Hôtel de la Marine

Before arriving in Paris, Kate heard about the opening of a new museum, the Hôtel de la Marine. 

Discover the Hidden Face of Concorde
Hôtel de la Marine

For the last 5 years, we had seen scaffolding and wraps covering the building and had no idea what it was about. The Hôtel de la Marine opened last year and we decided to visit. The Grand Tour, which included the living quarters, was sold out when we arrived, so we bought tickets to see the Salons and Loggia. However, Kate and I got mixed up as to where to begin the visit and ended up on the Grand Tour. 

James, my dad and I went back to visit this week. Unfortunately, only tickets to see the Salons and Loggia were available online while they are here so we weren't able to go on the Grand Tour, but the tour of the Salons and Loggia were well worth it. We were given headphones that automatically started the narration as we entered the different rooms of the Hôtel.

View of Hôtel de la Marine from Place de la Concorde

Entrance to Hôtel de la Marine

The Hôtel de la Marine is located on Place de la Concorde.

View of Place de la Concorde from the
Hôtel de la Marine

Place de la Concorde with view
towards the National Assembly
and Hôtel des Invalides

In 1748, Paris City Hall wanted to erect a statue to pay tribute to the king, Louis XV, but needed a place to put it. They wanted to place the statue in a pretty square like Place des Vosges or Place Vendôme. At the time, the city only stretched from the Bastille to the Tuileries Gardens. They thought about tearing down some slums and building a new square. But finally settled on the marshes just east of the Tuileries that were not inhabited and already owned by the king. The marshes were drained and the square constructed, but it was in the middle of nowhere. So they commissioned two palaces to be built on the north side of the square to embellish it.

Two Palaces

The palaces were built on either side of the rue Royale. If you walk up the rue Royale from Place de la Concorde, you end up at the Madeleine church. The palaces were built without any specific purpose-they were just built to dress up the square.

The building to the left became the opulent home of the Duc d’Aumont. It was later purchased by the Comte de Crillon, whose family resided there until 1907. The famous luxury hotel, Hôtel de Crillon, which currently occupies the building, took its name from these owners.

View of Hôtel de la Marine from
corner of rue Royal

James in front of 
Hôtel de la Marine

It was not until 1765 that it was decided to install the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne in the palace to the east. Garde-Meuble de la Couronne literally means Royal Furniture-Keep. It is also translated into English as the King's Wardrobe. The Garde-Meuble was responsible for choosing, purchasing and maintaining the king’s furniture, from beds to everyday chairs. It was also in charge of conserving the royal collections of weapons, armor, linens, wall hangings, hardstone vases, bronze works, and the crown jewels. At first, the Garde-Meuble was supposed to occupy only part of the building, but it ended up filling the entire building in 1767. The king had a lot of stuff!

Courtyard inside the 
Hôtel de la Marine

For 25 years, until the French Revolution, two Intendants were in charge of the Garde-Meuble. They fitted out apartments in part of the building and managed all the furnishings, linens and jewels for the king. The first Intendant to head the Garde-Meuble developed the building so that it fully met the needs of his administration by including storage areas, workshops, lodges, exhibition galleries and more. The exhibition galleries displaying the collections of the king were open to the general public the first Tuesday of every month from April to November.

Antechamber to Intendant's
Rooms

Intendant's Small Meeting Room

Wall Detail

Window Detail

Everywhere you looked the detail was amazing. The architect heading the restoration project and 18th century specialists studied the detailed records and inventories that survived, enabling them to recreate the rooms.

Intendant's Bedroom

Intendant's Bathroom

The bathroom had all the modern amenities and people were just starting to bathe regularly. It was considered such an exhausting endeavor that there was a bed in the bathroom for resting after a bath.

Dining Room Console

Dining Room

Oysters at the Dining Room
Fireplace

View onto the Loggia

The first Intendant was a bachelor known for his taste for opera women of loose morals. He ordered the creation of this cozy private room, which is now called the Mirrors Room.

Mirrors Room

Escalier d'Honneur

You reach this room through his bedroom to find large wall mirrors, framed with magnificent golden sculpted decors. The mirrors are painted with flowers, birds, women and little chubby cherubs. Originally, naked women standing on pedestals, not cherubs, adorned these mirrors. It was the wife of the second Intendant who ordered that the paintings be altered to be a bit more modest.

Bedroom of Intendant's Wife

View out to the Eiffel Tower

Wall Detail

View onto Loggia and
Place de la Concorde

The French Revolution changed the future of the palace. A symbol of royal pomp, the Garde-Meuble was not a very popular administration. On July 13, 1789, the revolutionaries seized the weapons on display in the arms room of the Garde-Meuble.The next day, they went looking for ammunition at the Bastille prison and stormed the Bastille. That  heralded the start of the French Revolution.

It is thought that the first shots against the Bastille prison were fired by canons fitted on gun carriages with silver inlays that the King of Siam gave as gifts to Louis XIV in 1684. They had been seized the previous day in the royal collections of the Garde-Meuble. 

On September 16, 1792, about 40 thieves broke a window and made a hole in an inner shutter and stole the crown jewels. However, there were several inconsistencies in reports of the incident: the locks were not forced and it is hard to believe that forty thieves were able to enter without arousing the suspicions of the staff. Was it a real theft or were there accomplices within the administration? The mystery remains to this day. The jewels were found in the years that followed. Most of the thieves were arrested and eight of them ended up being guillotined.

When the revolution got under way, King Louis XVI was forced to leave Versailles for Paris and all state institutions had to move to Paris with him. But it was a challenge to find space to house everything. The navy ministry received permission from the Intendant to settle into part of the palace housing the Garde-Meuble in 1789. Less than ten years later, the navy occupied the entire building. This marked the start of two centuries of France's navy ministry being based in the palace, and it became known as the Hôtel de la Marine. It was not until 2015 that the navy ministry left the building.

The remainder of the tour focused on the Salons and Loggia and this is the part I also saw with my dad and James.

Salon of Honneur

Blue and red on the ceilings

Originally used as exhibition galleries of the royal collections for French and foreign visitors, these rooms on the second floor overlooking the Place de la Concorde included the arms room, the gallery of large items of furniture (fabrics and wall hangings), the jewels room and the bronze works gallery. They were intended for displaying the excellence of French decorative arts and the monarchy’s power. Once the navy took over, these rooms were used as reception rooms and were redecorated in the 1840s. Everything was gilded. The ceilings were painted with blue and red, the colors in the French flag, and had the rooms had marine motifs. 

Ceiling Detail

The Golden Gallery

Dad and James in the Golden Gallery

View from the reception
rooms onto the
Place de la Concorde

During the French Revolution in 1789, the statue of Louis XV in the square was torn down and the area renamed the Place de la Révolution. The new revolutionary government erected a guillotine in the square, and it was here that King Louis XVI and then Marie-Antoinette were executed in 1793. Their executions were most likely viewed from this loggia and the one across rue Royale in the other palace.

In 1795, the square was renamed Place de la Concorde. The Obelisk of Luxor was erected on the site of the Louis XV statue in 1836. Sadly, the beautiful Egyptian Obelisk was covered with scaffolding for repair work, spoiling the view of the square.

Obelisk covered in scaffolding in Place de la Concorde

The most amazing part of the tour was the loggia. Walking by this building many times over the years I often wondered what kind of government building it was. I would look up at the balcony and wonder what it would be like to admire the view of the square from there. And now, after 200 years, it was once again open to the public.

The Loggia

View towards Eiffel Tower

View towards Les Invalides

View towards Tuileries Gardens
and Jeu de Paume

Eiffel Tower View

It was incredible to be on that balcony and look over the square. It is especially nice now that traffic in the center of Paris is restricted and there are fewer cars in the square. It was much calmer.

Dad and James on the Balcony

This museum is stunning and should be added to everyone's must see list when they are in Paris. Especially if you are lucky enough to schedule the Grand Tour. There are also nice restaurants on the ground floor we haven't tried. It is definitely a place where I plan to return to-there is so much to see and take in.

Musée Nissim de Camondo

My dad and I have been visiting a museum each day this week. Today we returned to the Nissim de Camondo Museum. I first visited this museum with my parents when Kelly and I directed our first BYU Study Abroad program in 2005. It was time to return!

Dad in Courtyard Entrance to 
Musée Nissim de Camondo

The mansion backs onto the Parc Monceau and was built by Moïse de Camondo. He was from a wealthy Jewish banking family that was mainly from Constantinople but over the generations lived all over the Mediterranean. They were called the Rothschilds of the East. 

Moïse's father, Nissim, and uncle, Abraham-Behor, came to Paris in 1868 when Moïse was a child to expand the family's banking operations in France. The brothers bought land next to each other that backed onto the newly created Parc Monceau. Nissim's land had a townhouse on the property where he lived and his brother Abraham built a huge mansion on his empty lot next door. They became French citizens and Moïse considered himself French in every way.

Portrait of Moïse's father 
Nissim de Camondo

In 1891, Moïse married Irène Cahen d'Anvers, 12 years his junior, who was the eldest daughter of another large Jewish banking family (which became BNP Paribas). They had two children, Nissim and Béatrice, in 1892 and 1894. But unfortunately it was an unhappy marriage and they separated in 1897 after Irène had an affair with Moïse's stable master. Several years later Moïse was able to obtain a divorce but had to give up his Italian citizenship to do so. The children remained with Moïse and he was an attentive and loving father. He was utterly humiliated by the divorce and devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that his children grew up in as solid and serene an environment as he could create.

Photo of Moïse's son Nissim

Moïse had collected furniture, furnishings and art from the period of the French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, just before the start of the French Revolution. As an avid Francophile, he considered this period to be “the great century of the Enlightenment” – which was an age when “France was really France.”

In 1911, Moïse began rebuilding his mansion to house his antiques. He was inspired by the Petit Trianon in the gardens of Versailles, the palace of Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV.  Although it was based on an 18th century palace, it was a mansion with all the modern comforts of the 20th century.

Elevator on Main Floor

Modern kitchen stove and ovens,
and on the right, a rotisserie oven

Dad in the kitchen

View from the second floor of
the courtyard entrance

Nissim's bathroom with
modern green tile, tub, 
footbath and bidet

Nissim's bathroom and 
door to his dressing room

Everywhere you looked, this mansion was exquisitely decorated.

Gobelin Tapestry from 1680
on stairs to second floor

Drawing Room

The roll top desk in the picture above right was a precursor to a desk built for Louis XVI. Moïse was a patient collector, waiting for exactly the pieces he needed to create his 18th century rooms. He bought the paneling from other mansions that were being razed and had his architect construct the rooms to fit the paneling. The height of ceilings on the third floor where the family lived was dictated by the height of the library paneling. Notice the cute tiny red chair in the foreground.

Library 

He acquired one Japanese lacquer commode and searched for 30 years to find its companion in order to reunite them.

Japanese Lacquer Commode

Companion Japanese Commode

There were beautiful views out to the garden and beyond to the Parc Monceau, separated by only a fence.

Second Floor View

Third Floor View

Moïse moved into the mansion with his family just before the start of World War I. His son Nissim enlisted in the army in 1914 and spent little time in the home. He was able to return for visits when he was on leave, and Moïse hoped that Nissim would take over the family empire and his mansion and collection. Sadly, it was not to be. On September 5, 1917, Nissim was in an airplane that went down somewhere over Lorraine, behind enemy lines. Moïse received a telegram but refused to believe that his only son, his pride and joy, was truly dead.

Dining Room

Hallway

Nissim's room, used as
a study after his death

Staircase from third floor

Despite repeated entreaties to the French military, Moïse could not recover his son's body until after the war. Following Nissim's death in 1917, Moïse was broken-hearted and closed all banking activities. He largely withdrew from society and devoted himself primarily to his collection and to hosting dinners for a club of gourmets a few times a year. 

Moïse's daughter Béatrice was an accomplished horsewoman. She married Léon Reinach and they had two children, Fanny (born 1920) and Bertrand (born 1923). Béatrice was not interested in antiques and her father's collection. She was more interested in horses. So after the death of Nissim, Moïse arranged to donate his mansion and all the contents to the state of France and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He died in 1935, and the museum opened the following year.  

In his will, he wrote that his lifelong project had focused on glorifying French culture “in the period I loved more than any other.” He appointed his daughter to be the guardian over his collection and left her strict instructions. She was not allowed to loan out any works of art or add or acquire new ones. He even forbade her from moving any pieces of furniture or paintings from one place to another unless they remained in the same room. His wishes are still respected today.

Moïse's bed in an alcove
built to fit the bed

Moïse's bedroom

The tragedies that afflicted this family continued. During World War II, Béatrice would often be seen riding her well-groomed horse in the Bois de Boulogne, accompanied by a German officer. She felt safe in Paris after the Nazi occupation. By then, she had converted to Catholicism and divorced her husband. She believed her wealth, her elite status, and all that her father had contributed to France, along with the influential people she rode horses with, would shield her from being deported. She did not think of herself as Jewish in any way. Her ex-husband urged her to leave Paris with the children, but she disregarded his advice. 

In 1943, Béatrice, her ex-husband and their two children were forcibly removed from Paris and taken to the Drancy deportation camp, 11 kilometers north of Paris. From there, they were subsequently deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Reinach and the children were deported in 1943 and Béatrice in 1944 and they were all murdered in Auschwitz. Béatrice was executed in a gas chamber on January 4, 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated by the Soviets. The story of this family was truly tragic.