1767-1777 – Hôtel de Saint-Florentin
The “hôtel particulier” (meaning “private residence”) known today as Hôtel de Talleyrand was built between 1767 and 1769 for Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Saint-Florentin, Marquis then Duc de La Vrillière (1705-1777). As State Secretary in charge of the King’s House, State Minister, State Secretary in charge of Foreign Affairs, and personal friend of the King, Saint-Florentin was one of the most influential figures of the reign of Louis XV.
The mansion was built in the neo-classical style. The elevations of the residence were designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698-1782), First Architect of the King, the designer of the Place Louis XV (today Place de la Concorde), of the Château de Compiègne, of the Petit Trianon in Versailles and of the Ecole Militaire in Paris. The chief interior designer was architect Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (1739-1811), who later designed the Eglise Saint-Sulpice, the Eglise Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, the Collège de France and the Arc de Triomphe. Chalgrin selected a team including some of the most skilled artists of the period to work on the building’s design: sculptors Guillaume Coustou the Younger (1716-1777), Étienne-Pierre-Adrien Gois (1731-1823), François-Joseph Duret (1729-1816), and Denis Coulonjon, painters Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743-1811) and Hubert Robert (1733-1808), and master ironsmith Pierre Deumier (1715-1785).
1777-1812
After the death of Saint-Florentin in 1777, the mansion became the property of the Duc de Fitz-James, and in 1784, of the Princesse de Salm-Salm, Duchesse de l’Infantado. It was the home of the Embassy of the Venetian Republic for a brief period of time between 1790 and 1794. In 1794, during the French Revolution, it was requisitioned by the Committee of Public Safety to house the Commission on Commerce, and the stables were used as an ammunition storage facility and a saltpeter manufacture. In 1800, the mansion was sold by the Duchesse de l’Infantado to the Marquis de Hervas.
1812-1838 – Hôtel de Talleyrand
In 1812, the Marquis de Hervas, who in the meantime had been named Marquis d’Almenara, sold the residence to the person who would become forever associated with it: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The famous French statesman, who had already bought Château de Valençay in 1803, made the mansion on rue Saint-Florentin his Parisian residence. It became a center of French society and political life. In 1814, he received in this mansion Czar Alexander I of Russia (from April 1st until April 15), King Frederick William III of Prussia, Emperor Francis I of Austria and the Duke of Wellington, the British Ambassador, to negotiate peace in Europe and the restoration of the monarchy in France and to prepare the Congress of Vienna. He died in this very building on May 17, 1838, after King Louis-Philippe had paid him a final visit.
In Choses Vues 1830 – 1848, Victor Hugo wrote : « Into this palace, as a spider into its web, he enticed and captured, one by one, heroes, thinkers, conquerors, princes, emperors, Bonaparte, Sieyès, Mme de Stael, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Alexandre de Russie, Guillaume de Prusse, Francois d’Autriche, Louis XVIII, Louis Philippe, and all the gilded glittering flies which buzz through the history of these past forty years. All this glittering swarm, fascinated by the penetrating eye of this man, passed in turn under this gloomy entrance bearing on it the inscription: Hotel Talleyrand. »