Reviews of the Les Invalides tours and tickets
One thing to know before you read: the great courtyard and the soldiers’ cathedral are open without a ticket. What you book is the single ticket that opens the Army Museum, the Dôme and Napoleon’s tomb, the relief maps and the Order of the Liberation. The five bookings reviewed here all turn on that difference: the ticket alone, two ways of adding a guide, a walk that leads to it, and the pass that includes it.
The five bookings reviewed
Les Invalides: Napoleon’s Tomb & Army Museum Entry
The base ticket, the one almost everyone needs. It opens the Dôme, the tomb and four museums. The only real complaint visitors make is about the time they had set aside.
ticket valid all dayRead the full review ›
Napoleon’s Tomb & Invalides Small-Group Guided Tour
Eight people maximum, entry included, in English. The best rating of the five, on a still-modest review count. You come out having understood how the rooms fit together.
1 hr 30, with a guideRead the full review ›
Les Invalides & Napoleon’s Tomb Guided Tour
The same idea, in French or English, with a quarter of an hour more and a private option. The meeting point, at La Tour-Maubourg, is worth reading twice.
1 hr 45 to 2 hrsRead the full review ›
Napoleon Walking Tour with Les Invalides & Tomb Entry
Three hours on foot through imperial Paris that end under the Dôme. It is not a tour of Les Invalides: it is what gives the tomb its scale.
3 hrs, on footRead the full review ›
Paris Museum Pass, 2, 4 or 6 consecutive days
Les Invalides is on it. Useful if you are stacking Paris monuments, useless if you are visiting one. Physical collection and calendar-day counting cost it stars.
2, 4 or 6 daysRead the full review ›How I read the reviews
I worked for twenty-two years in one wing of this building and I have lived in the quarter ever since. So I do not need the reviews to know what is inside: I use them to understand what surprises people who come from far away. And what recurs, review after review, is almost never the collection. It is how the day was organised: an hour set aside for a site that needs three, a meeting point looked for on the wrong side of the esplanade, a ticket bought in the belief that it only covered the tomb.
I do not copy reviews word for word and I do not attribute sentences to first names. What interests me is what recurs across many people, and that is better described than quoted. When a listing has few reviews, like the small-group tour or the Napoleon walk, I say so rather than talk about a consensus that does not exist: a 4.7 on twenty-three reviews is not worth a 4.6 on ten thousand.
What the reviews do not say
They do not say that the ticket opens four museums. Visitors write about the tomb, because that is what they came for, and many never realise they could have gone up to the relief maps or crossed the Order of the Liberation on the same piece of paper. You cannot read that in the ratings: you read it in the time they say they spent.
They also do not say that half of what people photograph here is free. The great courtyard, the moats and their cannon and the Saint-Louis cathedral need no ticket, and they are among the finest spaces on the site. The exact line is on the free-access page.
Where to start
If you read only one page, read the review of the entry ticket: it is the product that suits the great majority of visitors, and the published reviews finally make the recurring themes visible. If you are torn between a guide and going on your own, the comparison is on this page. If you are looking for something to add to the day, the Rodin Museum is four hundred metres away.
The ratings and review counts shown here are the ones I noted at my last reading; the booking modules show the live figures. To choose without reading five pages, it all fits in one table on the comparison page, and the rest of what you need before coming is in the complete guide.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need a ticket to enter Les Invalides?
Not for the great courtyard, the moats or the Saint-Louis cathedral, which are free. The ticket covers the Dôme, the tomb and the four museums: see what is free and the ticket page.
Are these reviews independent?
Yes. I am neither the monument nor a tour operator, and nobody reads these pages before publication. The site earns a commission on bookings made through its links, which is explained on the affiliate disclosure page.
Why do you not quote reviews word for word?
Because one visitor's isolated sentence proves nothing and lends itself far too easily to cherry-picking. I would rather describe what recurs across many people.
Which booking should I choose?
The entry ticket, in the great majority of cases. The three profiles are set out on the comparison page.