Élysée Palace

The architect Armand-Claude Mollet owned a plot on the road to the village of Roule, west of Paris — now the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré — and in 1718 sold it to Louis Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Count of Évreux, on the condition, written into the sale, that Mollet would build the count an hôtel particulier there. The house went up between 1718 and 1720 and was finished and decorated by 1722.

It was paid for with the dowry of 2,000,000 livres Évreux received on his marriage in 1707 to Marie-Anne Crozat, daughter of Antoine Crozat — a Toulouse shipowner reckoned the wealthiest man in France at the start of the eighteenth century, whose fortune was built on colonial slavery and the slave trade, in particular through the Compagnie de Guinée, whose task was to ship as many enslaved Black people as possible from Nantes to Saint-Domingue. On 14 December 1720, the day of the ball inaugurating the house, the count dismissed his wife, with his mistress the duchesse de Lesdiguières among the guests; the separation Marie-Anne then sought obliged him to return the dowry.

Évreux died in 1753, and on 24 December that year the Marquise de Pompadour bought it for 730,000 livres; opponents of the regime showed their distaste by hanging signs on the gates reading "Home of the King's whore". On her death in 1764 the house became Crown property, given over to lodging extraordinary ambassadors. In 1773 the court banker Nicolas Beaujon bought it and engaged the royal architect Étienne-Louis Boullée to extend it, adding a gallery for a collection that included Holbein's The Ambassadors, now in London's National Gallery, and Frans Hals' Bohemian, now in the Louvre.

In 1787 Bathilde d'Orléans, Duchess of Bourbon, bought the palace and gardens from Beaujon for 1,300,000 livres, and it was she who named it the Élysée. With the Revolution she fled the country; the house was confiscated and leased out, its gardens given over to eating, drinking and dancing and its rooms to gambling. Joachim and Caroline Murat bought it in 1805 and renovated it in grander, imperial style; in 1808 it passed to Caroline's brother, the Emperor Napoleon, as the Élysée-Napoléon. Russian Cossacks camped there in the occupation of Paris in 1814. After Waterloo, Napoleon returned and signed his abdication in the Salon d'Argent on 22 June 1815, leaving three days later. The duchess recovered it and sold it in 1816 to her royal cousin Louis XVIII; from 1820 to 1848 it mainly lodged royal guests.

After the revolution of 1848 and Louis Philippe I's abdication, the provisional government of the Second Republic took the palace over. On 12 December 1848 parliament passed a law declaring it the official residence of the president; renamed the Élysée National, it housed Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his coup d'état from the Salon d'Argent on 2 December 1851.

As Napoleon III he moved to the nearby Tuileries but kept the Élysée for discreet meetings with his mistresses, and in 1853 set the architect Joseph-Eugène Lacroix to renovate it; the palace has looked essentially as Lacroix left it in 1867 ever since. It became the official presidential residence of the Third Republic in 1873. The Salle des Fêtes, where French presidents are inaugurated, opened on 10 May 1889 under President Sadi Carnot, timed for that year's Exposition Universelle. In 1899 Félix Faure became the only officeholder to die in the palace.

The palace was classified a historical monument on 28 October 1916 and belongs to the French State. It was closed in June 1940 and stood empty through the Second World War, reoccupied only in 1946 by Vincent Auriol, first president of the Fourth Republic from 1947 to 1954. Charles de Gaulle, resident from 1959 to 1969, disliked its lack of privacy and oversaw the purchase of the Hôtel de Marigny opposite for visiting foreign officials: "I do not like the idea of meeting Kings walking around my corridors in their pyjamas." Konrad Adenauer signed the Élysée Treaty in the Salon Murat in 1963.

The palace holds the presidential office and residence, and the Council of Ministers meets there weekly; Emmanuel Macron, president since 2017, is its current resident. On 21 May 2026 the Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage presented the president with a plaque recording that the palace's historic core was financed "by the fortune of Antoine Crozat, amassed when he was the principal actor in the slave economy of the French colonial empire under Louis XIV".