Palais des Tuileries
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The lost Palais des Tuileries
For much of its life, the Louvre stood facing a twin sister some 500m to the west, the Palais des Tuileries. Built in 1559 for Catherine de Médicis shortly after the accidental death of her husband, Henry II. It was a place where she could maintain her political independence while wielding power on behalf of her sickly son, Francọis II. It was apparently Catherine herself who conceived the idea of linking the two palaces by a grande galerie running along the right bank of the Seine, but in 1572 she abandoned the entire project. Tradition has it that she was warned by a soothsayer to “beware of St-Germain” if she wanted to live into old age – the Tuileries lay in the parish of St-Germain l’Auxerrois. It’s more likely that the palace’s situation just outside the protection of the city walls was the problem, as 1572 was a dangerous year: on August 24, the bells of St-Germain l’Auxerrois rang out accordingly to a pre-arranged signal, whereupon radical Catholics set about the murder of some three thousand Parisian Protestants, possibly under the secret order of Catherine herself.
It wasn’t until forty years after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre that the two palaces were finally linked, in the reign of Henry IV. Louis XIV moved across from the Louvre in 1667, but the court soon departed for Versailies, and the Tuileries remained largely empty until the Revolution, when Louis XIV was kept under the virtual house arrest there by the revolutionary mob until the sans-culottes finally lost patience on June 20, 1972, breaking in and forcing the king to don the revolutionary red bonnet. The Tuileries was revived under Napoleon, who built the Arc du Carrousel facing its central pavillon, and its statue grew still greater under his nephew. Napoleon III, who finally enclosed both royal palaces around a single gigantic courtyard, the whole complex being dubbed the Cité Impériale. This glorious perfection didn’t last long; the Tuileries was set alight by the revolutionary Communards as they lost control of the city in May 1871.
Other buildings destroyed by the Communards, like the Hộtel de Ville, were swiftly rebuilt, but the ruins of the Tuileries were simply cleared away for the gardens that now bear the illustrious name. But in February 2004 a campaign to rebuild the Tuileries palace was launched with great fanfare in the Figaro newspaper by a society of admirers of Napoléon III, the Académie du Second Empire. The Académie des Beaux Arts decided to support the project, the Culture Ministry promised to look into it and a frenzied press argued the merits. The pros include the twenty thousand square metres of floor space that would be created and, for the more aesthetically minded, the fact that the palace would be hide the kink in the line of the “Grand Axis” as it reaches the Louvre. The main cons are the estimated cost of €300 million, and the political implications of the resurrection of a powerful royalist symbol. The project seems unlikely to find funding. It's not as if the Louvre is short of space. - there isn't enough staff even to keep all the existing rooms open daily.
