French and Allies in 1944) have gone around the arch rather than through its vault, out of respect for the tomb, a custom observed by both Adolf Hitler in 1940 and Charles de Gaulle in 1944. On 14 June 1940, the day German troops entered Paris, the flame was still relit that evening, in the presence of the German officers who authorised the ceremony.

In 1995, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria placed a bomb near the arch as part of a bombing campaign, wounding 17 people.

In December 2018, protesters from the yellow vest movement broke into the monument, sprayed it with graffiti and ransacked its museum, at an estimated repair cost of €1.2 million. At a trial in March 2021, eight protesters were convicted over the break-in and given modest sentences, after the main perpetrators could not be identified.

In September 2021, the arch was wrapped in silvery-blue fabric bound with red rope for L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, a posthumous project by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude that they had planned since the early 1960s. The monument remains owned by the City of Paris and is managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux.