Palais Disparus De Napoléon : Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Meudon

Exhibition at the Galerie des Gobelins, Paris, 15 September, 2021 - 16 January, 2022

Between 1800 and 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte made the "royal houses" of the Ancien Régime his own: architecture, fine and decorative arts were called upon to offer the Emperor a setting that was both luxurious and conveyed a message of order and grandeur. To this was added a political and economic purpose: to keep busy artists, craftsmen and factory workers, in order to pacify a society that had just emerged from the revolutionary turmoil while promoting French industry in the face of its European competitors. Three of the main palaces thus reinvented - the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud and Meudon - burned down in 1870 and 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Numerous pieces of furniture and elements of their decor that had been sheltered before the conflict were saved.

This exhibition catalogue resurrects these lost palaces for the first time and reveals the inventiveness of the designers of the early 19th century.