A palace by the tile kilns
The palace took its name from the tile works — tuileries — that once stood on the ground west of the Louvre. In 1564 Catherine de’ Medici, widowed five years earlier by the death of Henri II, had the architect Philibert de l’Orme begin a residence there, outside the old city wall, with a large Italian-style garden. Henri IV later joined it to the Louvre by the long gallery beside the Seine, and Louis XIV had it enlarged, fitted out a vast theatre, the Salle des Machines, and had André Le Nôtre redesign the garden in 1664.
When the court settled at Versailles in 1682, the Tuileries was left half empty. The boy king Louis XVFigure: Louis XV. The Well-Beloved who lost an empire and left his grandson the debts lived there from 1715 to 1722; after that its rooms were given out as lodgings to courtiers and royal pensioners, and its theatre was lent to the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. Few expected it to house a king again.
The gilded cage
Nearly three years as the king’s home and prison
On 6 October 1789, after the Women’s March on VersaillesEvent: Women’s March on Versailles. The day the women of Paris fetched their king, Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy, Marie AntoinetteFigure: Marie Antoinette. The queen France loved to hate and their children were brought into Paris and reached the Tuileries at around ten at night, to rooms no king had used for decades, hastily made ready. The Assembly followed the king to Paris and soon sat in the Manège, the old riding school along the garden’s northern edge.
For nearly three years the palace was a gilded cage. The king held court, received his ministers and heard Mass, while National Guards watched the doors. When the family was prevented from leaving for Saint-Cloud in April 1791, the pretence ended. On the night of 20 June 1791 they slipped out of the palace in disguise; the flight to VarennesEvent: Flight to Varennes. The king's escape that ended fifty kilometres from safety ended with their return under guard on 25 June.
On 20 June 1792 a crowd from the faubourgs forced its way into the palace and kept the king penned in a window bay for hours. He put on the red cap of liberty and drank to the nation’s health, but would not withdraw his vetoes.
10 August 1792
The day the monarchy fell
Before dawn on 10 August 1792 the tocsin rang across Paris. The palace was held by about 900 Swiss Guards, with some nobles and National Guards of doubtful loyalty. Early in the morning, persuaded that the palace could not be defended, the king led his family across the garden to shelter with the Legislative Assembly in the Manège.
The fighting began after they had gone. The insurgent sections of Paris and volunteer fédérés from Marseille and Brest attacked; the Swiss fired, then received the king’s order to cease fire and withdraw. Several hundred of them were killed in the fighting or cut down as they retreated, and palace servants were massacred with them. A young artillery officer, Napoleon BonaparteFigure: Napoleon Bonaparte. The officer the Revolution made, and the ruler who ended it, watched from the Place du Carrousel and later said that none of his battlefields had given him such an impression of corpses.
The same day the Assembly suspended the king. Three days later the family was taken to the Temple, and on 21 September the monarchy was abolished.
“Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti.” — To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss.
Convention, emperors, fire
Renamed the Palais national, the palace passed to the Republic. From 10 May 1793 the National Convention sat in the Salle des Machines, rebuilt as a debating chamber, and the Committee of Public SafetyGroup: Committee of Public Safety. The twelve who governed the Republic in the year of the Terror worked in the rooms of the Pavillon de Flore. In the garden, RobespierreFigure: Maximilien Robespierre. The Incorruptible who defended the Terror and died by it led the Festival of the Supreme Being on 8 June 1794; seven weeks later, on 9 Thermidor, he was shouted down in the same hall, and in the night after his arrest he was laid, his jaw shattered, on a table in the Committee’s antechamber.
Napoleon moved in as First Consul in 1800 and kept it as his main residence as emperor. After him Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III lived there in turn. Crowds broke into it again in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Empress Eugénie slipped out of it when the Second Empire fell in September 1870.
In May 1871, in the last days of the Paris Commune, Communards filled the palace with petroleum and gunpowder and set it alight on 23 May. The fire gutted it. The ruins stood for more than a decade, until the Republic had them demolished in 1883; some of the stones were carried off to Corsica to build the Château de la Punta.
What remains is the garden, which runs from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde — the old Place de la Révolution, where Louis XVI was guillotined — together with the Pavillon de Flore and the Pavillon de Marsan, both rebuilt in the nineteenth century and now part of the Louvre, and the Arc du Carrousel that once served as the palace’s gateway.
