Palais de la Légion d'Honneur

The Palais de la Légion d'Honneur stands on Paris’s Left Bank of the Seine, housing a museum and the Legion of Honour’s seat. Its museum is dedicated to France’s highest order of merit.

Pierre Rousseau designed the original Hôtel de Salm between 1782 and 1787 for Frederick III, Prince of Salm-Kyrburg. Thomas Jefferson admired the building during its construction. Social gatherings later welcomed visitors including the future Empress Joséphine during the French Revolution. The revolutionary government nationalised the palace, which became the Legion of Honour’s seat on 13 May 1804.

Antoine-François Peyre remodelled the interiors, adding sculptures by Jean Guillaume Moitte and Philippe-Laurent Roland. The Paris Commune burned the palace in 1871, after which Anastase Mortier directed its reconstruction. An additional building housed the museum from 1922 to 1925. The site became a classified historical monument in 1985, while its design inspired San Francisco’s three-quarter-scale California Palace of the Legion of Honor, built in 1924.

City: Paris
Content updated: 2026-06-22

Image: JLPC CC BY-SA 3.0
Image: JebulonPublic domain
Image: David McSpadden from Daly City, United States CC BY 2.0
Image: anonymousPublic domain

Take this page with you

The myTuur app is free, and once you are standing at a spot its story starts by itself.

Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Paris. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.

What is myTuur?

myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.