About this site

Who writes here

My name is Ghislaine Aubier. I am 64 and I live on the rue Saint-Dominique. I spent twenty-two years sorting archive boxes in one wing of this building, which mostly consists of answering people’s questions, and I now volunteer with a local heritage association. I cross the esplanade most days.

This site was born out of irritation. First: watching visitors photograph the Dôme from the Pont Alexandre-III, walk through the great courtyard, decide it is enormous, and leave — without seeing the tomb or a single gun from the collection, because nobody had told them the ticketed part begins behind all that. Second: hearing people hunt for a “Napoleon’s tomb” ticket that does not exist, when one ticket here opens four museums and a royal church.

What this site is, and what it is not

It is not the official site of the monument. The Hôtel national des Invalides is a state complex: the Army Museum runs the collections, the Institution nationale des Invalides treats wounded servicemen there, the military governor of Paris has his staff there, and the French military diocese holds services there. I speak for none of them: see the page on today’s soldiers. Nor is it a tour operator: I organise nothing, I guide nobody, I sell no entry.

What I do comes down to three things. I explain what can be seen without a ticket and what needs one, on what is free and the ticket page. I describe what is inside, honestly, including that the museum is far bigger than people plan for and that the relief maps under the roof are what visitors remember six months later — see what to see and the relief maps. And I compare five useful bookings around the visit, product by product, on the reviews page.

The practical facts — hours, exemptions, access, duration — come from what the monument publishes and from what I see on site. They change. When an opening time moves or a hall closes, write to me and I will correct it. I check myself: I live five minutes away.

How the site is funded

Through affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book after clicking a link or a module on this site, it earns a small commission, without changing what you pay. Nobody pays me directly, no operator reads these pages before publication, and I say so when a booking is not worth it: the Paris Museum Pass is useless to anyone visiting only Les Invalides, and half of what people photograph here — the great courtyard, the moats, the soldiers’ cathedral — is free and earns me nothing at all. The detail is in the affiliate disclosure.

To get started, the complete guide fits on one page. If you are in a hurry, what to see, in order is enough to miss nothing that matters.