The story
On a single day in July 1794, the revolutionary tribunal in Paris sent two noblemen to the guillotine. One was Frederick III, Prince of Salm-Kyrburg, a German prince who had ruined himself building a grand neoclassical mansion on the Left Bank. The other was Alexandre de Beauharnais, the first husband of Joséphine. Ten years later, at Joséphine's suggestion, Napoleon bought the prince's unlucky house for his new order, the Legion of Honour.
The Hôtel de Salm, designed by the architect Pierre Rousseau in the 1780s, has been the seat of the order ever since. Fires set during the Paris Commune gutted it in 1871, and it was rebuilt with money raised among holders of French decorations. The museum opened in one wing in 1925, in the aftermath of the First World War, and reopened in 2006 after five years of renovation.
Its galleries follow French and foreign honours from medieval orders of chivalry to the present day, through some 5,000 objects. Napoleon's own grand collar of the Legion is one of its central pieces. Nearby hangs Antoine-Jean Gros's full-length portrait of Bonaparte as First Consul, painted in 1802, the year he founded the order, and given by him to his fellow consul Cambacérès.
