The Lion Monument commemorates the Swiss Guards being killed during the storming of the French King’s Tuileries palace by the French Revolutionaries on 10 August 1792.

The monument war initiated and realised by the surviving Guard officer Carl Pfyffer von Altishofen from Lucerne.

The image of the dying lion was carved directly into the sand stone wall of a former quarry in Lucerne after the design of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and inaugurated on 10 August 1821.