Palace of Fontainebleau

The earliest reference to a royal residence at Fontainebleau comes in a charter of 1137 issued by Louis VII the Younger, though the building it names was probably older. Its foundation is placed by some accounts in the reign of Louis VII's father, Louis VI, and by others in that of his grandfather Philip I, who brought the Gâtinais into the royal domain in 1068. What stood on the site was a modest fortified hunting lodge set in marshy ground, with a courtyard, curtain walls, towers and a square keep. The keep rose three storeys and covered about fifty square metres; its lower walls were three metres thick and its upper walls one, built of stone, pierced with windows facing north and south and topped by a wooden palisade, with the king lodged on the middle level. Much remodelled, it survives as the keep of Saint Louis in the Oval Court, and traces of the twelfth-century curtain walls remain in the ground floor of the main range. The kings of France returned to it because of the abundant game and the many springs of the surrounding forest, and it became a favoured autumn residence.

A second charter of Louis VII, in 1169, established and endowed a chaplain to serve the chapel, which was consecrated to the Virgin and to Saint Saturnin by Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, then sheltering at Sens in exile after his quarrel with Henry II of England. At Christmas 1191 Philip II Augustus celebrated his return from the Third Crusade at Fontainebleau. Louis IX enlarged the place, called it his deserts and hunted there, and in 1259 settled Trinitarian friars inside the castle enclosure to serve a hospital and convent he founded; the foundations of their chapel and conventual buildings survive close to the present chapel of the Trinity. Some accounts credit the arrival of the Trinitarians to Louis VII instead, though the dated grant belongs to Louis IX.

Philip IV was the first king of France born at Fontainebleau, in 1268, had apartments fitted out there in 1286, and was the first to die there, in 1314, after a long agony following a fall from his horse. In 1313 Jeanne de Bourgogne, who owned the domain of Fontainebleau, married Philippe de Valois, the future Philip VI, who stayed there often. Isabella of France, by then queen of England, visited in 1325, and in January 1332 the marriage contract of the future John II and Bonne of Luxembourg was signed at the château; John was living there by 1350. Charles V installed a library. Charles VI stayed from 1388, and Isabeau of Bavaria put work in hand after acquiring the domains of the forest of Bière, Fontainebleau and Moret and the castellany of Melun in 1404. The château was then abandoned in the fighting of the Hundred Years' War, when the court withdrew to the Loire and to Bourges, and Charles VII came back to it only after the liberation of the Île-de-France and Paris in 1436, preferring the place for its healthiness.

Francis I resolved to put a Renaissance lodging on the site of the feudal castle, giving out that he chose the spot for the hunting of red and black game. The earlier building was pulled down apart from the keep and part of the north curtain wall, and a specification of 1528 told the architect to use the old walls wherever he could, which is why fifteenth-century stonework can still be read in the Oval Court. Gilles Le Breton directed the works but was not their designer, and the name of the architect who conceived the palace remains uncertain; Sebastiano Serlio, brought from Italy and promised 400 livres a year in December 1541 as the king's painter and architect at Fontainebleau, appears to have contributed less to the fabric than his standing suggests. A succession of men ran the site for the king: Florimond de Champeverne, his secretary and valet de chambre, from 1528 until his death in 1531; then Pierre Paule, called the Italian, until 1535; then, from 1543, Salomon des Herbaines, the king's tapissier and keeper of his furniture, who had the advantage of living on the spot.

What went up was one building around the Oval Court and another on the western lower court, joined by a gallery. The Porte Dorée, in the Italian Renaissance manner, became the main entrance, while the Portique de Serlio on the north side carried a Renaissance stair to the royal apartments. From about 1528 Francis built the Galerie François I, which let him pass directly from his apartments to the chapel of the Trinitarians. The north, west and south wings of the Cour du Cheval Blanc were built in 1540-1542; the southern half of the east wing dates from 1538-1539 and its northern half from after 1545, and the south wing was raised by a storey about 1545-1546 to hold the gallery of Ulysses. Around 1540, on land bought from the Trinitarians, the king began a new square of buildings to the east, closed on the north by the wing of the Ministers, on the east by the wing of Ferrare and on the south by the Ulysses gallery. He surrounded the château with a park in the Italian Renaissance manner containing the first grotto built in a French garden.

Francis meant Fontainebleau to be a centre of Renaissance art. He collected objects of art, commissioned mythological subjects, and had moulds of Roman statues including the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere sent from Italy to be cast in bronze; he acquired paintings by Italian masters, among them Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Virgin of the Rocks and Raphael's Belle Jardinière; and he assembled in the château the library that was the ancestor of the national library. Rosso Fiorentino, who had lost most of his possessions in the Sack of Rome in 1527, was invited to work on the interior in 1531 and was joined the next year by Francesco Primaticcio of Bologna. Rosso filled the Galerie François I with murals glorifying the king, framed in high-relief stucco and in panelling carved by the furniture-maker Francesco Scibec da Carpi, and the king's emblem, a salamander in flames, stands beside each painting he commissioned in the gallery. Rosso died in France in 1540. The mixture of painting and sculpture made here became known as the first School of Fontainebleau, covering roughly 1530 to 1610 and shaping Northern Mannerism in France; Giorgio Vasari called Fontainebleau the New Rome, and prints of the work carried the style into Antwerp, Germany and eventually London. Francis received James V of Scotland, the future husband of Madeleine of France, between 4 and 27 December 1536, and showed his palace to the Emperor Charles V between 24 and 30 December 1539.

Henry II carried on the building, and on 3 April 1548 charged Philibert de l'Orme with the works. About 1552 the open loggia planned by Francis I was closed with high windows and an ornate coffered ceiling to make the ballroom, and from that year Niccolò dell'Abbate, brought from Modena on Primaticcio's advice, painted its frescoes after Primaticcio's drawings. With Catherine de' Medici, the king extended the east wing of the lower court and gave it the horseshoe staircase that became a mark of the château. Most of their children were born at Fontainebleau, including the future Francis II on 19 January 1544 and the future Henry III on 19 September 1551. Two days after Henry II died of the wound he took in a jousting accident in 1559, Catherine dismissed Delorme, a protégé of Diane de Poitiers, and handed the works to Primaticcio, made superintendent of the royal houses on 12 July 1559; he designed the wing of the Belle Cheminée, with its elaborate chimneys and opposing stairs. In 1565, as a security measure in the Wars of Religion, Catherine had a moat dug around the château. It was less lived in under her three sons, who preferred the Louvre and the Loire houses, but an assembly of notables met there from 21 to 31 August 1560 on the religious quarrels troubling the kingdom and its work led to the calling of the Estates General; on 31 January 1564 Charles IX and Catherine received the ambassadors of the pope, the emperor and the king of Spain. Primaticcio died on 14 September 1570 and was succeeded by Tristan de Rostaing. Between 1584 and 1594, in the Wars of Religion, work inside the palace stopped altogether.

Henry IV made more additions than any king since Francis I, spending close to two and a half million livres between 1593 and 1609, after which the palace could house nearly a thousand people. He extended the Oval Court westward with the Tiber and Luxembourg pavilions, remade the façades around the courtyard between 1601 and 1606, built the domed Porte du Baptistère on the east, and raised the Cour des Offices between 1606 and 1609 for the kitchens and the lodgings of court officials. The galleries of Diana and of the Deer enclosed the old garden of Diana, and a large indoor tennis court was added. A second group of painters and decorators, Martin Fréminet, Ambroise Dubois, Jean de Hoey and Toussaint Dubreuil, worked on the interiors and became known as the second School of Fontainebleau. The gardens took as much of his attention: his gardener Claude Mollet laid out a great parterre of flower beds set with antique statues, Tommaso Francini made the fountain of Diana and the grotto, and a grand canal 1,200 metres long was dug, sixty years before Louis XIV cut his own at Versailles. The future Louis XIII was born at the château on 27 September 1601 and baptised there in September 1606; on 14 June 1602 the Marshal de Biron and the Count of Auvergne were arrested there for treason. Louis XIII inherited a building site in 1610 and finished it without major change, completing the decoration of the chapel of the Trinity and setting Jean Androuet du Cerceau to rebuild the horseshoe stair on the Cour du Cheval Blanc.

Under Anne of Austria the apartments of the Queen Mothers' wing were redecorated and the garden of Diana redrawn by André Le Nôtre in 1645-1646. In August 1646 the château received Henrietta Maria, queen of England, and her son, the future Charles II. Christina of Sweden, who had abdicated her own crown, stayed from October 1657 to February 1658, and on 10 November 1657 had her master of the horse and favourite, the Marchese Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, killed in the château for betraying her secrets; he wore a coat of mail under his clothes, which drew out his death and deepened the scandal. Louis XIV came almost every year to hunt at the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, and is said to have spent more days at Fontainebleau than any other monarch, though his architectural changes were limited: an apartment for Madame de Maintenon furnished with work by André-Charles Boulle, a new wing by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, and a thorough remaking of the gardens by Le Nôtre and Louis Le Vau between 1660 and 1664, with the basin of the Cascades in 1661-1662 and a pavilion on an island in the carp pond. The Grand Dauphin was born there on 1 November 1661; the trial of the superintendent Nicolas Fouquet opened at the chancellery on 25 June 1664; and on 18 October 1685 Louis XIV signed at Fontainebleau the edict revoking that of Nantes and outlawing Protestantism in France. James II, the deposed king of England, first stayed with Mary of Modena from 11 to 18 October 1690 and returned every year until 1700. Saint-Simon held that the decision to accept the Spanish crown for the Duke of Anjou was taken at a council held in Madame de Maintenon's apartments on 10 November 1700, and in August 1712 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, came sent by Queen Anne to negotiate peace after the War of the Spanish Succession.

Tsar Peter the Great was a guest during the Regency in 1717; a stag hunt and a banquet were arranged for him, and although the visit was officially a success, memoirs published later by his delegation record that he disliked the French style of hunting, thought the château small beside the other royal houses, preferred beer to wine and brought his own supply. Louis XV married Marie Leszczyńska in the chapel on 5 September 1725. To lodge his courtiers he built the Cour des Princes east of the Gallery of Deer in 1737-1738 and replaced the Ulysses wing on the Cour du Cheval Blanc in stages in 1738-1741 and 1773-1774; between 1750 and 1754 Ange-Jacques Gabriel raised a new wing along the carp pond with lavish apartments for the king and queen, a council chamber painted by François Boucher, Charles-André van Loo, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre and Alexis Peyrotte, and a small theatre in the Belle Cheminée wing. Fontainebleau served as a place of business as much as of leisure: a secret treaty of alliance with Spain was signed there on 27 October 1743, the first performance of Rousseau's Le Devin du village was given on 18 October 1752, and on 3 November 1762 the secret treaty of Fontainebleau settled the Louisiana possessions between France and Spain. Louis XVI added a building alongside the Galerie François I for his courtiers, had a Turkish salon made for Marie Antoinette in 1777 and a games room and boudoir in 1786-1787, and saw two further treaties ratified there, one in 1785 between Austria and the Netherlands and a commercial treaty with England on 10 November 1786. He and Marie Antoinette made their last visit in 1786, on the eve of the Revolution.

In January 1789 fire broke out in the Orangery, spread to damage the chapel and reduced the Dauphin's apartment to ashes. The Revolution left the château itself largely alone, far from the turbulence of Paris, but it was emptied of its furniture, which was afterwards sold at auction. The buildings were given over to the Central School of the department of Seine-et-Marne, then from 28 January 1803 to 30 June 1808 housed the barracks of the special military school, which was moved on to Saint-Cyr, and then served as a prison.

Napoleon brought the palace back into use from 1804, refurnishing it and fitting out forty apartments for the court he held there, with opera and theatre performed two evenings a week. He chose Fontainebleau for his meeting in 1804 with Pope Pius VII, who had travelled from Rome to crown him emperor. The Cour du Cheval Blanc was renamed the Cour d'Honneur, the wing of Ferrare facing it was demolished and replaced by an ornamental iron fence and gate, and the gardens of Diana and of the Pines were replanted as an English landscape garden by Maximilien Joseph Hurtault; the Sénarmont riding hall, built in 1807 between the carp pond and the forest, was the chief new building raised for him within the walls. It was also a place of political business, with treaties signed there in October 1807 fixing the frontier between Austria and the kingdom of Italy, allying France with Denmark and settling Portugal secretly with Spain. In 1808 Napoleon installed his throne in the former bedchamber of the kings of France, on the spot where the royal bed had stood, wanting to show the continuity of his empire with the monarchies before it. Pius VII, held prisoner at Savona, was brought secretly to Fontainebleau on 20 June 1812 and kept there for nineteen months, signing the concordat of Fontainebleau under pressure on 25 January 1813 and leaving on 23 January 1814. On 4 November 1810 the chapel saw the baptism of Napoleon's nephew, the future Napoleon III, alongside twenty-four other children of dignitaries and generals, with Napoleon as godfather and the Empress Marie-Louise as godmother.

Napoleon spent the last days of his reign at the château, abdicating there on 4 April 1814 under pressure from his marshals Ney, Berthier and Lefebvre; the treaty of Fontainebleau formalising the unconditional abdication was signed in Paris on 11 April. He signed the act on a small table in his private study. On 20 April, after a failed attempt on his own life, he took his leave of the soldiers of the Old Guard drawn up in the courtyard that has been called the Cour des Adieux ever since, a scene painted by Horace Vernet. He stopped at Fontainebleau again on 20 March 1815 during the Hundred Days, and remembered it in exile on Saint Helena as "the true residence of kings, the house of the centuries" and "the most comfortable and happily situated palace in Europe". Louis XVIII and Charles X each slept at the château after the restoration of the monarchy but made no major changes. Louis-Philippe began the first restoration campaign, directed by Jean Alaux, Picot and Abel de Pujol, redecorating the Hall of the Guards and Gallery of Plates in a neo-Renaissance style and the Hall of Columns in a neoclassical one, and adding stained glass from the royal manufactory at Sèvres. His son Ferdinand-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, was married in the chapel to Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin on 30 May 1837. On 16 April 1846 a forest guard, Pierre Lecomte, tried to assassinate the king in the park.

Abel Blouet became architect of the château in 1848 and began fresh restorations of the Galerie François I and the wings of the Cour du Cheval Blanc; on his death in 1853 he was followed by Hector Lefuel, then by Alexis Paccard in 1855 and Prosper Desbuisson in 1867. The château was classified as a historic monument on the list of 1862. Napoleon III, who had been baptised there, resumed the custom of long stays, and Fontainebleau took its place with Saint-Cloud, Compiègne and Biarritz among the court's summer residences. Historic rooms such as the Gallery of Deer were restored towards their original appearance while the private apartments were redone for the emperor and empress, and guest apartments were fitted into unused spaces. Fire destroyed the eighteenth-century theatre in the Belle Cheminée wing in 1856; Lefuel had already begun a new one in 1854 at the eastern end of the Louis XIV wing, in the Louis XVI style, with four hundred seats, two balconies and boxes, where actors from the Paris theatres performed for the emperor's guests. In 1867 the Empress Eugénie had rooms on the ground floor of the Gros Pavillon remade to hold her collection of Asian art, made up of gifts brought by the ambassadors of the king of Siam, received at the château on 27 June 1861, and of objects taken during the looting of the Old Summer Palace near Beijing by a joint British and French expedition in 1860. Her Salon of Lacquerware, made in 1868, was the last room decorated before the Empire fell in 1870 and the château was closed.

Prussian troops took the palace on 17 September 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, and Frederick Charles of Prussia and his staff used it as a headquarters from 6 to 18 March 1871, leaving it evacuated five days later. In November 1871 the outbuildings were handed to the school of applied artillery and engineering, which had left Metz. Presidents of the Third Republic used the château as an occasional summer residence and received foreign sovereigns there: Alexander I of Serbia in 1891 and George I of Greece in 1892 under Sadi Carnot, Leopold II of Belgium in 1895 under Félix Faure, and Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1913 under Raymond Poincaré. The former empress Eugénie came back to see the château on 10 July 1914. The façades and roofs of the buildings around the Cour Henri IV and the Cour des Princes, and those of the Pavillon Sully, were classified as historic monuments on 20 August 1913. The American Conservatory was inaugurated at the château on 26 June 1921 and the American school of fine arts on 25 June 1923, and both still exist. In 1927 the château became a national museum, and from that year into the 1930s the upper floors of the Belle Cheminée wing, burnt in 1856, were rebuilt with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The German army under General Richard Ruoff took Fontainebleau on 16 June 1940 and occupied it until 10 November, and again from 15 May to the end of October 1941. After the war the château housed the Franco-Vietnamese conference of 6 to 10 September 1946, chaired by Max André and Phạm Văn Đồng, and on 5 October 1948 the International Union for the Protection of Nature was founded there. From January 1949 part of the buildings, chiefly the Cour des Offices, was taken over by the Western Union and then by NATO's Allied Forces Central Europe, which stayed until July 1966. A general restoration followed under the programme law of 1964-1968 initiated by the Minister of Culture André Malraux, with President Charles de Gaulle. The domain was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1981, and the heads of state and government of the European Economic Community met at the château on 25 and 26 June 1984 under François Mitterrand. The Museum of Napoleon I opened in 1986 in the wing where the apartments of the princes of the First Empire had been, holding portraits, coronation costumes, a gold leaf from the coronation crown, and souvenirs of the emperor's campaigns and of his son, the King of Rome. The Ministry of Culture bought the former royal stables in 2006 and began restoring them, and the whole national domain, built and unbuilt, was classified as a historic monument by an order of 10 October 2008. Restoration of Napoleon III's theatre began in 2007, funded with ten million euros by the government of Abu Dhabi, which was acknowledged by renaming it for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan; it was inaugurated on 30 April 2014 and can be visited, though it can no longer be used for plays because working parts of the theatre, including the stage, were left out of the restoration. On 1 March 2015 thieves broke into the Chinese Museum at about six in the morning and, despite alarms and cameras, took about fifteen of its most valuable objects in seven minutes, among them the replica of the crown of Siam given to Napoleon III, a Tibetan mandala and an enamel chimera of the Qianlong reign. In 2021, for the bicentenary of Napoleon's death, more than 200 works from the château's own collections and from French and foreign museums were gathered there for an exhibition on the palace he made for himself. The château is owned by the French State and open as a national museum.