55, bd. JOURDAN

Quite possibly the best thing about my current schedule is that — even though I have but one class on Tuesday and it’s at 10:30 in the morning — it forces me to get up and actually do something with my day! Likewise, a fortunate break between classes on Wednesday gives me just enough breathing room to do something cool like visit Napoleon’s tomb.

Les Invalides is really quite an impressive structure. On par with the Arc de Triomphe and La Place de Concorde, it’s golden dome gleams as you walk towards it from the Metro (even when the weather is less than spectacular).

Inside you quickly discover the remnants of its past. As a hospital for wounded soldiers created by Louis XIV, the structure in the modern age serves as a military history museum and its courtyards are filled with multitudes of bronze cannons, and even a couple of tanks thrown in for good measure. Thankfully though, the Church down-plays this just a tad. Though it’s clear what the focal point is as soon as you walk in the door —

Even though Napoleon’s tomb and the Church of the Dome were impressive structures, and clearly devoted to the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte’s vast victories (this man had no humility) — I really enjoyed the adjacent World War I and II museum.

With only about 2 hours, I feel like I could have spent much more time taking in the vast collection of artifacts, news clippings, posters, garb, weaponry and multimedia that the museum had to offer. But all in all, I found the walk-through a great refresher and the attention to detail (especially with regard to the North African front or the French liberation movement) really quite interesting.

The two details though that I found interesting in their difference from other WWII exhibits I’ve seen — one was a wall panel that specifically addressed the notion that the French didn’t care to fight in WWII (how quick that campaign was), and the other was the fact that the ramifications of the Holocaust weren’t as blatant as in other museums. The focus really was more on the strategy of the war with some smaller asides to popular mentalities, a focus that I think worked pretty well given things like a 3D projection of the workings of the Schlieffen Plan or Plan XVII! What’s more I think I’ll get a lot more out of the trip to Normandy and Caen that I have planned for next weekend. Their video projections of Omaha beach and the war for domination in the sky were really quite good.

Finally the museum had things like this —

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to post a picuture of a Gattling gun, a motorcycle that could fit in a capsule and be parachute-dropped, or the Enigma Machine. There were just so many fun things at the musuem.

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