Palais de Chaillot: A Parisian Exhibition Palace and Cultural Complex
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On this page17 sections
History
The Palais de Chaillot is a monumental cultural complex in Paris, France, built by French architects for the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life. It stands on Chaillot Hill in the 16th arrondissement, overlooking the Seine and facing the Eiffel Tower, and replaced the Palais du Trocadéro as one of the exhibition’s intended permanent architectural legacies.
Before the Palais de Chaillot
Chaillot Hill had aristocratic and religious uses long before the present palace. Catherine de’ Medici acquired the Hermitage, also called the Maison de Beauregard, in 1583 and planned a pleasure house there under the direction of Étienne Dupérac. The property later passed to Pierre Jeanin and then to the marshal of Bassompierre, who enlarged the manor. In 1651, the Visitation Sainte-Marie nuns acquired the estate through the initiative of Henriette of England and established a convent.
A Savonnerie tapestry manufactory had already been established at Chaillot in 1624. The convent was abandoned during the French Revolution and was destroyed in 1794 when an explosion at the Grenelle gunpowder works damaged the site. These earlier uses formed part of the long institutional history of the hill before its transformation into an exhibition and civic precinct.
Imperial and exhibition projects
Napoleon I ordered plans in 1811 for a Palace of the King of Rome, intended as a residence for his son and the centre of an imperial administrative and military city. Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine were responsible for the project, which was never completed. Other unrealized schemes followed, including Antoine-Marie Peyre’s Villa Trocadéro proposal of 1824, plans for a monument or tomb to Napoleon I, Antoine Étex’s 1848 monument to Liberty, and later projects by Hector Horeau.
The name Trocadéro referred to the capture of the Spanish fort of Trocadéro near Cádiz on 31 August 1823 by French forces commanded by the Duke of Angoulême. In 1826, the hill was used for a military re-enactment of the capture before Charles X. A temporary triumphal arch was erected and the foundation stone of a planned barracks was laid. The barracks and a proposed commemorative obelisk remained unfinished.
For the 1867 Universal Exhibition, the hill was cut down and levelled by about three metres. A square and a granite staircase linking the site with the Pont d’Iéna were created, while the lower ground remained largely undeveloped until 1876. The Palais du Trocadéro was then built for the 1878 Universal Exhibition by Gabriel Davioud and Jules Bourdais, with gardens designed by Adolphe Alphand.
The Palais du Trocadéro continued in use after the exhibition and hosted the exhibitions of 1889 and 1900, as well as conventions and conferences. The Musée des Monuments français was established there in 1879, and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro operated there as the predecessor of the Musée de l’Homme.
Construction for the 1937 exhibition
The Palais du Trocadéro was partially demolished and substantially rebuilt for the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life. The replacement was designed by Léon Azéma, Jacques Carlu, and Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, architects who had received the Grand Prix de Rome, a prestigious French competition and scholarship for artists and architects. Construction took place from 1935 to 1937, although interior work continued after the exhibition and the theatre was not completed until 1939.
The architects retained much of the earlier building’s physical framework, including its curved wings, glass roofs, colonnade foundations, and curved roof trusses. They replaced the central performance hall and two towers with a broad esplanade and a theatre beneath it. The new palace was one of three permanent buildings resulting from the exhibition, alongside the Palais de Tokyo and the Palais d’Iéna. Strikes interrupted the construction in 1936.
Auguste Perret’s rejected proposal had envisioned a city of museums made up of four large buildings joined by a colonnade about 200 metres long. Economic difficulties and the fall of the government that supported the scheme contributed to the choice of a less expensive design that reused substantial parts of the Palais du Trocadéro.
War, diplomacy, and public ceremony
The Palais de Chaillot and its surroundings became a setting for major political and national events. A national-unity celebration commemorating the French Revolution of 1789 and the Federation of 1790 took place there on 14 July 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Adolf Hitler visited the esplanade on 23 June 1940 after the German invasion of France. In 1943, under German occupation, a ceremony marking the second anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was held there. After the Liberation of Paris, Allied troops installed an anti-aircraft gun in the large basin of the Trocadéro fountain. National funerals for the writer Paul Valéry took place at the palace on 24 and 25 July 1945.
The United Nations, the international organization founded in 1945 to promote cooperation and peace, held its third General Assembly session at the palace from September to December 1948 and its sixth from November 1951 to February 1952. The building temporarily received extraterritorial status, and Robert Schuman symbolically handed its keys to Secretary-General Trygve Lie on 1 September 1948. On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there, setting out fundamental rights and freedoms for all people.
Temporary prefabricated buildings were erected in the gardens for the United Nations. The larger complex constructed in 1951 covered 25,000 square metres and used a metal frame with dry assembly. It was built in 135 days and remained for about a decade before being removed in 1960. The palace also housed NATO, the military alliance established in 1949 by the North Atlantic Treaty, from 28 April 1952 to 15 December 1959. The protocol admitting West Germany to NATO was signed there on 23 October 1954, on the occasion when the Western European Union was established.
Later cultural use and protection
François Mitterrand renamed the esplanade the Parvis des Droits de l’Homme on 30 May 1985. The palace is state-owned, with the Ministry of Culture as its principal user. Its façades, roofs, parvis, terrace, staircase, and surviving original decorations received protection as historic monuments in 1980.
A fire on 22 July 1997 damaged the collections and recently renovated roof structure of the Musée des Monuments français. The subsequent refurbishment of the Paris wing accompanied the definitive relocation of the Cinémathèque française to Bercy. The cinema institution had occupied part of the palace from 1963 to 2005. The Musée de l’Homme was extensively redesigned between 2010 and 2015, while the Musée national de la Marine underwent major renovation from 2018 to 2023.
The palace now accommodates the Musée de l’Homme, an anthropology and ethnology museum; the Musée national de la Marine, devoted to maritime history and naval collections; the Théâtre national de Chaillot; and the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine. Established in 2007, the latter incorporates the Musée des Monuments français, the École de Chaillot, and the Institut français d’architecture. The theatre has also been associated with Jean Vilar, who directed it from 1952 and used it to revive a popular, publicly oriented theatrical tradition linked to the Théâtre national populaire.
Remains
The Palais de Chaillot consists of two pavilions and two long, curved wings that enclose the central Parvis des Droits de l’Homme and descend toward the Seine. The western Passy wing and eastern Paris wing are separated by the esplanade, with the Trocadéro gardens occupying the ground between the palace and the river. The building covers about 41,000 square metres, compared with approximately 17,000 square metres in the former Palais du Trocadéro. The central esplanade is about 125 metres long and 60 metres wide, and the theatre lies beneath it.
Structure and exterior
Construction and surviving elements
The palace combines a monumental, simplified Neoclassical style with Art Deco elements. Neoclassicism draws on the forms and proportions of ancient Greek and Roman architecture, while Art Deco is an interwar movement associated with geometric forms, stylized decoration, and modern materials. The structure is made of reinforced concrete. Load-bearing piers were doubled with millstone, while the walls used rubble stone, concrete blocks, and solid or hollow brick. These surfaces were covered with slabs of Burgundy stone and artificial stone, behind which parts of the earlier Trocadéro walls remain.
Reinforced-concrete slabs form the floors, and the metal window frames were installed in assembled units. Curved sheet-metal roof trusses from the Palais du Trocadéro survive and can be seen in the gallery of casts. The curved wings, glass roofs, and foundations of the former colonnades also belong to the elements retained in the 1937 reconstruction.
Sculpture and inscriptions
The façades carry extensive sculpture. Paul Belmondo, Léon-Ernest Drivier, Marcel Gimond, and Charles Hairon contributed sculptures or exterior reliefs, while Gilbert Poillerat made the entrance grilles. The pavilions are crowned by monumental sculptural groups by Raymond Delamarre and Carlo Sarrabezolles.
Fourteen of the twenty elevated spaces intended for street-facing reliefs are occupied. The reliefs on the Passy wing concern the continents and navigation, including Oceania by Henry Arnold, Africa by Antoine Sartorio, and Asia by Georges Saupique. Those on the Paris wing concern sculpture and architecture, including Civil Architecture by Jean Debarre.
Paul Valéry’s inscriptions appear on the façades in the Peignot typeface created by Cassandre, the professional name of the graphic and type designer Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, for the 1937 exhibition. On the Paris wing, facing the Eiffel Tower, an inscription is placed above Henri Bouchard’s 1937 statue Apollo Musagetes. On the Passy wing, the corresponding inscription stands above Albert Pommier’s Hercules Taming a Bison. Two other inscription blocks face the Trocadéro.
Trocadéro gardens
The Trocadéro gardens are arranged as an English-style park with sculptures, cascaded basins, and the Warsaw Fountain, erected in 1937. Water descends through twenty jets over eight successive levels. Félix Févola designed the water mirror and fountains, while Roger-Henri Expert arranged the overall composition.
Statues once placed in front of the palace to represent the six continents were moved to the Musée d’Orsay. Other sculptures remain in the gardens and on the façades, including the standing Man by Pierre Traverse and the seated Flora by Louis-Aimé Lejeune. A statue of Marshal Foch has occupied the former location of the temporary Peace Pavilion since 1951. Designed by Albert Laprade and Léon-H. Bazin for the 1937 exhibition, the pavilion contained semicircular rooms with photomontages about war and peace behind a 50-metre pylon decorated with olive branches and the word PAX.
Theatre beneath the esplanade
Original auditorium
The theatre was built in an Art Deco style under Louis Süe. Raymond Subes made its lamps, basins, and balustrades, Gustave Louis Jaulmes painted a Pompeian-style fresco, and Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Émile Vuillard, Louis Billotey, Roland Oudot, and Jean Souverbie contributed panels for the orchestra gallery.
The original auditorium, designed by Édouard and Jean Niermans, contained ten sculptural groups, mainly allegorical couples such as France and the City of Paris or Mural Art and Theatre Art. Évariste Jonchère made the stage fronton, which depicted Apollo surrounded by the theatrical arts. The orchestra pit could accommodate 150 musicians, and the auditorium held 2,800 seats, including 1,500 in the stalls.
The original theatre inherited and sought to correct technical and acoustic problems associated with the former concert hall of the Palais du Trocadéro. Its organ was designed to be modular and movable, but the new auditorium continued to draw criticism for heavy decoration and defective acoustics. The former Trocadéro organ remained at the palace until 1972 and is now in the Maurice Ravel Auditorium in Lyon.
Later theatre spaces
A smaller auditorium with 420 seats was created in 1965 by Jean de Mailly and the scenographer Jacques Le Marquet. It replaced a bar and smoking room decorated by Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz. Alterations in the 1970s followed a 1972 project by Jack Lang and Antoine Vitez, carried out by Valentin Fabre and Jean Perrotet, and the original large auditorium was removed. The theatre now has three halls, the largest seating 1,200 people.
A plaque in the theatre commemorates the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The palace also carries exterior plaques concerning human rights, including one installed by ATD Fourth World and another dedicated to people who died in the duty to inform. A fourth plaque by Henry Laurens is located in the theatre’s grand foyer.
Museums and collections
Institutional wings
The Passy wing contains the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national de la Marine. The Paris wing contains the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, while the Théâtre national de Chaillot occupies spaces beneath the esplanade. The upper floor of the Passy wing contains a duplex of several hundred square metres with a terrace. It was successively occupied by Paul Rivet, founder of the Musée de l’Homme, René Coty, a former president of France, and Christian Fouchet, a former minister of Education.
Musée des Monuments français
The Musée des Monuments français contains thousands of full-size plaster casts, many inherited from the comparative sculpture museum established after Eugène Viollet-le-Duc proposed a project using casts to study works from different periods and regions together. Its collections also include stained glass, frescoes, architectural models, building fragments, and about 200,000 photographs.
The displays include French sculpture casts from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, stained glass and frescoes, and architectural fragments ranging from 1850 to the contemporary period. Casts reproduce sculpture and reliefs from the cathedrals of Strasbourg, Bourges, and Reims. The fresco and stained-glass galleries contain more than one hundred works representing chapel, crypt, apse, and vault interiors, including reproductions associated with the abbey church of Paray-le-Monial, Villa Savoye at Poissy, and Paris’s Gare du Nord.
