The Caux Palace Hotel () is a former palace hotel located in the village of Caux, in the city of Montreux in the Vaud canton, in Switzerland.
Built on the Caux Mount by the Swiss architect Eugène Jost, it was inaugurated on 7 July 1902. The building rests on a 400-meter long terrace and is decorated with an abundance of towers and turrets with coloured tiles, which make it a remarkable feature of the Montreux landscape, visible from the whole Montreux Riviera region. It soon became an international venue first in the early 20th century as a luxury hotel, then from 1946 on as an international conference centre dedicated to the rebuilding of Europe under the leadership of the Swiss Initiatives of Change team. It is now also the seat of the Swiss Hotel Management School (SHMS) which uses the premises during the school semesters while Initiatives of Change keeps organising summer conferences there each year. The Caux-Palace Hotel is listed as a cultural property of national significance in Switzerland.
History
Caux before the palace hotel Until 1875, the area around Caux was only sparsely populated. The "Caux mountains" had always been used as a pasture for local farmers while the road to the Jaman pass was the shortest route towards the Sarine and Simmental valleys. In 1875 taking into account the rapid development of tourism on the lakeside where the first hotels had opened in 1837 in Montreux and in 1841 in Territet, Emile Monnier decided to transform his chalet on the Caux Mountain into an inn with a view to welcome the ramblers who started to explore the mountainside. This development had first affected the village of Glion, halfway between Montreux and Caux: a road to Glion was opened in 1850 and a cable-car service was opened between Territet and Glion in 1883.
About the same time local entrepreneurs became aware of the potential of Caux, almost 1000 meters above Glion. Philippe Faucherre, born in 1844 and his wife Louise Vauthier, both from hotel management background, were among them. In 1890 Faucherre bought a stone quarry in the area and built the Caux Grand Hotel in three years, all the needed material being brought to the construction site by mules for lack of other means of transportation.
The railway from Glion to Caux and to the Rochers-de-Naye summit was built at the same time and inaugurated in 1892 after only 15 months of works, a technical tour-de-force realized under the famous railway engineer Laubi. The extension of this railway between Montreux and Glion would wait 27 more years. The road to Caux was also opened at the same time by public works contractor Pierre Botelli.
The immediate success of the Grand Hotel, which attracted many prominent people to Caux, led other entrepreneurs to conceive the Caux Palace Hotel.The informations in this section are drawn from Philippe Mottu’s historic book: Caux from Belle Epoque to Moral Rearmament, published by La Baconnière, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1969.
The construction of the Caux palace hotel
Five years after the Grand Hotel opening, Ami Chessex, who was the owner of the lakeside Territet Grand Hotel, decided to build a new hotel on a piece of land he owned at Caux, just under the Caux Grand Hotel – although the area was rather slopy. Early in 1899 a joint venture company was founded by Chessex and Faucherre with a capital of 2.5 million Swiss Francs. At the start of 1900 this company issued 3 million worth of bonds (and issued 500,000 francs more in 1903).
The first round of works consisted of an additional floor on top of the Grand Hotel, which immediately increased its capacity by 80 beds. Then in 1900 the construction works of the Caux Palace started. The main requirement was to make it the most advanced, most luxurious and biggest hotel ever built in Switzerland. As imagined by chief architect Eugène Jost, the construction started by a 400-meter long supporting wall along the hotel's site, allowing for the creation of a nice garden at the foot of the future hotel and for a promenade along this belvedere from which future Caux Palace Hotel customers would enjoy a unique sight on the grand landscape of Lake Geneva and of the Alps.
Alfred Daulte, one of Jost's deputies, was to lead the works on site. It was difficult job given that there were up to 800 workers on site and that the progress of the construction was under close personal scrutiny from Ami Chessex, who used to walk up from Territet twice a week and did not hesitate to issue orders contradicting Daulte's. Nevertheless, the building and decoration works were completed in a little over two years, and on 7 July 1902, the Caux Palace Hotel was officially inaugurated in presence of the president of the Canton's executive, Mr Cossy, and of the whole Vaud government. The books of the Société immobilière de Caux showed a total cost of construction of 2,555,949 Swiss francs.
The Belle Epoque Like its predecessor, the Caux Grand Hotel, the Caux Palace Hotel was blessed with instant success. Visitors included celebrities such as Sacha Guitry, Paul Morand, Romain Rolland, Edgar Wallace, prince Ibn Saud, future king of Saudi Arabia, John D. Rockefeller and the maharajah of Baroda. The latter stayed frequently in Caux, using most of the fourth floor. His personal room at the south-west angle of the building enjoyed an outstanding view and was furbished in lemon-tree wood furniture, especially designed for the maharajah. This exceptional furniture and the initial decoration of this room have been preserved to this day.
Two to three weeks of waiting time were sometimes necessary before the privilege of staying at the Caux Palace Hotel could be granted to the customers. Several smaller hotels were therefore built in Caux in the wake of the opening of the Caux Palace Hotel, such as the “Pavillon des Fougères” (later “Hotel Alpina”) or the “Hotel Maria”. A school was opened in Caux in 1905, an Anglican chapel was built in 1906 and a Catholic one in 1907. Many private chalets were also built around the same years. Winter sport facilities included ski and sledge slopes, three ice rinks for skating and a bobsleigh track. The World Bobsleigh Federation and the World Ice Hhockey Federation were created in Caux.
The dark years 1 August 1914 spelt the end of the golden years of luxury tourism in Switzerland. In a matter of a few days most of the customers had left the hotels, which would remain empty for the next five years. On 10 August, the few remaining Grand Hotel customers were transferred to the Caux Place Hotel and the Grand Hotel was then closed down. In 1917, Ami Chessex died after having struggled for three years to keep the company afloat. The cumulated loss at the end of the war would be of 1 million Swiss francs.
In 1919, war had at last stopped and everything could have returned to normal, but exchange rates were high for the Swiss Francs and the Caux hotels did not completely correspond with the new expectations of the customers. Therefore, in spite of a financial restructuration of the company in 1919, business remained disappointing. In 1925, the Grand Hotel was renovated and renamed Hotel Regina, in memory of Empress Sissi of Austria-Hungary who had resided there in 1898 just before being assassinated in Geneva.
The years 1927 and 1928 brought at last sizeable improvement for the Caux hotels. A second financial restructuration took place in 1929 in order to raise 1 million francs to renovate the Caux Palace Hotel. The bobsleigh world cup was organised in Caux in 1930. Unfortunately, the years 1930 to 1935 were most difficult as a result of the worldwide financial crisis. The value of the individual share of the Société immobilière de Caux had sunk from around 200 francs in 1900 to 1 francs in 1936. A fourth financial restructuration was insufficient to mend the situation and the board put the hotels up for sale as the losses piled up.
In 1938 the railway was converted from steam to electricity and the ski fashion reignited interest for Caux. The Caux Palace Hotel was renamed Hotel Esplanade and now targeted a less exclusive audience. However, in 1939 it had to stop all activities for good.
World War II After the Caux Palace Hotel, most other hotels also had to gradually close down. In 1941, Hotel Regina was declared bankrupt and sold twice in a row. The Caux Palace Hotel reopened in May 1944 as a detention centre for English and American Air Force pilots escaped from Italian prisoner camps. Then from November 1944 to July 1945 they were replaced by Italian civilian refugees and from December 1944 by Jewish Hungarian refugees. This last group consisted of 1670 people who were on the Kasztner train. An oak tree was planted on the Caux terrace in memory of this convoy and a plaque was inaugurated there in 1999. It reads: “In memory of the Jewish refugees accommodated here during WWII, and in memory of those who were driven back by the Swiss borders. We shall not forget them.”See the diary of a Hungarian refugee from the Kasztner train, the historic exhibition in the Caux bookshop and the document on refugees on the CAUX-Initiatives of Change website .
These various visitors of Caux degraded the buildings a lot. Everything that could have a market value like door knobs, locks, taps, etc. was dismantled and sold. This completed the ruin of the creators of the Caux Palace Hotel. Apart from the ground and of the building's shell, nothing was left of the 9 to 10 million Swiss Francs which had been invested there since 1890. It later turned out, however, that the caretaker of the Caux Palace Hotel, Robert Auberson, had been able to hide and store a lot of valuable pieces of furniture, as well as crockery and cutlery.
The salvage of the Caux Palace Hotel In 1946, the derelict Caux Palace Hotel as well as the former Grand Hotel and other smaller hotel buildings in Caux looked like near their end. The bankrupt Société Immobilière de Caux had fallen into the hands of its main banker, Banque populaire de Montreux, who were looking for a quick way out and had put the whole lot on the market at a very low price. The most likely outcome was the demolition of the building in order to reuse its material.
But in an unexpected move, Geneva-born diplomat Philippe Mottu bid for the building with a small group of Swiss people. A graduate in theology and political science from Geneva university, Philippe Mottu had been associated with Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group since the mid-1930s and in 1943 he had had the recurring thought: "If Switzerland is spared by war, our task will be to put at the disposal of Frank Buchman a place where Europeans, torn apart by hatred, suffering and resentment, will be able to meet each other. Caux is the place."Story of the birth of the conference centre in Caux, by Philippe Mottu, 1997, in Cantonal Archives index, Lausanne, Vaud
The bankers as well as the city of Montreux mayor understood full well the positives of having an international conference centre in the area of Montreux and offered a "discount" price of 1.050.000 Swiss francs, giving Moral Rearmament a priority over other bidders. The Caux Foundation, which would administer the Caux Palace Hotel in the coming decades, being not yet in place, the sale contract was signed on 25 May 1946 by Philippe Mottu and Robert Hahnloser in their own name. It would take 95 individual Swiss donors to be able to reach the 450,000 Francs amount requested as first down payment on 1 July 1946. In-kind donations such as furniture, carpets also converged from all over Switzerland to help refurbish the former palace.