Musée de la Légion d'honneur

The Musée de la Légion d’honneur sits inside the Hôtel de Salm, identifiable by the tall, semicircular colonnade that faces toward the Seine. Built in the seventeen eighties for the Prince of Salm-Kyrburg, the residence once hosted lavish parties before the revolution stripped the Prince of his wealth and his head. Napoleon Bonaparte later reclaimed the structure as the headquarters for his newly minted order of merit. The building survived a fire set by the Paris Commune in eighteen seventy-one, emerging gutted but intact.