| Château de Saint-Cloud | |
|---|---|
.jpg) The château and gardens,c. 1720 | |
  Location just west of Paris | |
| General information | |
| Type | Château |
| Architectural style | French Baroque,Neo-Classical |
| Construction started | c. 1570 |
| Completed | c. 1701 |
| Demolished | 1891 |
| Client | Philippe I, Duke of Orléans Marie Antoinette |
| Design and construction | |
| Architects | Antoine Le Pautre;Jean Girard;Jules Hardouin Mansart;Richard Mique |
Thechâteau de Saint-Cloud (French pronunciation:[ʃatod(ə)sɛ̃klu]) was achâteau inFrance, built on a site overlooking theSeine atSaint-Cloud inHauts-de-Seine, about 5 kilometres (3 miles) west ofParis. The gardens survive, and the estate is now known as theParc de Saint-Cloud.
The château was expanded byPhilippe I, Duke of Orléans in the 17th century and byMarie Antoinette, Queen of France and Navarre in the decade of 1780. In the 19th century it was used byNapoleon Bonaparte, by the royal family during theBourbon Restoration, byLouis Philippe d'Orléans, and byNapoleon III. The palace was burned down in 1870 during theFranco-Prussian War and its walls were demolished in 1891.
TheHôtel d'Aulnay on the site was expanded into a château in the 16th century by theGondi banking family. The Gondis stemmed from a family ofFlorentinebankers established at Lyon in the first years of the 16th century, who had arrived at the court of France in 1543 in the train ofCatherine de' Medici. In the 1570s, the Queen offered Jérôme de Gondi a dwelling at Saint-Cloud, theHôtel d'Aulnay, which became the nucleus of the château with a right-angled wing that looked out on a terrace.
The main front faced south, with a wing that terminated in apavilion affording a handsome view over the Seine river.Henry III of France installed himself in this house in order to conduct the siege of Paris during theWars of Religion. In 1589 he was assassinated there by the monkJacques Clément.
After the death of Jérôme de Gondi in 1604, his son Jean-Baptiste II de Gondi sold the château to Jean de Bueil, comte de Sancerre, who died shortly afterward. The château was bought back byJean-François de Gondi,archbishop of Paris. His embellishments notably included gardens byThomas Francine.
After the death of Jean-François de Gondi in 1654, the château was inherited by Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi and then by his nephew Henri de Gondi, known as theDuke of Retz. The latter sold the property in 1655 toBarthélemy Hervart, a banker of German extraction who wasintendant thensurintendant des finances. He enlarged the park to 12 hectares and did considerable rebuilding. He built agrande cascade (not the present one) in the park.
Garden details that seem to be of this phase of Saint-Cloud were drawn byIsraël Silvestre.[1] It was built in the Italian style, with an invisibly flat roof and frescoed façades. Its gardens descended in a series of terraces to the Seine, with fountains at each level.
On 8 October 1658, Hervart organised a sumptuous feast at Saint-Cloud in honour of the youngLouis XIV, his brother,Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (Monsieur), their motherAnne of Austria, andCardinal Mazarin. On 25 October, Monsieur bought the château and its grounds for 240,000livres.
It appears that Mazarin pressed the sale, contributing to a policy of building a network of royal châteaux to the west of Paris and relieving the excessively enriched Hervart from the fate ofNicolas Fouquet, whosefête atVaux-le-Vicomte precipitated his fall and imprisonment.
Monsieur was engaged in building operations at Saint-Cloud until his death in 1701. The works were designed and constructed by his architectAntoine Le Pautre, who built the wings in 1677. The château as it was reconstructed for Monsieur took the form of a "U" open to the east, towards the Seine, with the Gondi château, which had faced south, integrated into its left wing. To the rear, a longorangery formed a wing that prolonged the right wing of the courtyard.[2] The entrance avenue, bordered by dependencies (some of which survive), arrived on an angle from the bridge.
Inside, the apartment of 'Madame',Princess Henrietta of England, in the left wing was decorated byJean Nocret in 1660, and the 45-metreGalerie d'Apollon, which occupied the whole of the right wing, was decorated with myths ofApollo byPierre Mignard. It was finished in 1680.
The last child of Monsieur and Madame was born here in 1669 and namedAnne Marie d'Orléans. She was the maternal grandmother ofLouis XV.
The château was the site of the death ofPrincess Henrietta in 1670, for whose funeralJacques-Bénigne Bossuet composed the oration.
In October 1677 five days of magnificent feasts in Louis XIV's honour inaugurated the new decorations and demonstrated the splendour of Monsieur's ménage.[3] TheGalerie was preceded and followed by a salon at either end, a measure to be taken up at Versailles, where Louis XIV found himself outdone in the matter of magnificent galleries, both by his brother and by his mistress in thechâteau de Clagny,[4] and set out in 1678 to build the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Following Le Pautre's death in 1679, the work was continued by his executive assistantJean Girard, a master mason rather than a full-fledged architect, and perhaps byThomas Gobert.Jules Hardouin-Mansart intervened towards the end of the century, designing a grand staircase in the left wing in the manner of the Ambassadors' Staircase at Versailles (destroyed in 1752).[5]
André Le Nôtre replanned the gardens and the park took on the dimensions it retains today. TheGrande Cascade, constructed by Le Pautre in 1664–65, has survived. Hardouin-Mansart added the basin and the lowermost canal in 1698.
A total of 156,000livres is estimated to have been spent over the years.
Saint-Cloud descended in the family of Monsieur's heirs, the Dukes of Orléans, and remained in their hands for most of the 18th century.
After protracted negotiations, the château de Saint-Cloud was bought in 1785 byMarie Antoinette, who believed that the air there would be good for her children, and was fond of the idea of leaving them a private and serene residence.Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, who had not visited the château since hismorganatic marriage withMadame de Montesson, was induced to part with it for 6,000,000livres.[6]
After the sale of the palace was officially finished, Marie Antoinette set about transforming her new private home, which was intended, from 1790 to 1800, to house the court while the château de Versailles was renovated. She set to transforming Saint-Cloud in 1787-88 by her preferred architectRichard Mique, who enlarged thecorps de logis and the adjacent half of the right wing; he rebuilt the garden front. Hardouin-Mansart's staircase was demolished in favour of new stone stairs leading into the state apartments.
The château was at first refurnished from theGarde Meuble with furnishings collected from other royal residences, but soon furniture was commissioned for Saint-Cloud, showcasing the Queen's patronage of the arts and tastes. Gilded chairs and marquetry commodes with gilt-bronze mounts in theLouis XVI style were being delivered to Saint-Cloud right up to the opening days of theFrench Revolution. In 1790 the royal family, imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace in Paris since 6 October 1789, managed to spend the summer here; those were their last days of privacy and freedom. During their stay, Saint-Cloud was the setting for the famous interview between Marie Antoinette andMirabeau.
After the monarchy was abolished, the château was declared abien national and emptied, its furnishings sold off in the Revolutionary sales, along with those of the other royal residences.
The Saint-Cloudorangery was the setting for thecoup d'état of18 Brumaire (10 November 1799), in which theDirectory was suppressed and theConsulate declared.Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimedEmperor of the French on 18 May 1804 at Saint-Cloud. Saint-Cloud was later used by Napoleon's family and was their main seat along with theTuileries Palace.
Napoleon made Saint-Cloud his preferred residence and transformed theSalon de Vénus to a throne room, which Saint-Cloud had naturally lacked, but neither he nor the occupants to follow did much more to Saint-Cloud than interior decoration. When thePrussians captured it in 1814, they supposedly foundAlbrecht Altdorfer'sThe Battle of Alexander at Issus hanging in his bathroom.
It was at Saint-Cloud once again, in Monsieur'sGalerie d'Apollon, thatNapoleon III invested himself as Emperor of the French on 1 December 1852. During theSecond Empire, Napoleon III and his wifeEugénie stayed at Saint-Cloud in the spring and the autumn. Napoleon III had the orangery demolished in 1862 and Eugénie transformed the bedroom of Madame into a salon in theLouis XVI style. The castle was used during much of the nineteenth century to welcome members of European royal families. For example,Queen Victoria andPrince Albert stayed at Saint-Cloud when they came to visit Paris for the firstExposition Universelle (1855).
At Saint-Cloud, Napoleon III declaredwar on Prussia on 28 July 1870. The heights dominating Paris were occupied by the Prussians during thesiege of Paris, who shelled Paris from the grounds of the château. Counter-fire from the French hit the building, and it caught fire and burned out on 13 October 1870. Much of its contents had been removed by Eugénie after war was declared.
The standing roofless walls were destroyed in 1891. The pediment of the château's right wing, one of the preserved parts of the building, was bought byFerdinand I of Bulgaria and integrated into hisEuxinograd palace on theBlack Sea coast.
_-_Paris%2c_1871_-_Ruines_du_ch%25C3%25A2teau_of_St_Cloud_3.jpg)
The sculpture groupFrance crowning Art and Industry was installed in the lower part of the park in 1900.
Many thousands of trees in the park were knocked down or badly damaged in a storm on 26 December 1999, but restoration work was carried out.
Today, only a few outbuildings and its park of 460hectares remain, constituting thedomaine national de Saint-Cloud. It includes the gardenà la française designed by Le Nôtre, Marie Antoinette's flower garden (where roses for the French state are grown), a gardenà l'anglaise from the 1820s (the Trocadéro garden), ten fountains, and a viewpoint of Paris known as 'la lanterne', because a lantern was lit there when Napoleon Bonaparte was in residence.
Thepavillon de Breteuil in the park has been the home of theGeneral Conference on Weights and Measures since 1875.
The park has been the venue for theRock en Seine festival since 2003.
Since December 2006, there has been a movement to reconstruct the château de Saint-Cloud, led chiefly by an association that wants to finance the project primarily through private sources rather than through the government. The association, 'Reconstruisons Saint-Cloud!' or 'Reconstruct Saint-Cloud!', was created in 2006 and seeks to fund the rebuilding by imposing a fee on visitors.[7]
48°50′15″N2°12′53″E / 48.83750°N 2.21472°E /48.83750; 2.21472
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