Everything about Ch Teau De Saint-germain-en-laye totally explained
The
Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a French royal
palace in the
commune of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the
département of
Yvelines, about 19
km west of
Paris. Today, it houses the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale (Museum of National Archeology).
The first
castle, named the
Grand Châtelet, was built on the site by
Louis VI in around 1122. The castle was expanded by
Saint Louis in the 1230s. It was burned by the
Black Prince in 1346; of it, only the
Gothic chapel remains. This
Château Vieux was rebuilt by
King Charles V in the 1360s on the old foundations. The oldest parts of the current
château were reconstructed by
François I in 1539, and have subsequently been expanded several times.
Henri II built a separate new château (
le Château Neuf) nearby, to designs by
Philibert de l'Orme, sited at the crest of a slope, which was shaped, under the direction of
Étienne du Pérac (Karling 1974 p 10) into three massive descending terraces and narrower subsidiary mediating terraces, which were linked by divided symmetrical stairs and ramps and extended a single axis that finished at the edge of the
Seine; the design took many cues from the
Villa Lante at
Bagnaia. "Étienne du Pérac had spent a long time in Italy, and one manifestation of his interest in gardens of this type is his well-known view of the
Villa d'Este, engraved in 1573" (Karling 1974, p 11).
The gardens laid out at Saint-Germain-en-Laye were among a half-dozen gardens introducing the Italian garden style to France that laid the groundwork for the
French formal garden. Unlike the
parterres that were laid out in casual relation to existing châteaux, often on difficult sites originally selected for defensive reasons, these new gardens extended the central axis of a symmetrical building façade in rigorously symmetrical axial designs of patterned parterres, gravel walks, fountains and basins, and formally-planted
bosquets; they began the tradition that reached its apex after 1650 in the gardens of
André Le Nôtre. According to
Claude Mollet's
Théâtre des plans et jardinage the parterres were laid out in 1595 for
Henri IV by Mollet, trained at Anet and the progenitor of a dynasty of royal gardeners. One of the parterre designs by Mollet at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was illustrated in
Olivier de Serre's
Le théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600), but the
Château Neuf and the whole of its spectacular series of terraces can be fully seen in an engraving after
Alexandre Francini, 1614.
Louis XIV was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638. One of du Pérac's retaining walls collapsed in 1660, and Louis undertook a renovation of the gardens in 1662. At his majority he established his court here in 1666, but it was the
Château Vieux that he preferred: the
Château Neuf was abandoned in the 1660s and demolished. From 1663 until 1682, when the king removed definitively to Versailles, the team that he inherited from the unfortunate Fouquet—
Louis Le Vau,
Jules Hardouin-Mansart and
André Le Nôtre laboured to give the ancient pile a more suitable aspect.
The gardens were remade by
André Le Nôtre from 1669 to 1673, and include a 2.4 kilometre long stone terrace which provides a view over the valley of the
Seine and, in the distance, Paris.
Louis XIV turned the château over to
King James II after his exile from Britain in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. King James lived in the château for thirteen years, and his daughter
Marie-Louise Stuart was born in exile here in 1692. King James Stuart is buried in the nearby Church of
Saint-Germain; his descendants stayed at the château until the
French Revolution, leaving in 1793.
In the
19th century,
Napoleon I established his cavalry officers training school here.
Napoleon III had the castle restored by
Eugène Millet from 1862, and it became the
Musée des Antiquités Nationales (Museum of National Antiquities) in 1867, displaying the archeological objects of France.
On September 10, 1919 the
Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ending hostilities between the
Allies of World War I and
Austria, was signed at the château.
During the German occupation (1940-44), the château served as the headquarters of the German Army in France.
The museum was renamed the
Musée d'Archéologie Nationale in 2005. Its collections include finds from
Paleolithic to
Merovingian times.
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