The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel is the smaller of the two triumphal gateways in Paris. It was built between 1806 and 1808 by Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, Napoleon’s pre-eminent court architects and the codifiers of the Empire style. The arch commemorates the campaigns of 1805, in particular the battle of Austerlitz, and it originally served as the ceremonial gate of the Tuileries Palace.
The model for the design is the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, which Percier and Fontaine had drawn and published with archaeological precision. The composition is a triple arch, with a central bay slightly wider and taller than the two flanking ones, set within a rectangular block of pink marble crowned by an attic storey. Eight Corinthian columns of red and white marble stand free of the wall plane, paired across each pier rather than engaged. Above each column rises a sculpted soldier on the attic, which functions as a frieze of figures rather than as a pure cornice. The arch openings are framed by deeply coffered intrados decorated with rosettes. The proportional system follows the Vitruvian canon of classical architecture: the column shaft is roughly nine times its diameter, and the central arch reads as a square and a half. Where Chalgrin’s later Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, completed in 1836, abstracts and enlarges its Roman precedent, the Carrousel imitates it at close to full scale.
The arch also anchors one end of the Axe historique, the great urban spine that runs from the Louvre, through the Tuileries gardens, up the Champs-Élysées to the Étoile, and on to the Grande Arche de La Défense. Napoleon understood, as Louis XIV had before him and as Mitterrand would after, that an axis is the diagram of political authority laid across a city. The Carrousel is its starting note.