Aura Invalides: An Unusual Night out in Paris

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We gathered at dusk, just outside the Place Vauban entrance to Les Invalides, anticipation growing for an unusual evening that would take us inside the city’s most iconic dome for a multi-media experience combining sound, music and video-mapping. Like the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame, Les Invalides is generally “just there,” a golden domed beauty which rises now and then on the skyline as we go about the city. To get inside Le Dôme just after dark, when it is closed to the general public, and reflect on its history and beauty amid swirling colors and rousing music was surely going to be a special treat. The event, Aura Invalides, is one of a series of tours-with-a-difference and immersive events offered by the sightseeing tour agency Cultival. 

Even standing in a queue, the sense that history all around is inescapable. Yes, it all began as a yet another Louis XIV show-off project when he commissioned the Dôme des Invalides as a church for royal mass. He insisted, characteristically, on a baroque masterpiece which would rise higher than any other building in Paris, at least until the Eiffel Tower was built nearly 200 years later. Gilded on the outside and lavishly decorated inside, it seemed to be just another of the Sun King’s tributes to himself. However, just a few years later, in 1674, the Hôtel des Invalides, commissioned by Louis on the same site, opened its doors to injured and elderly soldiers who needed to be looked after, a role the institution still plays today. He was justly proud of this, referring to it as “the best decision of my reign.” I like to remember this charitable act when I encounter, for example, the excess of bling Louis indulged in all over Versailles. 

We filed quietly up the entrance steps and into the Dôme, then circulated in search of a good viewing spot. Some sat in groups on the steps around the central gallery, comfortably poised to gaze upwards as the presentation unfolded. Others, including me, took up positions leaning over the balustrade and down into the crypt below where Napoleon’s tomb rests in splendid isolation. Looking up, I could dimly see Charles de la Fosse’s metaphor-laden ceiling painting. You’ll have guessed that the saint depicted is Saint Louis, alongside such symbols of royalty as a crown and plentiful fleur-de-lys, but perhaps not that he’s sharing the space with Christ Himself and the symbols of His passion, nails, the cross and the crown of thorns. Here, as so often, France’s most ostentatious monarch has left no trace of false modesty. 

If you look round the Dôme in the daytime, the tendency is to keep moving, but here, waiting for things to start, I gazed down at the piece of theater which is Napoleon’s last resting place. He died in 1821, but it was nearly 20 years until his remains were brought back to France and a further 20 until the crypt was ready to accommodate the specially created massive sarcophagus containing a nest of five coffins and mounted on a vast green granite pedestal.

During Aura Invalides there is no access to the crypt, but I have been down there on other occasions and could picture the heavy bronze door forged from canons captured by Napoleon’s men at the Battle of Austerlitz and the extract from his will written above it: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine among the people of France whom I so much loved.” I thought of him, lying down there in military uniform and his Légion d’Honneur sash and was glad that, although he’d been buried not cremated, his wish on where he wanted to lie for eternity had been granted.  

The event I’d come to see is a collaboration between the tourism agency Cultival whose motto is “Visit differently” and the Musée de l’Armée, one of the world’s biggest military museums, which is housed in a separate wing of Les Invalides. It is therefore a unique blend of creativity, technology and historical references, expressed through video projections onto the inside of the dome and a specially written contemporary musical score. It took a multidisciplinary team a full year’s work to put it all together. The result is a 50–minute presentation, beginning and ending with spellbinding digitally created scenes and pausing in the middle to allow participants to visit the side chapels and explore the history to be found inside them. 

The first of three movements portrays the building of the Dôme and diagrams showing it taking shape are interspersed with waves of color highlighting different architectural features. Columns and statues are picked out in flashes of light, flames in different colors lick over the ceiling painting and the sculptures, all building up a picture of the enormity of the task accomplished by the original 17th-century architects. Waves of recorded sound, both orchestral and electronic, are provided by 36 musicians and a choir of 16 voices, sometimes dramatic, sometimes reflective.  It all takes place in the round, across the full 360 degrees of the dome, meaning every individual’s experience will be unique, depending on where they fix their gaze at any one moment. 

The second movement juxtaposes moments of history to build up a picture of France’s collective memory. Against a backdrop of, for instance, silhouetted soldiers evoking the Napoleonic wars, we were invited to spend a few minutes touring the side chapels. Each was introduced by a short information panel, summarizing the history it represented. They included the Chapelle Saint-Jérôme, the chapelle ardente de Napoléon Bonaparte, that is the place where his body rested while the central crypt was being prepared. Now it’s where his younger brother Jérôme Bonaparte, one-time king of Westphalia and governor general of the Invalides, lies and in the nearby Chapelle Saint-Augustin is his older brother, Joseph, whom he appointed King of Naples in 1806. 

From further back in time is the tomb of Vauban in the Chapelle Sainte Thérèse. He was Louis XIV’s favorite architect and designed some 160 fortifications, a dozen of which are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. But to me, the most moving of all is the sculpture in the Chapelle Saint Ambroise which marks the tomb of Ferdinand Foch, commander–in–chief of the Allied Troops in WWI. The sculptor Paul Landowski took two years of reflection and six years of work to produce the piece which shows his coffin being borne aloft by some of his men. In fact, Foch did not die in combat, but the sculpture captures the high regard in which he was held and also pays tribute to the men who had fought alongside him. By extension, it is a memorial to the sacrifice and dignity of all the country’s soldiers. 

The final movement is called l’Esprit du Dôme (the Spirit of the Dome) and aims for a fitting finale in this most magnificent of settings. The music swelled and receded, the visuals ebbed and flowed, sometimes sparkling like a fireworks display, sometimes serene and beautiful, all combining to take spectators out of the here-and-now and into a magical, sensual world. It was, one reviewer has noted, “une expérience grandiose et poétique.” If you’d like to enjoy a visit-with-a-difference to an iconic Parisian landmark, then an evening at Aura Invalides might be just what you are looking for. 

DETAILS

Aura Invalides is recommended for all ages from age 5 upwards. 
2 place Vauban, 7th
It begins at nightfall – check the website for exact timings.   
Prices:  Adult: €28 / Ages 18 to 26: €18 / Ages 5 to 18: €12 
Advance booking required: www.aura-invalides.com
Nearest metro: La Tour-Maubourg (Line 8) or Varenne (Line 13)
Marian was a guest of Cultival. 
For more information on their other tours and events, see
https://www.cultival.fr/en_GB/