Musée des Plans-Reliefs

The Musée des Plans-Reliefs holds a collection of over one hundred intricate, three-dimensional scale models of fortified towns. King Louis the Fourteenth commissioned the first of these in sixteen sixty-eight to help his military planners visualize terrain and fortifications before deciding on siege strategies. These models were treated as high-level state secrets and kept under lock and key to prevent foreign spies from learning the vulnerabilities of French defenses. Military engineers constructed them with painstaking accuracy, often using materials scavenged directly from the sites they represented to ensure the smallest details were authentic.