Place de la Bastille

Continuing our tour of French Revolution locations meant we had to stop at the former site of the Bastille even though we knew nothing remained of the ancient prison. We went to the Bastille stop and could see the Colonne de Juillet (July Column) in the center of the Place de la Bastille, but couldn't find an easy way to get any closer with all of the traffic, so we decided seeing it from the other side of the road was good enough. The July Column is a monument to the Revolution of 1830 that commemorates the "Trois Glorieuses", the "three glorious" days that saw the fall of Charles X of France and the commencement of the "July Monarchy" of Louis-Philippe.

Les Invalides

It was getting late in the day but we still had some time so we decided to head over to Les Invalides and Napolean's Tomb. Since we had our Paris Museum Passes, we figured a few hours spent here were better than nothing and weren't going to cost us anything.

Musee de l'Armee

Also at Les Invalides was the Musee de l'Armee, the museum of the Army of France. Putting aside our provincial snickering about visiting a bunch of displays of white flags of surrender, we decided to tour two of the galleries. First we visited the Departement Ancien, which was a gallery of ancient armor from the 13th through 17th centuries. Unfortunately due to limited time and a desire to satisfy Thomas' request to visit the World War II museum, we had to rush through a little faster than we would have liked. But it was incredible to see the types of armor the kings and princes wore, as well as the armor that the horses had to carry (on top of carrying the armored rider). The gallery also included some ancient weaponry like cannons and muskets and swords.

World War Museum

After our run through the ancient armory, we had to go visit the more modern gallery of war, this one focused on World War I and II. Thomas is a WWII buff and wanted us to spend more time when we were in Europe learning about the World Wars, but with limited time (and limited interest from others in our party), we compromised on visiting a few historical museums in lieu of lengthy side-trips to places like Normandy. The World War Museums were interesting from the American perspective as we mostly learn about our role in the two wars and less about the European troops or life in Vichy France during WWII. It is interesting to see some of the same kind of focus on how important the French army was to the War as we normally saw back home when talking about our own Armed Forces.

As this was our last night in Paris and we had an early morning jaunt to the train station for the Eurostar to London, we decided to head back to the hotel around 6PM. We stopped at McDonald's again for dinner since we really were not that hungry and then went to the hotel to pack up our meager luggage and play some games while planning a little of our London itinerary (even though all of our London guidebooks we had bought in the States were still somewhere in Heathrow.)