Tuileries Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tuileries Palace once ran 266 metres along the right bank of the Seine, closing off the western edge of the Louvre's courtyard. For roughly three centuries it served as the Parisian home of most French monarchs, from Henri IV to Napoleon III. It began in 1564 as a private project for a widowed queen, Catherine de' Medici. By 1871 it had become a target for an angry crowd, and by 1883 it was gone entirely. How did a queen's private retreat turn into the setting for coronations, revolutions, and the fall of an empire? And what was it about this particular building that made people want to destroy it rather than simply leave it behind?

• 2. A Queen's New Home

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  Craftsmen once fired roof tiles, called 'tuiles', in kilns on this marshy patch just outside the city walls, giving the site its future name. The Seine flooded the area regularly, reaching as far as what is now the Rue Saint-Honoré. Because the land sat so close to the Louvre Castle, members of the royal family had already begun buying plots there before Catherine de' Medici took an interest.

  After Henri II died in 1559, his widow moved into the Louvre Castle with their son, Francis II, and began planning a residence of her own. She sold the medieval Hôtel des Tournelles near the Bastille, the house where her husband had died. Between 1563 and 1568 she assembled several parcels of land near the Louvre into a single site with room for a large garden.

  Philibert de l'Orme took charge of the build as chief architect. He died in 1570, while the work was still in its early stages, and Jean Bullant took his place. The 1588 Day of the Barricades, a clash between Catholics and Protestants in the city, brought construction to a sudden halt. The site sat unfinished, unprotected, and pillaged for six years, until a king made his triumphal return to Paris.

• 3. Kings Come And Go

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  Henri IV made his triumphal return to Paris in 1594 and picked construction back up at both the Louvre and the Tuileries. He built the Grande Galerie, running parallel to the Seine, to physically connect the two palaces. He commissioned the landscape gardener Claude Mollet to rework the garden. The architects and decorators Étienne Dupérac, Louis Métezeau, and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau shaped the new palace, and Androuet du Cerceau's Pavillon des Tuileries, later renamed the Pavillon de Flore, became the link between the Tuileries and the Grande Galerie.

  Work stopped again after Henri IV's death in 1610; his son Louis XIII showed no interest in resuming it. Construction did not pick up again until 1653, after the civil unrest of the Fronde had ended. Between 1659 and 1661, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin had the architect Louis Le Vau enlarge the palace northward, adding the Théâtre des Tuileries.

  In 1662, Louis XIV marked the birth of his son and heir, Louis, Dauphin of France, with a spectacular 'Carrousel' in the courtyard on the east side of the palace. More than 700 riders took part in the equestrian pageant, competing in dressage. One contest involved spearing the cardboard heads of 'Saracens' and 'Moors'. Mounted processions circled the courtyard afterward, accompanied by music, and the King himself rode in the procession dressed as a Roman emperor. The courtyard has been known as the Carrousel ever since.

  From 1664 to 1666, Le Vau and his assistant François d'Orbay reworked the palace further. They tore out Philibert de l'Orme's grand central staircase and replaced it with a colonnaded vestibule. Above it sat the Salle des Cents Suisses, the Hall of the Hundred Swiss Guards, and a rectangular dome went up over the pavilion. A new grand staircase went into the north wing. Richly decorated royal apartments filled the south wing, with the King's rooms on the ground floor facing the Louvre and the Queen's above, overlooking the garden.

  The court finally moved into the Tuileries in November 1667, only to leave again in 1672 for the new Palace of Versailles. The palace sat largely empty afterward, used mainly as a theatre, though its gardens stayed popular with Parisians.

  Louis XIV died in September 1715. His five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV, was brought from Versailles to the Tuileries on the 1st of January 1716. The palace, barely used in forty years, was refurnished for the boy king. He stayed only until the 15th of June 1722, when he returned to Versailles three months ahead of his coronation. Both moves were made at the direction of the regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. Louis XV came back for brief stretches in the 1740s, while the palace theatre kept hosting operas, concerts, and performances by the Comédie-Française. The next monarch to move in, Louis XVI, would arrive with far less choice in the matter.

• 4. A Palace Under Siege

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  On the 1st of December 1783, the palace garden served as the launch site for the first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon, piloted by Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers. The flight came just two months after the Montgolfier brothers' first manned hot air balloon flight from the Palace of Versailles. Louis XVI watched from the tower, and Benjamin Franklin, the United States ambassador to France, stood among the crowd below. The balloon and its passengers landed safely near Nesles-la-Vallée, roughly 50 kilometres from Paris.

  He and his family were forced from Versailles to the Tuileries on the 6th of October 1789, driven out by the pressure of the Revolution. Nothing had been readied for them; the palace's existing occupants were suddenly evicted, and furniture had to be hauled over from Versailles. For a while the royal family lived in relative calm, with the gardens kept private for them until noon and opened to the public afterward.

  On the 9th of November 1789, the National Constituent Assembly moved its sessions from Versailles into the Salle du Manège. This was the Tuileries' covered equestrian academy on the palace's north side, and the largest meeting hall in the city. Its successor, the National Convention, used the same hall. So did the Council of Five Hundred of the Directory, beginning in 1795, until that body relocated to the Palais Bourbon in 1798. In 1799, the Jacobin Club du Manège set up headquarters there, while the Committee of Public Safety, under Robespierre, met in the Pavillon de Flore.

  By the 21st of June 1791, with the Revolution intensifying and the family's safety in question, Louis XVI attempted to flee Paris. That night they attended a final Vespers Mass in the palace chapel before setting off in disguise for Montmédy. They were caught and arrested in Varennes and brought back to Paris under house arrest.

  On the 10th of August 1792, a large mob stormed the palace gates and poured into the gardens. They overwhelmed and killed the Swiss Guards defending the building. Fires broke out in several outlying structures. The sans-culottes took control of the palace itself. In November 1792 they discovered the armoire de fer, a hidden safe in the royal apartments. It was believed to hold Louis XVI's secret correspondence appealing to other European powers for help, and the find deepened public anger toward the imprisoned royal family. The National Convention met first in the Salle du Manège, then from the 10th of May 1793 in the remodelled Salle des Machines. There it launched the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. The Terror sent the King, Queen Marie Antoinette, his sister Madame Élisabeth, and thousands of others accused of opposing the Revolution to their deaths. Traces of the buildings burned in the 1792 storming would not surface again until archaeologists excavated the site in 1989.

• 5. Napoleon's Imperial Stage

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  Napoleon Bonaparte moved his residence from the Petit Luxembourg to the Tuileries on the 19th of February 1799. He judged it a more fitting stage for his imperial ambitions. Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine set to work redesigning the interior in the Neoclassical Empire style. Napoleon also tore down the ruins of buildings that had burned during the Revolution, clearing space around the palace.

  In 1806, he ordered a triumphal arch built in the centre of the Carrousel courtyard, modelled on the ancient Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome. It served as the palace's ceremonial gateway. Two years later, having proclaimed himself emperor, he revived Henri IV's old ambition. He planned a new wing on the gardens' north side to match the existing south wing, finally linking the Tuileries to the Louvre. The project meant tearing down the Manège and other buildings to clear the courtyard, and it required cutting a new street, the Rue de Rivoli. The former Salle des Machines, once home to the National Convention, was remodelled into a theatre that could double as a banquet hall.

  After Napoleon's divorce, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon was commissioned to design apartments for his new wife, Marie Louise. Her bridal suite was decorated in the Greek Revival style. The couple's son was born in 1811. He was given his own quarters in the Waterside Gallery of the Louvre, reached from the Tuileries by a short underground passageway. He also had a small pavilion of his own in the courtyard, decorated by Fontaine. Napoleon's fall would soon hand the palace over to soldiers from Russia and Prussia, camped in the very gardens his architects had just redesigned.

• 6. Restoration And Empire

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  During the July Revolution of 1830, an armed mob stormed and occupied the Tuileries once again, installing Louis Philippe d'Orléans as the new monarch. He used the palace until 1848, when the French Revolution of that year overthrew him.

  Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, was elected the first President of France in 1848 and initially moved into the Élysée Palace. In 1852, barred from running for president again, he proclaimed himself emperor and moved his household to the Tuileries. The palace, looted and damaged during the 1848 revolution, was extensively refurbished, its new staterooms done up in what became known as the Second Empire style. The palace's prominent roofline, especially its square central dome, went on to influence hotels and government buildings both in France and abroad. These staterooms hosted the ceremony of the Second Empire, including a visit from Queen Victoria in 1855. The old buildings that had cluttered the courtyard were cleared away, and the Louvre's northern wing along the Rue de Rivoli, linking it to the Tuileries, was finally completed.

  Louis-Napoléon kept his private apartment on the ground floor of the palace's southern wing, described as 'gilt boxes furnished in the style of the First Empire.' He liked his rooms kept extremely hot and thick with smoke, from the cigarettes he smoked one after another. His bedroom held a talisman from Charlemagne, considered a good luck symbol for the Bonaparte family. His office displayed a portrait of Julius Caesar by Ingres alongside a large map of Paris, which he used to show his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, his plans for rebuilding the city. His wife, Eugénie de Montijo, occupied 8 of the 11 rooms on the floor above, connected to her husband's apartment by a winding staircase decorated in Louis XVI style with a pink salon, a green salon, and a blue salon. A mezzanine along that staircase housed the treasurer of the privy purse.

  The state rooms of the south wing served different purposes depending on the occasion. At informal dinners, the household gathered in the Salon d'Apollon before proceeding through the throne room to dinner in the Salon Louis XIV. Gala dinners were held in the larger Galerie de Diane, the southernmost of the state apartments. A state ball meant refreshments in the Galerie and a procession to the Salle des Maréchaux, which spanned two floors of the central Pavillon de l'Horloge and served as the ballroom.

  The palace's little-used northern wing held the chapel, the Galerie de la Paix, and the Salle de Spectacle. That hall staged performances such as the Daniel Auber cantata on the evening of Louis-Napoléon and Eugénie's civil wedding, the 29th of July 1853, and hosted grand occasions like the party for visiting sovereigns during the International Exposition on the 10th of June 1867. It later served as a hospital during the Franco-Prussian War.

  Between 1864 and 1868, Napoleon III had the architect Hector Lefuel redesign the Pavillon de Flore, by then the palace's southernmost pavilion. It served as the backstairs of the palace, connected by service corridors to a sprawling gas-lit basement, where a small railway carried food up from the kitchens under the Rue de Rivoli.

• 7. Flames Of The Commune

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  On the 23rd of May 1871, twelve men acting under Jules Bergeret, the Commune's former chief military commander, set the Tuileries alight with petroleum, liquid tar, and turpentine. The fire burned for 48 hours and gutted the palace completely, sparing only the foundations and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Explosives planted in the central pavilion, detonated by the flames, blew up the dome itself. In a note to the Committee of Public Safety, Bergeret wrote, 'The last vestiges of Royalty have just disappeared. I wish that the same may befall all the public buildings of Paris.' Paris fire brigades and the 26th battalion of the Chasseurs d'Afrique did not manage to put the fire out until the 25th of May. Communards also set fire to the Louvre's library and other nearby sections, destroying them entirely, though firemen saved the museum itself.

  The ruins stood on the site for 11 years. Fire had utterly destroyed the roofs and interior, but the stone walls remained intact enough to make restoration possible. Other Paris landmarks burned by the Communards, such as the City Hall, were rebuilt during the 1870s. The Third Republic, more sympathetic to the Commune, eventually pardoned its exiled members after much hesitation. In 1882, despite opposition from Georges-Eugène Haussmann and from historians, it ordered the walls torn down.

  Demolition began in February 1883 and finished on the 30th of September 1883. A private entrepreneur, Achille Picart, sold bits of the stone and marble as souvenirs. Some pieces even went into building a palace near Ajaccio in Corsica, essentially a reconstruction of the Pavillon de Bullant. The courtyard pediment of the central pavilion survives elsewhere in Paris, and other fragments sit in the garden of the Palais du Trocadéro, in the Louvre, and in the Museum of Decorative Arts. More pieces turned up across France, in Arcueil, Barentin, Courbevoie, the Château de Varax in Marcilly-d'Azergues, Nantes, Saint-Raphaël, and Salins. Others crossed borders entirely, to Schwanenwerder in Berlin, to Bordighera in Italy, and to the Palacio de Carondelet in Quito, Ecuador. More than a century later, a group would form with one purpose: reconstructing the palace the fire had destroyed.

• 8. What Remains

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  Since the destruction of the Tuileries, the courtyard has remained open to the west, and the site now forms an elevated terrace between the Place du Carrousel and the Tuileries Garden proper. That garden covers 22.4 hectares, bordered by the Louvre to the east, the Seine to the south, the Place de la Concorde to the west, and the Rue de Rivoli to the north. The Jeu de Paume, a museum of contemporary art, sits in its northwest corner.

  Bernard de Carnesse laid out the garden in 1564 as an Italian Renaissance design. André Le Nôtre redesigned it in 1664 as a jardin à la française, favouring symmetry, order, and long sightlines. His plan drew the eye from one reflecting pool to the next along a single axis running west from the palace façade, a line later extended into what is now called the Axe historique.

  That straight line runs from the site through the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe to La Défense. It was originally centred on the Tuileries façade, while a similar line ran across the Louvre's entrance court. Because the two façades sat at slightly different angles, a small 'kink' appeared where they met, a quirk ultimately dictated by the curving course of the Seine. Once the palace came down in 1883, the wide gap it left between the Louvre's two wings opened straight onto this unbroken axis.

  In 2003, a group called the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Tuileries proposed rebuilding the palace on its original site. Its members pointed out that much of the original furniture and paintings still existed, having been placed in storage when the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870. By 2006, the estimated cost of rebuilding had reached 300 million euros, or about £200 million pounds sterling and US$380 million. The plan called for public subscription and a private foundation to fund it, with no money from the French government. President Jacques Chirac called for a public debate on the idea, and former president Charles de Gaulle had once backed reconstruction too, saying it would 'make a jewel of the centre of Paris.' In 2008, though, Michel Clément, Director of Architecture and Heritage, pushed back: 'From our point of view, the reconstruction of the Tuileries Palace is not a priority.' He added that resurrecting monuments 'out of the ground ex nihilo' was not part of French heritage practice, and that the focus instead belonged on the vestiges that had survived.