Château de Malmaison: Joséphine and Napoleon’s Country Residence in France
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History
Château de Malmaison is a historic country residence in Rueil-Malmaison, France, west of Paris. Its surviving form combines Renaissance, classical, and Empire elements, and its best-known phase began when Joséphine de Beauharnais acquired the estate in 1799. During the Consulate, the French government established after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup, Malmaison became a private retreat for Joséphine and Napoleon and a major center of government activity alongside the Tuileries Palace.
Origins and the seventeenth-century residence
The origin of the name Malmaison is uncertain. It is generally connected with the Latin expressions mala domus or mala mansio, meaning “bad house.” The name may have recalled medieval brigandage, Norman incursions, or an earlier association with caring for sick people. The estate was described as a royal villa in the sixth century, and a manor with a courtyard, farmyard, fields, and vineyards was recorded there by 1376.
Guillaume Goudet, a Parisian merchant and sergeant-at-arms, acquired Malmaison in 1390. The property remained among his descendants until 1763, passing through the Goudet, Dubois, Dauvergne, Perrot, and Barentin families. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Christophe Perrot built a new residence. His son Charles inherited it in 1641. In 1686, Jacques Honoré Barentin added the north pavilion, a small wing with a mansard roof, and a corresponding southern wing.
Leased estate and eighteenth-century society
After the Barentins became less closely connected with the estate, Malmaison was leased to successive occupants. Gérard Michel, Sieur de La Jonchère, and his wife remodeled the interiors and redesigned the gardens. Guillaume Pierre Tavernier de Boulongne and Jacques Verdeilhan were later occupants.
The Barentin family sold Malmaison to their cousin Henri d’Aguesseau in 1763. After his death, his widow sold it in 1771 to the banker Jacques-Jean Le Couteulx du Molay and his wife, Sophie Le Couteulx de La Noraye. They partially reshaped the gardens in the English style and refurnished the apartments. Before the French Revolution, their household received a distinguished circle that included Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Choderlos de Laclos, the Baron Grimm, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Condorcet, and the Abbé Sieyès.
Joséphine and Napoleon at Malmaison
Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife and later Empress Joséphine, bought Malmaison from Jacques-Jean Le Couteulx du Molay on 21 April 1799. Loans helped finance the purchase, including assistance from Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard. Napoleon later assumed responsibility for the acquisition, probably using money connected with his first Italian campaign. The purchase included the château, its dependencies, and approximately 260 hectares of adjoining land.
Malmaison remained a private retreat, while the Tuileries Palace served as the official seat of government and court. Napoleon stayed there regularly until 1804, when he moved his principal residence to Saint-Cloud, and he continued to visit until his divorce from Joséphine in 1809. During the Consulate, Malmaison nevertheless functioned as an important center of government activity.
Napoleon commissioned Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine to renovate and redecorate the residence. Percier and Fontaine were leading French architects and decorators whose work helped shape the Empire style, the monumental decorative language associated with Napoleon’s rule. Fontaine proposed a more extensive reconstruction, but Napoleon chose a less radical renovation. Their work gave the interiors a Directoire character, derived from the French government of 1795 to 1799, and helped establish the later Empire character of the house.
Joséphine’s residence and the nineteenth century
After the divorce, Joséphine received Malmaison as her sole property and made it her principal residence. She continued to receive Napoleon there. On 28 May 1814, shortly before her death, she received Alexander I of Russia. Joséphine was buried in the church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul in Rueil-Malmaison.
Napoleon returned to Malmaison from 25 to 29 June 1815, after his defeat at Waterloo and his second abdication, before traveling onward toward Rochefort. Joséphine’s son, Eugène de Beauharnais, inherited the estate. His widow sold it in 1828 to the Swedish banker Jonas-Philip Hagerman. In 1842, Maria Christina of Spain, the widow of Ferdinand VII and later Duchess of Riánsares, acquired Malmaison as a residence. She sold it in 1861 to Napoleon III, who refurnished the château.
Damage, restoration, and museum history
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Prussian troops damaged and plundered the interior. The French state subsequently used the château as a barracks. In 1877, the state sold the estate to a property developer who subdivided and sold most of the park. Following several changes of ownership, the château and a reduced park of six hectares were acquired in 1896 by the patron Daniel Iffla, known as Osiris.
Osiris commissioned the architect Pierre Humbert to repair Malmaison after the damage caused by the Prussian occupation. Humbert carried out extensive work intended to return the residence to an appearance resembling its earlier state. In 1904, three years before his death, Osiris bequeathed Malmaison and his collection of Napoleonic art to the French state. The château became a museum in 1905 and now forms part of the national Napoleonic museums, presenting the residence through reconstructed and restored interiors associated with the Consulate and First Empire.
The roundabout of the Guides Pavilion received heritage protection in 1942. In 1991, the wider Malmaison domain, including the château, park, other buildings, entrance grille, Bois-Préau park, and garden of the Villa des Œillets, was classified as a historic monument. The estate also holds the “Remarkable Garden” designation. Its principal surviving components include Château de Malmaison and its park, the privately owned Petite Malmaison and its park, Château de Bois-Préau and its park, which houses an annex of the Malmaison museum, and the Vert-Mont estate.
Remains
Malmaison survives as a country residence rather than a defensive castle. The seventeenth-century house had a two-storey main block oriented from east to west, with a taller pavilion on the south side. A farmyard at the northern end was enclosed by dependencies. Later work altered the interiors and garden while retaining the character of a private estate. The grounds once extended over much more land than the approximately six-hectare park that remains with the château today.
Interior rooms and collections
The Council Room
The Council Room, also associated with Napoleon’s study, was designed as a military tent. Lances and shields were arranged as symbolic supports for the walls, while the door panels displayed trophy weapons linked with Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Gauls, Dacians, Persians, and Etruscans. A central council table was surrounded by ten armchairs, ten stools, and six mahogany chairs. A twelve-light chandelier of gilded bronze and crystal supplied the room’s principal lighting.
The room also contained portraits of Frederick II of Prussia, Hortense and her two sons, and Joséphine, whose portrait was associated with François Gérard. Napoleon’s two beds, once placed beside the fireplace, do not survive.
The dining room
Fontaine remodeled the dining room in 1800 in the Directoire style. He removed the wall separating it from an antechamber, producing a bright room of about 80 square meters with six windows. White and black marble tiles cover the floor. An oval mahogany table is accompanied by twelve chairs and two armchairs reserved for Joséphine and Napoleon. Several furnaces in the basement heated the room.
Louis Lafitte painted the decoration on stucco in 1800 from designs by Charles Percier. Six Pompeian dancers appear on the walls. The room also contained a white marble fountain, originally surmounted by a statuette of Hebe, a Greek goddess associated with youth.
The library and billiard room
Napoleon’s library was formed by joining three smaller rooms. Percier and Fontaine designed it around 1800, and numerous decorative painters completed the ceiling in ten days. Apollo and Minerva appear at its center, surrounded by portrait medallions of writers and philosophers including Virgil, Dante, Homer, Terence, Ossian, Pindar, Xenophon, Socrates, Herodotus, Polybius, Voltaire, and Raynal.
The library served Napoleon for writing and other work, but it also contained game tables, including tables for tric-trac. It held approximately 4,500 books and about 750 orders belonging to Napoleon. Its furnishings include mahogany pieces made by the Jacob-Desmalter brothers, prominent cabinetmakers associated with refined Empire interiors, and a celestial globe made by Nicolas-Constant Lemaire in 1788.
The billiard room contained a mahogany billiard table and four additional tables for tric-trac and reversi. The imperial couple played there with officers and ladies of the court. Most of the furnishings now present date from a renovation carried out by Louis-Martin Berthault in 1812.
Joséphine’s apartments
Joséphine’s apartments comprise an antechamber, a principal bedroom with its original bed, an ordinary bedroom, and a toilet room. The wall decoration and furniture of the principal bedroom were restored in 1865 to the state associated with Napoleon III. The château also retains a music room, a salon, and other reception and residential spaces that form part of the museum’s reconstructed Consulate and First Empire setting.
Façades, bridge, and sculpture
During the Consulate, unstable exterior walls required the addition of stone piers or buttresses to the façades. Statues and vases from the gardens of Marly were placed on these supports. On the park façade, four marble statues represented Flora by René Frémin, a Companion of Diana by Anselme Flamen, Air by Philippe Bertrand, and Pomona by François Barois. The original statues were later transferred to the Louvre and replaced by others.
Four eighteenth-century white-marble vases were placed on buttresses that could not support statues. Since 1879, these vases have decorated the central basin of the Tuileries Garden.
In 1801, four bronze sculptures were installed on the bridge over the moat before the southwest façade. They represented a young centaur, an old centaur, Apollo Belvedere, and Diana the Huntress. The centaurs were late-eighteenth-century casts reproducing ancient marble sculptures from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. The original casts on the bridge were replaced by versions made by the Rudier firm in 1937.
Apollo Belvedere had been commissioned from Luigi Valadier by the Count of Orsay. Diana the Huntress was made by Barthélemy Prieur in 1602 after an ancient marble and had previously formed part of the Fountain of Diana at Fontainebleau. From 1807, both sculptures were replaced by two fourteen-foot-high marble obelisks from the former château of Cardinal Richelieu in Poitou. The obelisks imitate porphyry, stand on bronze balls and matching marble pedestals, and bear hieroglyphs. Their gilding and that of the bronze balls have not survived. The original Apollo is displayed in the Carriage Pavilion, the original Diana returned to Fontainebleau, and two cast-iron copies made in 1936 now stand in the park.
Landscape garden and horticultural remains
Joséphine transformed the grounds into an English-style landscape garden. The estate contained rare and exotic plants and animals gathered from different parts of the world. A heated orangery built in 1800 could hold 300 pineapple plants. In 1805, a heated greenhouse using twelve coal furnaces was built beside the reception buildings of Petite Malmaison. These conservatories, glazed structures that protect plants from cold weather, allowed tropical and newly introduced species to be cultivated.
Between 1803 and her death in 1814, Joséphine cultivated nearly 200 plants introduced into France for the first time. Animals ranged freely in the garden, including kangaroos, emus, ostriches, black swans, zebras, gazelles, chamois, a seal, antelopes, and llamas. Some came from Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia and nearby islands between 1800 and 1803.
The rose garden
Malmaison became especially associated with its rose collection, which contained about 250 varieties by 1814. These included centifolia, moss, Damask, and Gallica roses, with plants originating in Joséphine’s native Martinique and other parts of the world. The garden employed the Scottish horticulturists Thomas Blaikie and Alexander Howatson, the botanist Étienne Pierre Ventenat, the horticulturist and rose enthusiast André Dupont, and the garden director Étienne Soulange-Bodin.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté was commissioned to record Joséphine’s roses and lilies through drawings and notes. His Les Roses, published from 1817 to 1820, contained 168 plates, approximately 75 to 80 of them based on roses from Malmaison. Dupont practiced controlled pollination and produced 25 cultivated rose varieties while working for Joséphine, linking the garden with the early development of deliberately controlled rose hybridization.
Plants reached the garden from the English horticulturist Kennedy, Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Martinique, and expeditions sponsored during the Consulate and Empire. In 1810, a special arrangement between the British and French admiralty allowed the Chinese rose “Hume’s Blush Tea-Scented China” to cross the naval blockade and reach Malmaison. The rose “Souvenir de la Malmaison” appeared in 1844 and was named for Joséphine by the Grand Duke of Russia. It was first planted in the imperial garden at Saint Petersburg.
Paintings and reconstructed presentation
The museum includes a version identified as probably the original of Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at the Great St Bernard. Together with the rooms, furniture, decorative schemes, and Napoleonic objects, it contributes to a presentation intended to evoke Malmaison during the Consulate and First Empire. The surviving museum display is one of the few in France to preserve a relatively homogeneous ensemble of furniture and decoration from the Consulate period.
