L'Hôtel national des Invalides

Invalides houses the Musee de L’Armee, the military museum for France. It was built by Louis the 14^th in 1670 for the old or injured officers who had served him. A part of the building still serves the original purpose.

As one would suspect, the lead off is with General de Gaulle. The liberator of France. He was everywhere. But heck, he’s everywhere anyways. They had the whole story of the Free French fighting forces during WWII strung around this courtyard…

One of the plaques said this…

I didn’t correct them while I was there, but I’ll do it now. Sorry Frenchman, US troops got there first, that’s why we have all Hitler’s stuff.

Personally I liked it more when they focused on this guy…

After all, he really did have a pretty good run as a military commander. They went a bit over the top with the monument to him though…

Here is the little guy’s tomb…

Looks quite modest in my picture actually. Looks can be deceiving. It’s big…

You can see how far i had to spread my arms, and I was a good 20 meters from the tomb. Impressive place. They also had tombs of other marechals on the first floor. Vauban, Turrenne[check this], and Foch. There was enough space off in the corners for them.

The rest of Invalides is a big museum that exhorts French military accomplishments, and briefly describes their defeats, through history.

The Hundred Years War was described as a civil war and a war of English invasion. Both are true to some extent or another. Their casualty figures for the Battle of Agincourt are the lowest I have seen anywhere, and the account of the battle had huge gaping holes in it. Apparently there were only fifty or so French knights at the Battle. You can look anywhere else, including the medieval sources, and the numbers are much higher. Another thing was that the only reason the French lost at Sedan in 1870 was they were “vastly outnumber by a superior force.” I seem to recall that the forces were split about even; France, sorry, but you lost because the Prussians were superior, not because there were vastly more of them. I especially like how they spent so much timae on Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz, and then the little cinematic for Waterloo was turned off. I’m being kind of harsh, I actually think they tried to be a little balanced, they just aren’t well practiced at giving history a balanced account. I don’t remember how many rooms Napoleon had all to his lonesome, probably somewhat justified, but they certainly didn’t spend much time on actual information in the Hundred Years War. Oh well, I wasn’t really expecting anything different. It was good enough that we spent about three hours walking through looking at things.