Fontainebleau

• 1. Introduction

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  Fontainebleau sits 55.5 kilometres south-southeast of the centre of Paris, and yet it holds the largest land area of any commune in the entire Ile-de-France region. It is the only commune in that region that covers more ground than Paris itself. Thirty-four sovereigns passed through its palace across the centuries, from Louis VI to Napoleon III. Popes arrived as prisoners. Treaties were signed that carved up continents. And today, more than thirteen million people visit the forest each year, while three hundred thousand more pass through the palace doors. How did a small town built around a freshwater spring become one of the most storied addresses in French history? That question runs through every stone of Fontainebleau.

• 2. A Spring and Its Names

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  "Fontainebleau" takes its name from a natural freshwater spring located in the English garden not far from the chateau. The official chateau history places this naming in the sixteenth century, when the spring was known as the Fontaine Belle-Eau, meaning "Spring of beautiful water". The spring was later rebuilt in the nineteenth century, its waters now flowing into an octagonal stone basin.

  Before that sixteenth-century naming, medieval Latin scribes recorded the place differently. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it appeared in documents as Fons Bleaudi, Fons Bliaudi, and Fons Blaadi. A 1137 record names it Fontem blahaud. In the seventeenth century, some writers preferred the fanciful Latin form Fons Bellaqueus. That Latin version is the root of the word Bellifontains, the name given to inhabitants of the commune.

  Two competing stories explain the deeper origin of the name. A popular legend ties it to a favourite hunting dog of King Louis IX named "Blaud" or "Blau". The story holds that during a hunt, the dog became separated from the king, who eventually found the animal by the spring. A second account, drawing on medieval language, points to a compound of fontaine, meaning spring and fountain, combined with blitwald, itself built from a Germanic personal name, Blit, and the Germanic word for forest. Whether the name traces to a lost dog or a forgotten language, the spring at its centre remained a fixed point around which everything else grew.

• 3. Royal Foundations

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  Louis VII gave Fontainebleau its first royal footprint in the middle of the twelfth century, endowing the hamlet with a hunting lodge and a chapel. A century later, Louis IX, known also as Saint Louis, extended that presence significantly. He referred to Fontainebleau as "his wilderness" and had a country house and a hospital built there.

  Philip the Fair was born at Fontainebleau in 1268 and died there in 1314, making the town both cradle and grave for one of France's most powerful monarchs. The sovereign who truly transformed the site, however, was Francis I, who lived from 1494 to 1547. His reconstruction of the chateau was the largest of his many construction projects, and it produced the residence that became his favourite. The palace also served as the home of his mistress, Anne, duchess of Etampes.

  From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, every monarch from Francis I to Louis XV undertook renovations of one kind or another: demolitions, expansions, embellishments. The accumulated result was, as one historical account puts it, a character that is heterogeneous but harmonious nonetheless. Among those born within its walls were Francis II, Henry III, and Louis XIII. The Palace of Fontainebleau also stood as the site where the French royal court, from 1528 onwards, engaged with the body of new ideas that became the Renaissance.

• 4. Treaties and Turning Points

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  On the 18th of October 1685, Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau at the palace. Also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the decree reversed a permission granted to the Huguenots in 1598, stripping them of the right to worship publicly in designated locations and ending certain other privileges they had held. Large numbers of Protestants were forced to convert to Catholicism, killed, or driven into exile, most of them to the Low Countries, Prussia, and England.

  The 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau, a secret agreement between France and Spain, settled the fate of the Louisiana territory in North America. Preliminary negotiations for the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years' War, also took place at Fontainebleau. Then in 1807, Manuel Godoy, chancellor to the Spanish king Charles IV, joined Napoleon to sign another treaty at Fontainebleau, this one authorising the passage of French troops through Spain to invade Portugal.

  The most dramatic episode may have been the nineteen months that Pope Pius VII spent at the chateau beginning on the 20th of June 1812. Transferred in secret from Savona and accompanied by his personal physician, Balthazard Claraz, the Pope arrived in poor health. From June 1812 until the 23rd of January 1814, he never left his apartments. On the 20th of April 1814, Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard, the grognards who had served with him from his earliest campaigns, in the White Horse Courtyard. Contemporary sources described the occasion as deeply moving. The courtyard has since been renamed the Courtyard of Goodbyes, and the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau sent Napoleon into exile on Elba.

• 5. Forest, Boulders, and Biodiversity

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  The Forest of Fontainebleau surrounds the town and dozens of nearby villages, and it draws more than thirteen million visitors each year. France's Office National des Forets manages and protects it, and it carries recognition as a French national park. Its scope of conservation covers wild plants including the rare service tree of Fontainebleau, as well as populations of birds, mammals, and butterflies.

  Hikers and horse riders have long treated the forest as a destination. Climbers regard it as something more specific: Fontainebleau holds the largest developed bouldering area in the world. The rocky formations that give the forest its climbing reputation are the same formations that gave French Revolutionaries a reason to temporarily rename the whole town. During the Revolution, Fontainebleau was called Fontaine-la-Montagne, meaning "Fountain by the Mountain", the mountain in question being those rocky outcrops in the forest.

  The forest was once a royal hunting ground, and that history of protection may have contributed to its unusual ecological richness. The rare service tree of Fontainebleau, named for the town, is one detail that points to how distinctly this landscape developed over centuries of careful, if self-interested, royal stewardship.

• 6. A Town in the World

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  For the 1924 Summer Olympics, Fontainebleau hosted the riding portion of the modern pentathlon event, held near a golf course. In July and August 1946, the town held the Franco-Vietnamese Conference, an attempt to resolve the long-contested question of Vietnam's independence from France. The conference ended without resolution.

  During the Cold War, Fontainebleau held the general staff of Allied Forces in Central Europe, known as AFCENT, along with the land forces command LANDCENT. This arrangement lasted from NATO's founding until France's partial withdrawal from NATO in 1967, when the United States returned the bases to French control. NATO then relocated AFCENT to Brunssum in the Netherlands and AIRCENT to Ramstein in West Germany.

  In 2008, the tennis court at the chateau hosted the men's World Championship of Real Tennis, also called Jeu de Paume. The real tennis World Championship holds the distinction of being the oldest in sport. Fontainebleau has one of only two active real tennis courts in France. The European campus of the INSEAD business school also sits at the edge of the commune, beside the Lycee Francois Couperin, drawing students and executives who live in accommodations throughout the surrounding area.

• 7. Lives and Graves

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  The cemetery at Avon, the neighbouring commune, holds the graves of the philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff and the New Zealand-born short story writer Katherine Mansfield, who died in Fontainebleau in 1923. Oscar Milosz, the poet, novelist, dramatist, and Lithuanian diplomat, also died in Fontainebleau, in 1939.

  Among those who passed through the town for other reasons: Arnold Bennett, the writer, lived in Fontainebleau from 1908 to 1912. Lin Fengmian, later called the father of modern Chinese painting for his advocacy of synthesising Western techniques with Eastern traditions, studied French in Fontainebleau before moving on to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Django Reinhardt, the guitarist, died not in Fontainebleau itself but nearby, in Samois-sur-Seine. Christina, Queen of Sweden, was in Fontainebleau when her lover, Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, was murdered there.

  The commune also lists among its notable people Lilian Thuram, the football player who won both the World Cup and the European Championship. Claude-Francois Denencourt, born in Fontainebleau, is credited with inventing modern hiking and nature tourism, a fitting origin for the man given the forest on his doorstep. Fontainebleau has since twinned with Konstanz in Germany, Richmond-upon-Thames in England, Siem Reap in Cambodia, Nanjing in China, Lodi in Italy, Sintra in Portugal, and Alba Iulia in Romania, the last of those partnerships formalised in 2023.