Palais-Royal
The
Palais-Royal, originally called the
Palais-Cardinal, is a palace and an associated
garden located in the 1st arrondissement of Paris
. Facing the Place du Palais-Royal, it
stands opposite the north wing of the Louvre
, and its
famous forecourt (cour d'honneur), screened with columns
and, since 1986, containing Daniel
Buren's site-specific artpiece, Les Deux Plateaux, known as Les
Colonnes de Buren.
History
Palais-Cardinal
Originally, the
Palais Cardinal was the residence
of
Cardinal Richelieu, who had
hired the architect
Jacques
Lemercier to design it. Construction was completed in 1629.
Upon his death in 1642, Richelieu bequeathed the palace to the
French Crown. After
Louis XIII
died, it became the home of the Queen Mother,
Anne of Austria, her advisor,
Cardinal Mazarin, and her young sons, King
Louis XIV and
Philippe, duc d'Anjou.
During the
Fronde, the royal family fled
there for safety.
From 1649, the
palace was the residence of
the exiled Queen of England,
Henrietta Maria of France, and her
youngest daughter,
Princess
Henrietta-Anne of England, who lived there at the invitation of
her nephew, King Louis XIV.
The two had escaped England
in the midst
of the English Civil War.
Henrietta Anne was later married to the king's younger brother,
Phillipe de France, duc
d'Orléans.
House of Orléans
The couple was married in the chapel of the palace on 31 March
1661.
After their marriage, the palace became the
main residence of the Orléans while Philippe I was waiting for
improvements to his country estate, the château de
Saint-Cloud
, to be carried out.
The Duchess of Orléans' mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, was then
obliged to move out of the palace and eventually settled in a
Château in
Colombes, on the outskirts of Paris. The palace was
soon to be the social center of the capital when the reign the
House of Orléans was to begin
after the marriage of the new ducal couple.
Philippe de France
The
duchesse d'Orléans, who
was known at court as
Madame, created the ornamental
gardens of the palace, which were said to be among the most
beautiful in Paris.
The couple was unsuited as a result of Henriette's youthful
flirting with members of her brother-in-law's court (she was later
said to have become one of his flings) and Philippe's well-known
and open
homosexuality. One of their
children,
Marie Louise
d'Orléans, was born in the palace in 1662.
The
Court gatherings at the Palais Royal
were famed all around the capital as well as all of France
. It
was at these parties that the
crème de la crème of French
society came to see and be seen. Guests included the main members
of the Royal Family like the Queen Mother,
Anne of Austria; the
duchesse de Montpensier, the
Princes
de Condé and the
de Conti. Philippe's favourites were
also frequent visitors.
The Palace was redecorated for the new ducal couple and apartments
were created for the maids and staff of the duchesse d'Orléans.
Several of the women who later came to be
favourites to King Louis XIV were
from the household of
Madame:
Louise de La Vallière, who gave
birth there to two sons of the king, in 1663 and 1665;
Françoise-Athénaïs,
marquise de Montespan, who supplanted Louise;
Angélique de Fontanges, who was
in service to the second Duchess of Orléans.
The second Duchess of Orléans
Madame died in 1670
after an alleged poisoning by her husband and his new favourite,
the
Chevalier de
Lorraine. An autopsy was performed, and it was reported
that Henrietta-Anne had died of
peritonitis caused by a perforated
ulcer. The
Chevalier de Lorraine was
later installed in the palace.
After her death, the duke's second wife, the
Princess
Palatine, preferred to live in the Château de
Saint-Cloud. So, Saint-Cloud became the main residence
of her eldest son and the heir to the House of Orléans,
Philippe Charles d'Orléans
known as the
duc de
Chartres.
Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, Duchess of Orléans
In 1692, on the occasion of the marriage of the
duc de
Chartres to
Françoise-Marie de Bourbon,
Mademoiselle de Blois, a legitimised daughter of Louis XIV
and Madame de Montespan, the King deeded the Palais-Royal to his
brother.
For the convenience of the bride, new apartments were built and
furnished in the wing facing east on the
rue de Richelieu.
It was at this time that Philippe commissioned the famous gallery
for his collection of artwork. The cost of this reconstruction was
totaled to be 400,000
livres.
After the dismissal of
Madame
de Montespan and the arrival of her successor,
Madame de
Maintenon, who forbade any lavish entertainment at
Versailles, the Palais-Royal was again a social
highlight.
When the Duke of Orléans died in 1701, his son became the head of
the
House of Orléans. The new
Duke and Duchess of Orléans took up residence at the Palais-Royal.
Two of their daughters,
Charlotte Aglaé
d'Orléans, later the
Sovereign Duchess Consort of Modena
and Reggio, and
Louise
Diane d'Orléans, later the
Princess
of Conti, were born there.
La Régence and the reign of Louis XV
At the death of Louis XIV in 1715, his five-year old great-grandson
succeeded him.
The Duke of Orléans became Regent for the
young Louis XV, setting up the
country's government at the Palais-Royal, while the young king
lived at the nearby Tuileries Palace
. The Palais-Royal housed the magnificent
Orléans art collection of some
500 paintings, which was arranged for public viewing until it was
sold abroad in 1791.
After the Regency, the social life of the palais became much more
subdued. Louis XV moved the court back to Versailles and Paris was
again ignored. The same happened with the Palais-Royal;
Louis d'Orléans,
who succeeded his father as the new Duke of Orléans, and his son
Louis
Philippe lived at the other family residence in Saint-Cloud,
which had been empty since the death of the Princess Palatine in
1722.
The Palais-Royal was soon the scene of the notorious debaucheries
of
Louise Henriette de
Bourbon who was married to Louis Philippe in 1743. She died at
the age of thirty-two in 1759. She was the mother of
Louis Philippe II
d'Orléans better known as
Philippe Égalité.
The Palais Under the Stewardship of Louis Philippe II
A few years after the death of Louise Henriette, her husband
secretly married his mistress, the witty
marquise de Montesson and the couple lived at the
Château
de Sainte-Assise where he died in 1785. He completed the sale
of the
Château de Saint-Cloud to his distant relative,
Queen
Marie Antoinette.
In 1785,
Louis
Philippe II d'Orléans his father as the head of the House of
Orléans. He was born at the Château de Saint-Cloud and later moved
to the Palais-Royal and lived there with his wife, the wealthy
Louise Marie
Adélaïde de Bourbon whom he had married in 1769. The couple's
eldest son,
Louis-Philippe III
d'Orléans, was born there in 1773.
Louis Philippe II, who controlled the Palais-Royal from 1780
onward, expanded and redesigned the complex of buildings and the
gardens of the palace between 1781 and 1784. In 1784, the
Palais-Royal reopened as a shopping and entertainment complex. It
had 145 boutiques, cafés, salons, hair salons, bookshops, museums,
and countless refreshment kiosks. The redesigned palace, which was
open to the public, became one of the most important marketplaces
in Paris. It was frequented by the aristocracy, the middle classes,
and the lower orders. It had a reputation as being a site of both
sophisticated conversation (revolving around the salons, cafés, and
bookshops) and shameless debauchery (it was a favorite haunt of
local prostitutes).
The Palais-Royal also contained one of the most important public
theaters in Paris. It was rebuilt in 1786 at the behest of Louis
Philippe II (who became the new Duc d'Orléans in 1785 upon the
death of his father). In 1799, the theater became the home of the
Comédie-Française or Théâtre-Français , which it remains
today.
Palais de l'Égalité and the Revolution
Palais Royal Gardens: Illustration,
from an 1863 guide to Paris, enlarges the apparent scale.
Modern planting keeps the lawn, fountains and trees.
During the revolutionary period, Philippe d'Orléans became known as
Philippe Égalité and ruled at the
Palais de
l'Égalité, as it was known during the more radical phase of
the
Revolution, made himself
popular in Paris when he opened the gardens of the palace to all
Parisians and employed the
neoclassical architect
Victor Louis to rebuild the structures around
the palace gardens, which had been the irregular backs of houses
that faced the surrounding streets, and to enclose the gardens with
regular colonnades that were lined with smart shops (in one of
which
Charlotte Corday bought the
knife she used to stab
Jean-Paul
Marat).
Along the
galeries, ladies of the night lingered, and
smart gambling casinos were lodged in second-floor quarters.
There was
a theatre at each end of the galleries; the larger one has been the
seat of the Comédie-Française
, the state theatre company, since Napoleon laid its
administrative reorganisation in the décret de Moscou on
15 October 1812, which contains 87 articles.. The very first
theatre in the Palais-Royal was built by Lemercier for
Cardinal Richelieu, and inaugurated in
1641. Under Louis XIV, the theater hosted plays by
Molière, from 1660 to Molière's death in 1673,
followed by the Opera under the direction of
Jean-Baptiste Lully.
From the 1780s to 1837, the palace was once again the centre of
Parisian political and social intrigue and the site of the most
popular cafés. The historic restaurant "Le Grand Vefour" is still
there. In 1786, a noon cannon was set up by a philosophical
amateur, set on the
prime meridian of
Paris, in which the sun's noon rays, passing through a lens, lit
the cannon's fuse. The noon cannon is still fired at the
Palais-Royal, though most of the ladies for sale have disappeared,
those who inspired the
Abbé
Delille's lines;
- "Dans ce jardin on ne rencontre
- Ni champs, ni prés, ni bois, ni fleurs.
- Et si l'on y dérègle ses mœurs,
- Au moins on y règle sa montre."
("In this garden one encounters neither fields nor meadows nor
woods nor flowers. And, if one upsets one's morality, at least one
may
re-set one's watch.")
The
Marquis de Sade referred to the
grounds in front of the palace in his
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)
as a place where progressive pamphlets were sold.
Upon the death of the Duke, the palace's ownership lapsed to the
state, whence it was called
Palais du Tribunat.
Bourbon restoration
After the Restoration of the Bourbons, at the Palais-Royal the
young
Alexandre Dumas
obtained employment in the office of the powerful
duc d'Orléans, who regained control
of the Palace during the Restoration. In the
Revolution of 1848, the
Paris mob trashed and looted the Palais-Royal. Under the
Second Empire the Palais-Royal was home
to the cadet branch of the Bonaparte family, represented by
Prince Napoleon, Napoleon III's
cousin.
Today's Palais-Royal
Today it houses the
Conseil d'État, the
Constitutional Council, and
the
Ministry of
Culture.
At the rear of the garden are the older
buildings of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France
, the national library of deposit, with a collection
of more than 6,000,000 books, documents, maps, and prints; most of
the collections have been moved to more modern settings
elsewhere.
Palais Brion
The
House of Orléans did not
occupy the northeast wing, where Anne of Austria had originally
lived, but instead chose to reside in the palais Brion, where the
future regent, before his father died, commissioned
Gilles-Marie Oppenord to decorate the
grand appartement in the light and lively
style
Régence that foreshadowed the
Rococo.
These,
and the Regent's more intimate petits appartements, as
well as a gallery painted with Virgilian subjects by Coypel, were all demolished in 1784, for
the installation of the Théâtre-Français, now the Comédie-Française.
The palais Brion, a separate
pavilion standing along rue Richelieu,
to the west of the Palais Royal, had been purchased by Louis XIV
from the heirs of
Cardinal
Richelieu. Louis had it connected to the Palais-Royal. It was
at the palais Brion that Louis had his mistress
Louise de La Vallière stay while
his affair with
Madame de
Montespan was still an
official secret.
Later on, the royal collection of antiquities was installed at the
palais Brion, under the care of the art critic and official court
historian
André Félibien,
who had been appointed in 1673.
See also
References
External links
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