The Trocadéro Palace was an eclectic building of Moorish and neo-Byzantine inspiration dating from the second half of the 19th century. Located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, on the Convent of the Visitandines de Chaillot between the Place du Trocadéro and the gardens of the same name, it comprised a 4,600-seat auditorium extended on either side by two curved wings, each housing a museum (the Musée des Monuments Français and the Musée d'Ethnographie), as well as conference rooms.
Built for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, it was not intended to outlast the event; although the building was eventually preserved for some sixty years, it was widely criticized for its architectural style, its progressive dilapidation, and the poor acoustics of its main hall, which was soon deserted by orchestras. It was dismantled in 1935 in preparation for the 1937 Exposition Universelle, to make way for a new building, the Palais de Chaillot.
History Past Initial projects
The location of the Trocadéro Palace has witnessed a succession of buildings and architectural projects. Originally, the site was part of the former estate of Maréchal de Bassompierre, Henry IV's comrade-in-arms. In 1651, Henrietta Maria of France founded a convent of the Visitation order, which was destroyed during the French Revolution.(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 7.
In February 1811, Emperor Napoleon I decided to build on the site of the Palace of the King of Rome, a building intended to be the residence of his son (one month before the latter's birth). It was to be the center of an imperial administrative and military city.(fr) (fr) Roger Wahl, Un projet de Napoléon Ier : le Palais du roi de Rome, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1955, p. 41. The architects in charge of the project were Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine.
Another project, envisaged by Antoine-Marie Peyre in 1824, the "villa Trocadéro" is an urban planning project centered on a semi-circular square, organized around the commemoration of the recent victory at Trocadéro in Spain by the Duke of Angoulême in 1823, leaving the choice of architecture to the purchasers of the plots.(fr) Emmanuel Larroche, L'expédition d'Espagne 1823 : De la guerre selon la Charte, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013, 350 p. (), p. 195-196.(fr) Françoise Waquet, Les Fêtes royales sous la restauration, 1981, p. 99, quoting G. Hubert, "L'Art français au service de la Restauration", Revue des Arts, no 4, 1955, p. 210-216. In 1839, Camille Moret designed a tomb for Napoleon I, and in 1841, Hector Horeau proposed the addition of a colossal 30-metre statue of the Emperor.Michael Paul Driskel, As Befits a Legend : Building a Tomb for Napoleon, 1840-1861, Kent (Ohio)/London, Kent State University Press, 1993, 251 p. (, read online), p. 54-55.
In 1858, the sculptor Antoine Étex, having proposed a monument to Liberty in 1848,(fr) . envisaged a "monumental lighthouse or fountain" at the center of a circular square housing the imperial palace and ministerial buildings.(fr) . In 1868, Hector Horeau proposed a new project for a colossal statue of "intelligent France enlightening the world".(fr) . But none of this came to fruition.
"Trocadéro" The name "Trocadéro" comes from the Trocadéro fort, which defended the Spanish port of Cadiz. On 31 August 1823, it was taken by the French expeditionary corps commanded by the Duke of Angoulême, who had been sent by his uncle, King Louis XVIII of France, to restore King Ferdinand VII to his Spanish throne. The Trocadéro site thus refers to a French military victory. In 1826, during a re-enactment of this feat of arms in a military parade for the French king Charles X, the site's layout was used to depict the battle: the hill of Chaillot represented the "Trocadéro fort" and was to be "conquered" from the Champ-de-Mars, from where the French "troops" set off (a papier-mâché fort was built on the hill).
A temporary triumphal arch was erected and the foundation stone laid for a military barracks, which was never built. The obelisk that was also to be built in the middle of the hill never got beyond the planning stage. Bonapartists even proposed erecting the Emperor's tomb here, before the remains were moved to the Hôtel des Invalides.
However, the top of the hill remained uncultivated until it was leveled to create the Place du Roi de Rome (Place du Trocadéro) in 1869, and the land below until the Trocadéro gardens were laid out in 1876.
1878 Exposition Universelle building
From the mid-1860s onwards, the Chaillot hill underwent "earthworks and levelling" to provide a panoramic view of the 1867 Exposition Universelle facilities on the Rive Gauche (Left Bank), and to create the Champ-de-Mars park.(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 12. The square, then still called "Place du Roi de Rome", was linked to the Pont d'Iéna by a granite staircase.
As early as 1876, there was talk of developing the site for the 1878 Exposition Universelle. The program for the Concours pour l'Exposition Universelle of 1878 called up for the construction of a "formidable hall for public meetings and solemnities". The palace was designed by architects Gabriel Davioud and Jules Bourdais, inspired by the Giralda in Seville, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,(fr) . and, above all, by Baron Haussmann's 1864 project for a 10,000-person hall, the Orphéon, which was to have been built on the Place du Château d'Eau.(fr) . It was the result of a competition, whose requirements included a 10,000-seat festival hall and exhibition galleries; 94 teams entered the competition, but the Davioud-Bourdais project had in fact already been selected.(fr) . The design features two semicircular wings linked by a circular central section flanked by two towers, in the Moorish or neo-Byzantine style; on the square side, the gable is "Flemish-style",(fr) . although other commentators refer less to the orientalism of the project than to a whimsical style, now typical of all world's fairs since London's Crystal Palace in 1851.(fr)
Work on the Trocadéro Palace took place between November 1876 and June 1878;(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 14. in 1877, the square was renamed "Place du Trocadéro", while in July of the same year, "the two-story portico of the central body was completed, while the walls delimiting the high windows were being added". Given the resources available at the time, workers still had to maneuver on "wooden scaffolding erected as a framework". In October, the roof began to be laid and the waterfall bed was dug out of the mine (the waterfall descends from the central body to the gardens in the form of a fountain).(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 16.
The Trocadéro Palace was never intended to go beyond the exhibition stage,(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 20. but in the end, it remained, due to its much higher cost than originally projected (twelve million gold francs instead of seven and a half million, which subsequently led the City of Paris to withdraw from the project, in favor of the State.(fr) .
Alongside this, the Palais du Trocadéro hosted the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and 1900, whose installations were mainly located on the Champ-de-Mars (the most notable being the Eiffel Tower, also initially built on a temporary basis). On 15 April 1889, a supplement to Le Figaro noted: "If you want to get a good idea of the Exposition Universelle as a whole, the best way is to stand at the central point of the Trocadéro Palace, in the middle of the circular gallery overlooking the gilded statues of the five parts of the world. From there, the panorama is magnificent".(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 42. For the 1900 exhibition, the pavilions of the French colonies and protectorates were set up in the palace gardens, and the Iéna bridge was "widened with wooden sidewalks"(fr) Esprit(s) des lieux, 2011, p. 64. (it was completely enlarged in 1935, from 14 to 35 meters).
Controversial museum palace
The palace was home to the Musée des Monuments Français, created in 1879 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and the first Paris ethnographic museum, founded by Ernest Hamy, forerunner of the Musée de l'Homme. The Trocadéro gardens were designed by Adolphe Alphand. From 1880, a popular observatory, founded by Léon Jaubert, was set up here. Between 1878 and 1925, an Indochinese museum, the result of discoveries made by explorer Louis Delaporte, occupied a third of the palace's Passy wing; the objects on display were then transferred to the Musée Guimet, with the exception of 624 plaster casts from the temple of Angkor, which remained at Trocadéro, donated in 1936 to the Musée des Monuments Français, housed in the new Palais de Chaillot.(fr) Éric Biétry-Rivierre, "Une collection inestimable sauvée... à Morangis", Le Figaro, 6 May 2013, p. 32.
Unlike other Parisian monuments that were initially decried, but quickly accepted by elites and the general public (such as the Palais Garnier and the Eiffel Tower), the Trocadéro Palace was the subject of numerous and recurring criticisms in the decades following its construction: the disdain of architects and writers, a style deemed obsolete, and the faulty acoustics of the assembly hall.
Viollet-le-Duc nevertheless championed the project, but died in 1879.(fr) . The press and other personalities mocked the building, such as the humorist Touchatout, who compared the statue overhanging the dome of the Assembly Hall to a "fly on the lid of a soup tureen", or Joris-Karl Huysmans, who referred to the palace as "the belly of a lying hydropic woman", while the writer André Billy declared "Down with the Trocadéro!" Julien Green spoke of Moorish "abominations" and modernist architect Georges-Henri Pingusson enthused that the 1937 exhibition had "the merit of liberating one of the most beautiful sites in Paris by demolishing the central building that had both damaged and obstructed it". In addition, the public reacted against the dilapidated ornamentation, which, planned for the 1878 exhibition only, had not been designed to last that long. Draughts from the galleries and acoustics in the main hall had also been a recurring problem since the building's construction, despite several attempts to remedy the situation. In fact, it was the architecture of the hall itself that was lacking. This conclusion led the architects to opt for the demolition of the village hall while retaining the two wings in 1937.(fr) .
In the interwar period, the site was already referred to as the "vieux Trocadéro" (the old Trocadéro). As early as 1932, it was the subject of speculation as to its future, in preparation for the 1937 International Exhibition, thanks to a "competition of ideas": while the first project envisaged the exhibition taking place outside Paris, a study published the following year mentioned for the first time the demolition of the palace and the organization of the event on a Champ-de-Mars/Trocadéro axis. In the autumn of 1933, Anatole de Monzie, Minister of Education, who was then overseeing the field of Culture, supported a project to build a Cité des musées in place of the palace, "centered on a vast esplanade both open and covered by a gigantic 190-meter-wide portico, punctuated by 23 columns".
However, as economic difficulties piled up, the French government opted to "camouflage" the old palace, a less costly solution.(fr) . Eight projects were selected in January 1935, won by the Carlu-Boileau-Azéma trio, who planned to permanently camouflage the palace so as to preserve the wings (originally, the two towers were also to remain). What was to become the old Palais du Trocadéro thus survived in part, with the surface area gained on the garden-side wings increasing the floor area from 17,000 to 41,000 m2, the walls and columns being covered on the street side by stone slabs, the interior by partitions and the floor mosaics by a new covering. The new village hall will now be built underground.(fr) .
Palace destruction