La Colonne de la Grande Armée, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, Boulogne
The column was erected in the 1840s and is a fifty-three metre-high monument topped with a statue of Napoleon Bonaparte. (Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square is shorter at forty-six metres high). It marks the base camp where Napoleon massed France’s biggest ever army of eighty thousand men ready to invade England.
It was initially intended to commemorate a successful invasion of England, but this proved to be a bit premature and as he didn’t quite manage that it now commemorates instead the first distribution of the Imperial Légion d’honneur.
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