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The Musee D'InvalidesBy Paul HooperHaving spent a few days in Paris this year I took a day out to visit the Musee d'Invalides. This is a huge complex in the centre of Paris and is in sharp contrast to our own military Museums. If you imagine having the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum and the armouries at Leeds and the Tower of London all under one roof then you can see how huge this collection is. D'Invalides contains a number of separate museums but there is one entrance fee of 6 euros about £4. Inside you have The French Army Museum, The Artillery Museum, The Resistance Museum and the Museum of Plan Reliefs. Also the Army church and tomb of Napoleon are all part of the complex. Although most of labelling and captions are in French, if you know a smattering of French and take a dictionary with you then you can get by. Although I could wax lyrical over all the Museums, I would like to explain the Museum of Plan Reliefs and for this a bit of history is required. If you were a General in the 16thC then one of your biggest problems was knowing what was on the other side of the hill and what sort of fortifications you had under your command. Maps had no way of showing contours apart from rudimentary hatching, buildings were often omitted and sometimes fortifications were marked in the wrong place or even never built! So Louis XIV commissioned the first of a series of relief maps of Dunkirk. So what is a relief map? Well it is a detailed model of an area, town or fortification and when I say detailed, I mean it shows every house, hill river tree etc all to a constant scale. Most of the relief maps in the collection are to a constant 1/600th scale although there are a few which are bigger or smaller scales. By 1697 there were over 144 of these models and some thirty of these survive to the present day. Under Louis XV a further 186 were constructed. Relief maps were made right up until the 1870s when maps finally took over. Over 90 of these relief maps still exist with nearly sixty of them on show in Paris. To give you some idea of the size of theses models, the relief map of Cherbourg measures nearly 17m x 9.46m that's over 50' by 30'! It also includes maps of places like Sevastapol in the Crimea, Rome and all the fortifications around the French borders. If anyone is interested I have an English version of the guide to the museum which has plenty of photographs but these do not do justice to the sheer physical spectacle that is this museum. |