THE WORLD MONUMENTS IN PARIS #2 | The Hôtel de la Chancellerie d’Orléans and the Hôtel de Rohan, with François Bouquet

🗓️ January 16 | 1:00 PM (EST) - 19h Paris

Built at the beginning of the 18 th century by the architect Germain Boffrand before being redecorated in the 1760s by Charles De Wailly, the hôtel particulier known as the Hôtel de la Chancellerie d’Orléans (a/k/a the Hôtel de Voyer d’Argenson) stood on the edge of the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris until it was demolished in 1923 to make room for its neighbor the Banque de France – all but the interiors of four rooms (the anteroom, the bedroom, the dining room, and the grand salon), which were painstakingly dismantled piece by piece by the Banque de France with the view to their being reconstructed one day. After 10 years of restoration work and reassembly supported by the Ministry of Culture, the Banque de France, and World Monuments Fund, the interiors of the four rooms were reconstructed and partly furnished by the Mobilier National in the Hôtel de Rohan-Strasbourg, which was built during the same period as the Chancellerie d’Orléans, near the Hôtel de Soubise inside the French National Archives in the Marais. These exceptional interiors of the Chancellerie d’Orléans, which offer a wonderful sense of the splendor of Parisian decorative art at the time of the transition from the style of Louis XV style to that of Louis XVI, were shown to the public for the first time in October 2021.

Speaker
François Bouquet is a graduate of the Institut National du Patrimoine. He is currently the Curator in charge of historical hôtels and the furniture collections at the Archives Nationales of France.