Historical information:

The Army Museum at Les Invalides was originally built by Louis XIV as a hospital and home for disabled soldiers.Now it houses the tomb of Napoleon and the museum of the French army.The museum has a huge collection of military attributes dating from antiquity to the present day.

The Musée l'Armée was founded in 1905 by merging the Artillery Museum and the Museum of the Historical Army.It contains 500,000 items, including weapons, armor, artillery, uniforms, emblems, and paintings.

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Another big attraction is the magnificent Tomb of Napoleon; Napoleon died in 1821 on The Island of Saint Helena, where he had been in exile since 1815. He was buried in a valley under the shade of weeping willows.His remains remained there until October 15, 1840, when King Louis-Philippe ordered the return of the emperor's body to France.

Napoleon's tomb was designed by the architect Visconti (1791-1853).It is made of red porphyry on the basis of green granite and is surrounded by a wreath of laurels and inscriptions about the great victories of the Empire.The Emperor's body was laid in the grave on April 2, 1861.

Since its inception in 1905, the Army Museum has continuously replenished its collections, becoming one of the leading museums in Europe and around the world for collections of military history.To be interested in the history of the collections of the army museum means to discover the history of France in a different way.

The Army Museum currently houses nearly 500,000 works covering military history from the chronological period from the prehistoric period to the present day. The museum is also the ^{custodian of} the tomb of Emperor Napoleon I and successor of the Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides.

The museum's collections consist of armor and antique weapons, artillery pieces, firearms, knives, emblems, uniforms, orders and ornaments, as well as historical figurines. The Army Museum also houses rich iconographic collections consisting of paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings, photographs, as well as a number of printed works, manuscripts, periodicals and private archives. It also houses a collection of archaeological artifacts, as well as a collection of non-European ethnographic sites whose origins go beyond the French colonial empire and colonization.

The Army Museum continued to enrich its collections with donations or purchases of antiquities. Among the artists and private collectors who contributed to the creation of the museum's funds are such personalities as General Vanson, Edouard Dethel, Prince of Moscow, as well as the brothers Raoul and Jean Brunon, as well as Georges Pauliac or structures such as the Cincinnati Society of France.
The Army Museum is also one of the trustees of many individuals, civilian or military, French and foreign.

The State has also contributed to the enrichment of museum collections by transferring military organizations or institutions for typologies of items ranging from uniforms, equipment regulating emblems to armaments, especially during the closure of the Saint-Etienne and Tulle weapons factories between 1998 and 2001.

The state also placed at the disposal of the Museum of the Army large collections, such as weapons and armor, collected by Napoleon III at the Château de deux. Pierrefonds (1880), or franchet d'Espèrey museum after Algeria's independence in 1962. Finally, the museum received works for safekeeping from the Ministry of Fine Arts and national museums (louvre museum, Versailles castle, Clooney museum for example).

Today, about 25,000 works from museum collections are kept in French and foreign museums, as well as in organizations of the Ministry of the Armed Forces.

The collections were subjected to the vagaries of war. The Army Museum was partially evacuated in 1870, but remained open during World War I and continued to enrich its collections with numerous objects and works related to the conflict, while trophies taken from the enemy were regularly exhibited between 1915 and 1918.

During World War II, the collections of the Army Museum were partially looted by the German occupiers. After the war, the museum's director, General Henri Blank, conducted several restoration missions in Germany.