Tuileries Garden
The Tuileries Garden is a public garden between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France. Created by Catherine de' Medici as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in 1564, it was opened to the public in 1667 and became a public park after the French Revolution. Since the 19th century, it has been a place for Parisians to celebrate, meet, stroll and relax. Covering an area of, it is one of the most iconic parks in Paris. During the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, it was the site of the Olympic and Paralympic cauldron.
History
The Italian Garden of Catherine de' Medici (16th century)
In July 1559, after the accidental death of her husband, Henry II, Queen Catherine de' Medici decided to leave her residence of the Hôtel des Tournelles, at the eastern part of Paris, near the Bastille. Together with her son, the new king of France Francis II, her other children and the royal court, she moved to the Louvre Palace. Five years later, in 1564, she decided to build a new residence with more space for a garden. For that purpose, Catherine bought land west of Paris, just outside the city Wall of Charles V. It was bordered on the south by the Seine, and on the north by the faubourg Saint-Honoré, a road in the countryside continuing the Rue Saint-Honoré. Since the 13th century this area had been occupied by tile-making factories called tuileries. The new residence was called the Tuileries Palace.Catherine commissioned a landscape architect from Florence, Bernard de Carnesse, to create an Italian Renaissance garden for the palace. The new garden was an enclosed space five hundred metres long and three hundred metres wide, separated from the new palace by a lane. It was divided into rectangular compartments by six alleys, and the sections were planted with lawns, flower beds, and small clusters of five trees, called quinconces; and, more practically, with kitchen gardens and vineyards. It was further decorated with fountains, a labyrinth, a grotto, and faience images of plants and animals, made by Bernard Palissy, whom Catherine had tasked to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain.
The development of the garden was interrupted by a civil war. In 1588 Henry III had to flee through the garden to escape capture from the Catholic League on the Day of the Barricades of the French Wars of Religion and did not return. The gardens were pillaged. However, the new king, Henry IV, returned in 1595 and, with his chief landscape gardener Claude Mollet, restored and embellished the gardens. Henry built a chamille, or covered arbor, the length of the garden, Another alley was planted with mulberry trees where he hoped to cultivate silkworms and start a silk industry in France. He also built a rectangular ornamental lake of 65 metres by 45 metres with a fountain supplied with water by the new pump called La Samaritaine, which had been built in 1608 on the Pont Neuf. The area between the palace and the former moat of Charles V was turned into the "New Garden" with a large fountain in the center. Though Henry IV never lived in the Tuileries Palace, which was continually under reconstruction, he did use the gardens for relaxation and exercise.
Garden of Louis XIII and Louis XIV – The French formal garden (17th century)
After the assassination of his father in 1610, Louis XIII, age nine, became the new owner of the Tuileries Gardens. It became his enormous playground - he used it for hunting, and he kept a small zoo of exotic animals. On the north side of the gardens, his mother and the regent, Marie de' Medici, built stables and a riding school, the Manége, which survived until the French Revolution, when it was used as the meeting hall of the revolutionary parliament.The garden was entirely enclosed, and was used exclusively by the royal family when they were in residence, but When the king and court were absent from Paris, the gardens were turned into a pleasure spot for the nobility. In 1630 a parterre at the west end of the garden, between the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace, where the moat of the old city walls had been, was turned into a parterre of flower beds and paths. This parterre was transformed into a sort of a playground for the aristocracy. The daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orléans and the niece of Louis XIII, known as La Grande Mademoiselle, held court there, and it became known as known the "Parterre de Mademoiselle". However, in 1652, "La Grande Mademoiselle" was expelled from the palace and garden for having supported an uprising, the Fronde, against her cousin, the young Louis XIV. Louis XIV had the space transformed into large parade ground, When his first child was born, on Jun 5-6 1662, the parterre was the setting for a spectacular circular horseback promenade by the nobility, slowly circling the parterre. This became known as a "Carrousel", and gave its name to that portion of the garden.
Louis XIV quickly imposed his own sense of order on the Tuileries Garden. His architects, Louis Le Vau and François d'Orbay, finally finished the Tuileries Palace, making a proper royal residence. In 1664, Colbert, the King's superintendent of buildings, commissioned the landscape architect André Le Nôtre, to redesign the entire garden. Le Nôtre was the grandson of Pierre Le Nôtre, one of Catherine de' Medici's gardeners, and his father Jean had also been a gardener at the Tuileries. He immediately began transforming the Tuileries into a formal jardin à la française, a style he had first developed at Vaux-le-Vicomte and perfected at Versailles, based on symmetry, order and long perspectives.
Le Nôtre's gardens were designed to be seen from above, from a building or terrace. He eliminated the street which separated the palace and the garden, and replaced it with a terrace looking down upon flowerbeds bordered by low boxwood hedges and filled with designs of flowers. In the centre of the flowerbeds he placed three ornamental lakes with fountains. In front of the centre of the first fountain he laid out the Grande Allée, which extended 350 metres. He built two other alleys, lined with chestnut trees, on either side. He crossed these three main alleys with small lanes, to create compartments planted with diverse trees, shrubs and flowers.
On the south side of the park, next to the Seine, he built a long terrace called the Terrasse du bord-de-l'eau, planted with trees, with a view of the river. He built a second terrace on the north side, overlooking the garden, called the Terrasse des Feuillants.
On the west side of the garden, beside the present-day Place de la Concorde, he built two ramps in a horseshoe shape Fer à Cheval and two terraces overlooking an octagonal lake Bassin Octogonal in diameter, respectively from corner to corner, with one fountain in the centre with a waterjet of height, additional powerful waterjets from each corner to the center. The terraces frame the western entrance of the garden, and provide another viewpoint to see the garden from above.
Le Nôtre wanted his grand perspective from the palace to the western end of the garden to continue outside the garden. In 1667, he made plans for an avenue with two rows of trees on either side, which would have continued west to the present Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées.
Le Nôtre and his hundreds of masons, gardeners and earth-movers worked on the gardens from 1666 to 1672. In 1682, however, the King, furious with the Parisians for resisting his authority, abandoned Paris and moved to Versailles.
In 1667, at the request of the famous author of Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales, Charles Perrault, the Tuileries Garden was opened to the public, with the exception of beggars, "lackeys" and soldiers. It was the first royal garden to be open to the public.
Louis XV and Louis XVI – balloon flights, an invasion, and revolutionary ceremonies
After the death of Louis XIV, the five-year-old Louis XV became owner of the Tuileries Garden. In 1719, two large equestrian statuary groups, La Renommée and Mercure, by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox, were brought from the king's residence at Marly and placed at the west entrance of the garden. Other statues by Nicolas Coustou and Guillaume Coustou the Elder, Corneille Van Clève, Sébastien Slodtz, Thomas Regnaudin and Coysevox were placed along the Grande Allée. A swing bridge was placed at the west end over the moat, to make access to the garden easier. The creation of the Place Louis XV created a grand vestibule to the garden, though entrance to the north side of the garden, prior to the construction of Rue Saint-Honoré by Napoleon, was obstructed by residences, convents and private gardens.Certain holidays, such as 25 August, the feast day of Saint Louis, were celebrated with concerts and fireworks in the park. Small food stands were placed in the park, and chairs could be rented for a small fee. Public toilets were added in 1780.
A famous early balloon ascent, the first free flight of a manned hydrogen balloon, was made from the garden on 1 December 1783 by Jacques Alexandre César Charles and Nicolas Louis Robert. The King watched the flight from the tower of the palace. The first trial of the balloon was attended by the first American ambassador to Paris, Benjamin Franklin. The balloon and passengers landed safely at Nesles-la-Vallée, thirty-one miles from Paris.
On 6 October 1789, as the French Revolution began, King Louis XVI and family were brought against his will to the Tuileries Palace. The garden was reserved exclusively for the royal family in the morning, then open to the public in the afternoon. Queen Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin were given a part of the garden for her private use, first at the west end of the Promenade Bord d'eaux, then at the edge of the Place Louis XV.
After the King's failed attempt to escape France on 21 June 1791, the King and family were placed under house arrest in the palace. The royal family was allowed to walk in the park on the evening of 18 September 1791, during the festival organized to celebrate the new French Constitution, when the alleys of the park were illuminated with pyramids and rows of lanterns. But as the Revolution took a more radical turn, On 10 August 1792, a mob stormed the palace, the King was imprisoned, and the King's Swiss Guards fell back through the gardens where they were massacred.
The new revolutionary government, the National Convention, met in the Salle du Manège, the former riding academy in the northwest corner of the gardens, which was the largest meeting hall in the city. Louis XVI was put on trial by the National Convention at the Manège, and was sentenced to death. Afterwards the Tuileries became the National Garden of the new French Republic. The Convention ordered that statues from the former royal gardens of Marly, Versailles and Fontainebleau be brought to Paris and installed in the National Garden. The originals are now in the Louvre, with copies taking their place in the gardens.
The garden was also used to celebrate revolutionary holidays and festivals. On 8 June 1794, a series of events to honour the Cult of the Supreme Being was organized in Paris by Robespierre, with sets and costumes designed by Jacques-Louis David. The opening event was held in the Tuileries. After a hymn written for the occasion, Robespierre set fire to mannequins representing Atheism, Ambition, Egoism and False Simplicity, revealing a statue of Wisdom. The ceremony then moved on the a larger event in the Champs de Mars. Two months later, however, Robespierre was accused of excessive ambition, arrested and sent to the guillotine.
During their storming, the gardens had been badly damaged, with many buildings set on fire. The National Convention assigned the renewal of the gardens to the painter Jacques-Louis David, and to his brother in law, the architect August Cheval de Saint-Hubert. They conceived a garden decorated with Roman porticos, monumental porches, columns, and other classical decoration. The project of David and Saint-Hubert was never completed. All that remains today are the two exedres, semicircular low walls crowned with statues by the two ponds in the centre of the garden.