Tuileries Palace

The ground west of the Louvre lay outside the city walls, flooded by the Seine as far as the present Rue Saint-Honoré and worked by craftsmen whose kilns made the tuiles — roof tiles — that named the site. After Henri II died in 1559 his widow Catherine de' Medici sold the Hôtel des Tournelles where he had died and between 1563 and 1568 assembled land here for a residence with a large garden.

Building began in 1564 under Philibert de l'Orme, who died in 1570 with the work barely started; Jean Bullant took his place. Catherine never moved in. The Day of the Barricades in 1588 halted the work, and the unguarded site was abandoned and pillaged.

Work resumed in 1594, when Henri IV returned to Paris in triumph. He raised the Grande Galerie along the Seine to link the Tuileries to the Louvre and had Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau add the pavilion later renamed the Pavillon de Flore. Work halted after his death in 1610.

After the Fronde ended, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin had Louis Le Vau extend the palace northwards between 1659 and 1661 with the Théâtre des Tuileries. In 1662 the king marked the birth of his heir with a Carrousel of over 700 participants in the eastern courtyard, appearing himself as a Roman emperor; the courtyard kept the name. From 1664 to 1666 Le Vau and François d'Orbay recast de l'Orme's façades and central pavilion, and André Le Nôtre redesigned the garden. The court moved in in November 1667 and left in 1672 for Versailles.

On 6 October 1789 Louis XVI and his family were forced from Versailles into a palace where nothing had been prepared for them. On 9 November the National Constituent Assembly moved its sittings into the Salle du Manège, the palace's covered riding school and the largest meeting hall in the city. On 21 June 1791 the family heard a last Vespers in the chapel and left in disguise for Montmédy; they were arrested at Varennes and brought back under house arrest.

On 10 August 1792 a mob entered the gardens and massacred the Swiss Guards defending the palace, close to 600 of whom died in the fighting or afterwards. That November the invaders discovered the armoire de fer, the safe believed to hold Louis XVI's secret appeals to other European powers. The Convention sat in the Salle du Manège and from 10 May 1793 in the remodelled Salle des Machines, launching the Terror of 1793–94 that executed the king, Marie Antoinette, his sister Madame Élisabeth and thousands of others.

Napoleon Bonaparte moved his residence from the Petit Luxembourg to the Tuileries and had Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine recast the interiors in the Neoclassical Empire style. In 1806 he ordered a triumphal arch modelled on the Arch of Septimius Severus at the centre of the Carrousel courtyard; in 1808 he took up Henri IV's scheme for a northern wing to the Louvre, clearing the Manège and cutting the Rue de Rivoli.

After Napoleon's defeat the gardens became a camp for Russian and Prussian soldiers and the Bourbons returned. An armed mob stormed the palace again in the July Revolution of 1830; Louis Philippe used it until he was overthrown in 1848. Louis-Napoléon proclaimed himself emperor in 1852 and moved in, rebuilding the staterooms in what became known as the Second Empire style — the setting for Queen Victoria's visit in 1855. The north wing's Salle de Spectacle served as a hospital during the Franco-Prussian War.

On 23 May 1871, during the suppression of the Paris Commune, twelve men under Jules Bergeret, the Commune's former chief military commander, set the palace alight with petroleum, liquid tar and turpentine. The fire burned for 48 hours and gutted everything but the foundations and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the dome brought down by explosives placed in the central pavilion. 'The last vestiges of Royalty have just disappeared,' Bergeret wrote to the Committee of Public Safety.

The ruins stood eleven years. The stone walls remained intact and restoration was possible, but in 1882 the Third Republic had them torn down, against the opposition of Haussmann and historians. Demolition began in February 1883 and finished on 30 September, and Achille Picart sold the stone and marble as souvenirs. A committee proposed rebuilding the palace in 2003, costed in 2006 at 300 million euros to be raised by public subscription; in 2008 the director of architecture and heritage, Michel Clément, answered that the project was not a priority and that raising monuments ex nihilo was not part of French heritage practice.