The Secrets of Napoleon’s Favorite Palace | World's Greatest Palaces Season 1 Episode 8

Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth. Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best. Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered. Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality. These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world. This time Chateau de Fontainebleau began life as a medieval castle in the 12th century before being turned into a renaissance masterpiece in the 1500s. Kings and emperors of France resided at this grand country retreat for nearly 750 years, making Fontainebleau one of the world's greatest palaces. Lying 55 kilometers southeast of Paris, Fontainebleau has stood in the forests of rural France for nearly a thousand years. In his memoirs Napoleon Bonaparte called the imposing structure the true home of kings. Today Chateau de Fontainebleau is a gigantic structure containing 1500 rooms. With constant renovations and additions by kings and emperors over seven centuries, it has changed dramatically through the years. In French the word chateau means both castle and palace and this is not an accident because of course royal houses were first in the middle ages castles and then later developed into very grand palaces as we know them today. So Fontainebleau starts off as a castle round a courtyard with a keep and indeed the keep of 1137 still survives. It was Francis I that decided to transform this castle into something which we would describe as a palace by building huge corridors and galleries attached to the original castle while keeping some of the original buildings. King Francis I's 16th century reimagining of Fontainebleau retained a section of the medieval castle which still stands today. Vincent Draguet is the director of heritage and collections at the chateau. Although much has changed about Fontainebleau over the centuries, the dungeon was kept fully intact by every monarch who resided here. Each of the royal dynasties of France saw it as a symbol of heritage and antiquity. Now housing palace administration on the inside, the robust exterior stonework of the dungeon remained solid almost a millennium later. In the middle ages building was done by craftsmen, master craftsmen, who designed and built the building. They were responsible for both and the patron would come to the master craftsman and describe what they wanted and then they would work out together what was being built on site. Coming back to the site regularly to see whether the One of the key materials that's used in this castle is sandstone that was sourced locally from a forest and also rubble stones and those have been set together using a mix like a paste called mortar. Louis VII was the first known king to reside at the medieval castle of Fontainebleau in the 12th century and his successors were still visiting the castle some 300 years later. The castle was vacated by the French monarchy and it remained empty for a hundred years. It was then in the early 16th century that King Francis I came to the throne and decided to make Fontainebleau his passion project. Francis was heavily influenced by the renaissance movement that had begun in Italy. Ideas about design and architecture had transitioned from the medieval style of construction. It's the Italian renaissance that invents the modern idea of the architect. The classical buildings which were emulating Rome had to be drawn out in advance. They couldn't be worked out on site and thus somebody had to do the drawings and hand these to the builders to build. King Francis employed a master mason named Gilles Le Breton to oversee the build. His construction team helped to turn the medieval castle into a palace fit for a king. The construction of the new wings of the castle wasn't particularly revolutionary. It was the way it was carried out, the style in which it was carried out that was so radically different. The stone ashlar that was cut with beautiful fine joints wasn't radically different from the medieval stonework but it was the creation of classical ornament of capitals and friezes and cornices and some of these presented technical difficulties. The cornice is a very heavy element and it's right at the top of the building and it cantilevers out it. So that you have to lift the heaviest stones to the top of the building. When you've got a structure that's being constantly changed over a period of time where new things are being added in, old things are being taken away, one of the biggest challenges around that is making sure that we're keeping structural stability. If you imagine the gravity loads are all kind of channeling their way through the structure in a particular path and then if you're coming in and changing those pathways it's really important to make sure that the forces find a different way to travel and often what you do to ensure that is to put some temporary supports in there and that way you can be sure that the forces do have somewhere safe to dissipate. The most recognisable thing about the architecture of Francis I, the Renaissance wings, is its classical style. Its use of classical columns taken from the books of Vitruvius, a Roman author, and their later interpretations by Italian writers. The use of these is essential in classical architecture. In the mid-16th century, King Francis I had decided to update the medieval castle of Fontainebleau. The interiors of Francis's new look home were designed to showcase the groundbreaking artwork of the Renaissance. The Italian Renaissance, the movement of art, the growth of art, the idea of almost a sort of realistic art and the flowering of arts and culture during the 15th century, this began in Italy and Francis I very much wanted to see it in his own palaces and Fontainebleau was the place he used. Everything about it was a symbol of beauty and Francis's power and the way he's doing that is not just through seeming strong and success in war but also seeming like the great king of art and culture and the Renaissance and the rebirth and certainly the influence of Fontainebleau on France can't be understated. Francis invited Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticio over to France to turn his dream into a reality. They helped decorate a huge new hall for the king, the gallery of Francis I. Another reign of Francis I, Francis I wanted all these Italian artists to come at his court and Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticio came in Fontainebleau and they infused French art with what they did and what they saw in Italy. So the school of Fontainebleau is really a school in the proper sense of the term. You have these important Italian masters and you have a whole squad, a whole team of young French artists that will learn how to do fresco or how to do a beautiful leg or a beautiful arm or very fleshy fruits and they're the guidance of these masters and when they will leave the works at Fontainebleau and when they will work in Paris or elsewhere in France they will use what they learned and so that's how all the Fontainebleau style is becoming popular in France and will infuse really a French art of the 16th century. King Francis's private gallery has 14 different frescoes along the walls, painted by the school of Fontainebleau during the 1530s. So here you have Danae. Danae embodies the beautiful girl of the Renaissance, doesn't she? With her golden hair, her sophisticated hairdo, her almond-shaped eyes and her body with the robustness that recalls the art of Giulio Romano in Mantua and also the gracefulness of the face that recalls the art of Raphael and really that's the school of Fontainebleau. Danae lies on her very beautiful bed and you can see this kind of golden shower that is just going down on her and this golden shower is Jupiter manifesting himself under the appearance of gold and he will fecundate this way Danae and this will give birth to Perseus. Around this beautiful fresco you have these great caryatids carrying baskets of fruits and look at the opulence and the abundance and the richness of these fruits with the huge fruits of Italy, very big, very fleshy. This is really a signature of the gallery of Francis I. As well as being incredibly beautiful, the artwork forms part of the structural design of the gallery. A fresco is not just a painting on plaster, the plaster and the paint are mixed which makes it particularly difficult to do as you have to paint before the plaster dries and the plaster has to be mixed in such a way that there's time for the painter to finish their work each day and the painting has to be split into segments to allow this to happen. The gallery measures 60 meters long, six meters wide and five meters high. Before the 18th century renovations of the palace, it had windows on both sides of the room. The gallery was a particularly impressive space, partly because of its huge length. It's obviously a very large building, far larger than anyone else would have been used to seeing, but it also contained an awful lot of glass. Glass in this period is tremendously expensive. The only way to make windows was to take a sheet of glass and spin it so it spun out like a plate and then cut rectangles out of this circular disc of glass. So each rectangle was relatively small and these were then mounted in larger windows. Ordinary people very often didn't have glass at all, so to have a huge gallery with windows down one or even both sides filled with glass, which was so expensive, showed off how rich you were. Almost hidden away amongst the frescoes in the gallery is a 16th century depiction of Francis I's new renaissance wing. Well this is kind of the first photograph of Fontainebleau, so you can recognize the Porte Dorée, the pond that is just in front of you, and where all the arcades are is where we are right now, the gallery. You can see that people are bathing in the pond, it's a very lovely scene, and the bigger fresco represents Venus in her bath, and it's very important for Fontainebleau because you have to remember that downstairs there used to be a full appartement des bains, seven rooms dedicated exclusively to baths. The lavish royal baths that were once plumbed in directly below the gallery have since been removed. Having a room in your house devoted entirely to bathing was virtually unique, and of course all of the associated plumbing and everything that was required would have been completely innovative. The same kind of technology that was being employed in renaissance fountains and elsewhere to create water displays was there to be used in creating Francis I's bathroom. It was the fact that it was being used for a bathroom that was unusual. The bathrooms were even adorned with artworks of the day, including one of the world's most priceless portraits. Bath Appartement housed the collection of paintings of Francis I, with some paintings not very famous, such as the Mona Lisa, or all the big Raphaels that are in the Louvre, they were all exposed in this appartement des bains, downstairs in the Chateau de Fontainebleau. There was art everywhere in the palace, and including the fact that the Mona Lisa was at one point hung in some of the bathrooms, that this great priceless painting, the most priceless painting now in the world, was just like in a bathroom because they had so many other great pieces of art that almost the Mona Lisa was just a footnote. Another grand addition to Fontainebleau was the stunning ballroom. It was still under construction when Francis I died in 1547. So we are in the Salle de Balle of the Chateau de Fontainebleau, a space that was conceived under the reign of Francis I, but only accomplished under the reign of his son, King Henry II. All that you can see on the walls or on the ceiling are the work of Italian artists who came to Fontainebleau in the 16th century to work for the kings of France. For example, the frescoes were done by Niccolò della Batte upon the drawings of Francesco Primaticcio, one of the most important representatives of what is called the first school of Fontainebleau. After the death of Rosso Fiorentino in 1540, Francesco Primaticcio had taken sole control of the artistic direction of Fontainebleau. The frescoes in the ballroom are all his creation. So here you have the Feast of Bacchus. You can recognize Bacchus in the center. He's a bit greenish now. The cup he's holding in his hand and the grape wreath he has on his head. Then you move to this arcade where you see Apollo playing a kind of lute for the muses on Mount Parnassus. And look how the drapery here overhangs on the architecture or how the arm of this lovely lady playing the flute is climbing on the arch. So there you see how much in Fontainebleau architecture and painting are fusing with one another. And that's really the school of Fontainebleau. It's because architecture, sculpture, painting are all imagined together by just one mind. And here it was the mind of Primaticcio. To top it all off, an intricately carved wooden ceiling sits above the 10 meter high room. This was an amendment by Henry II to the original plan by his father Francis I. Francis had commissioned an arched ceiling held up by pillars which were built and still remain in the gallery despite not being needed. Henry II's new architect changed the plans to include the more fashionable wooden ceiling. It was conceived by Francis Sibec de Carpi, an Italian cabinet maker that also worked for the So it's a wooden ceiling with these kind of coffers with the emblems of Henry II, the crescent, and the cipher of Henry II with the H. And you see all the work of gilding, of working in the wood that is really typical of these ceilings of the Renaissance. In 1589, the House of Bourbon became the new royal dynasty in France. Henry IV was the first Bourbon ruler and continued the elaborate additions to Fontainebleau that had been started by Francis I over 60 years beforehand. The differences between Henry's and Francis I's palaces can be seen from the oval courtyard. On the north side, the two large periods of construction of the courtyard in a certain way, with at the end, on the pavilion, the chimneys on which we see the H of Henry IV, and on this side, on the other hand, we find the F of Francis I. The artistic traditions begun in Fontainebleau under Francis and then continued under Henry IV, who elaborates and increases the size of the building. And architects like André de Circel, who come in and produce this amazing staircase, this double horseshoe staircase in front of the building. King Henry IV's renovations at Fontainebleau extended beyond just bricks and mortar. He cultivated the medieval parks surrounding the palace and created three gardens within the 130-acre grounds. Today, Arnaud Amelot is in charge of them. These gardens really symbolize the belief in French society at the time of the importance of regularity. That's what they believed. If you can tame and civilize the garden, then you can tame and civilize everything and you can build an empire. And that's what these gardens are so symbolic of. The Roman goddess of the hunt, Diana, features heavily in the gardens and the palace itself. Finally, Fontainebleau was a very popular hunting ground for all the sovereigns who succeeded each other throughout the centuries. Here we see this Diana, Diana à la Biche, which is a bronze sculpture. This is not the original. The original was placed inside the Gallery des Serres, because it is a fragile sculpture that was protected inside, among other bronze sculptures dating back to the Renaissance. King Henry also added a number of artificial bodies of water to the gardens, including the carp pond, the cascades, and the 1,200-metre-long Grand Canal. Commissioned in 1610, the canal was one of the first created in France, and certainly the biggest at the time. The excavation of the man-made channel called for some engineering expertise. The originality of the Grand Canal is that it was excavated and built on digs. This is also the originality of the Grand Canal. We carried out considerable landfilling work. We redesigned the terrain to recover the soil, the clay, to create the watertightness of the canal, and to build the digs The vast canal was fed by water diverted from both the carp pond and the River Seine, four kilometres northeast of Fontainebleau. The king and one of his courtiers had a wager on how successful the irrigation would be. They wanted to know how many days it would take to fill the Grand Canal again. The Maréchal de Bassonpierre said it would take two days, while King Henry IV said it would take much longer. In fact, Henry IV was right. In reality, it would take many days to fill the water with the Grand Canal, because it represents about 140,000 cubic metres of water. It's a huge scale. The king was right about his courtier. 164 years after the death of Henry IV, his five-time great-grandson, Louis XVI, became King of France in 1774. Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, would escape from the Palace of Versailles near Paris to Fontainebleau every autumn, just in time for the hunting season. Marie Antoinette is very fond of Fontainebleau, because it is a residence in the middle of nature, where she is probably a little freer than in Versailles. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette did relatively important work in Fontainebleau, and several rooms today present a decor that was made for Queen Marie Antoinette. Some of the most opulent rooms at Fontainebleau were decorated specifically for the Queen. She brought exoticism into Fontainebleau. Marie Antoinette's rooms in Fontainebleau were absolutely amazing. And to Louis and Marie Antoinette, they were just doing everything exactly the same as all the monarchs before her had done. You make Fontainebleau into this beautiful palace. And we delivered a magnificent bed made of sculpted and gilded wood for Queen Marie Antoinette in 1787. But Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's last stay at Fontainebleau was a year earlier. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette never returned to Fontainebleau after 1786. Their subjects were turning against them. By this point, with the growth of revolutionary feeling, with the growth of republican feeling, it seems too much when you have a country which is struggling for money to start a revolution. To spend all this money on Versailles, to spend all this money on Fontainebleau, for the Queen to build these huge rooms, to have fun with all her friends, well now, what once had seemed like great patronage, like a great symbol, what once had seemed like the king showing his love for France, now seemed like selfishness, now seemed like spending the country's money. And so, although a lot of the focus about excess and extravagance was focused on Versailles, there was also criticism of Marie Antoinette's rooms in Fontainebleau, about how much she'd spent and about how divorced, really, she was from the reality of ordinary French people. During the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799, a young man from Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Paris to help topple the monarchy. Christophe Bayer has been writing books about one of history's greatest military leaders for over a decade. And here, because he never lost a minute, it so happens that during a sea trip from Toulon to Corsica, he had a few hours to lose. To lose? What am I saying? Nothing in the world, Bonaparte had lost, was but a minute. He wandered around the walls, he analysed the layout of the points, he observed the heights, and in his head, he made the ideal plan for a siege. Arriving several years later in Toulon, he said, this is where the cannon must be placed. The point was taken, the cannons blew straight into the English fleet, the English left the Rade, abandoned their royalist allies, who were massacred, the young Bonaparte, at the same time as the revolutionary armies in Toulon, entered history. The palace had been ransacked during the revolution, so before Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France in December 1804, he began renovating Fontainebleau. In 1804, to receive the Pope who came for his coronation, Napoleon decided that the castle had to be renovated. So they brought a lot of furniture from Paris or other residences, which were intended to renovate the residence. And little by little, the castle was repaired, renovated, embellished, and from time to time inhabited by the Emperor and his court. Napoleon was a military man who had no desire for wonderful food, or beautiful art, or beautiful wall hangings, or lovely sculptures. He really didn't like them, but he used them as a way of bolstering his power, of intimidating foreign visitors, as a way of intimidating the French, as a way of saying, I am the richest. Even to this day, the majority of the furniture at Fontainebleau dates back to Napoleon's residence at the palace during the early 19th century. And this unparalleled furniture, which makes Fontainebleau the great conservatory in the world of the Empire style, this unparalleled furniture, you can see it here, in the throne room, the only one existing in France and in Europe, dating from the Empire. This throne is made up of a chair, of a rope topped with a Roman eagle, stepping on, tightening, a scythe. And the scythe, what is it? It is the lightning, fulgur in Latin, which is struck by Jupiter to crush his enemies and to defeat the Titans who would dare to stand against him. Despite being a great man of the people, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte enjoyed playing the role of king at Fontainebleau. Napoleon was the revolutionary hero, the republican hero, the great army hero, and yet, when he became emperor, everything was excess and gold and red and bling. He said, all you have to do to fool people is throw gold dust in their eyes. And Fontainebleau was a way in which he threw gold dust into the eyes of ambassadors, of ministers, of the army. By 1813, Napoleon had conquered most of Europe, but the allied coalition of Prussia, Austria and Russia were fighting back. After defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, they invaded France and conquered Paris in the spring of 1814. It was the end of the road for the emperor. And then, a few days later, on April 20th, he left for the island of Elbe and he crossed the Grand Court of the castle and said his farewells to the guard, who was really his military entourage. At that moment, he gave a very memorable speech to his guard. Soldiers of my old guard, I bid you farewell. For 20 years, on the roads of Europe, I have found you responding to honour and glory. We could have continued the struggle, if it had been the civil war. Farewell, I am leaving to write our history. It was incredibly emotional because he'd fought tooth and nail to get that throne and he'd fought tooth and nail to hold on to it and you see the moment in which he's reduced in Fontainebleau, in which he becomes no longer the emperor, no longer the great military campaigner who no one thought could lose anything. He becomes just a man. In February 1815, Napoleon escaped his exile on Elbe and seized power of France once more. But it was fleeting. He was defeated for a second and final time at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. He took the lead, crossed the borders of present-day Belgium, fought bravely against an alcoholic and tenacious Englishman. Wellington was unable to bend. It was Blücher who saved the day. Napoleon was swept away. He would never return to Fontainebleau. He asked the reckless for hospitality in England. England, as a gesture of hospitality, reserved a rock for him, beaten by the winds and storms, at the bottom of the South Atlantic. While imprisoned on the island of St Helena, Napoleon still had his favourite residence on his mind. And he thinks of his dear Fontainebleau, where he spent more than 170 days, which is huge for someone who ran across Europe, and he will give this marvellous definition. After the defeat of Napoleon, the French monarchy was restored. In 1830, King Louis-Philippe, the fifth cousin of Louis XVI, resided at Fontainebleau. Like so many of his predecessors, the king added a modern innovation to the Renaissance wing of the palace for his sister, Madame Adelaide. This is the chaise volante of Madame Adelaide, the flying chair. It's the precursor of an elevator, and it was used by Madame Adelaide, the sister of King Louis-Philippe, who lived very often in Fontainebleau. She was living in the petit appartement, downstairs, and as she had a very fragile condition, she needed an elevator to come more often to see her brother, who lived upstairs in the castle. So Madame Adelaide, the king's sister, would enter her elevator this way, through this little balustrade. A chair would be placed on this platform, then you would close it like this, and then, downstairs, people would use the crank and the wheel to take her downstairs. We're used to, in modern elevators, an electric motor powering an elevator fast up and down a shaft. This elevator is operated by hand, a servant or servants cranking it. It would have moved very slowly up and down, with the accompanying noises and creaks and groans. So Madame Adelaide was put on her chair, upstairs, and taken down through, you see these cables, to access her appartements that are at the first level of the castle. And you can see here, the wheel, with the crank mechanism that was manually activated by two people that were responsible for lifting up and down the princess. The 19th century elevator used technology that can be linked back to the ancient Mesopotamians. So at the time, the technology would have been pretty basic. They would have been using a pulley system. And pulley systems have been in existence for thousands of years. In simple form, you've got a wheel, you've got a rope that's wrapped around it, and then you use a winch system to either wrap the rope around the pulley or to unravel it, which then allows the platform itself to move up and down. Here, it's really the arrival of modernity in a Renaissance world. So even though it is a very basic, simple form of engineering, for me, it embodies what engineering is about, which is making people's lives easier and better. In 1848, the French monarchy fell again, with the country electing Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis-Napoleon, as president. By 1852, he had declared himself Emperor Napoleon III and, like his uncle, took ownership of Fontainebleau. They regularly come to Fontainebleau and do relatively important work there. They, in particular, build and furnish a new theatre in the castle, which still exists, which has just been restored, and which is a theatre of about 420 seats, which was built between 1852 and 1855 and which was inaugurated in 1857. The theatre was designed by French architect Hector Lefuel, who converted part of an 18th-century wing at Fontainebleau into a private auditorium for the emperor and his entourage. Indeed, this division of the theatre room into several levels, with the first level being the ground floor, which is rather reserved for officers, so for people wearing military uniforms, then the imperial lounge, the place for the guests, which can be found on a second gallery. It's a miniature opera house, with all the features of a great opera house, but scaled down. It's horseshoe-shaped, which was good for acoustics, but most importantly, good for lines of sight. It was lit by candles. Although it could have been lit by gas this era, it seems to have been deliberately old-fashioned. All the audience members, who were guests of the emperor, were seated on a comfortable cushioned chair, upholstered in luxurious silk. But even though the entire theatre appears to be garnished with expensive adornments, the stunning architecture is mainly a façade. It's directly on the plaster that we apply the decor to the handkerchief, or a decor that is made by moulding, which is what we call stoneboard. It's a technique that allows you to imitate the sculpture, but at the same time to make infinitely reproducible adornments, which are then gilded, and simply put in place by nailing them. Despite creating the lavish-looking theatre, the emperor rarely used it. But the Second Empire only lasted for 18 years. In 1870, Napoleon III was captured during the Franco-Prussian War, and France declared itself a republic once more. Château de Fontainebleau has been open to the public as a museum since 1927. Beloved by kings and emperors, half a million visitors per year come to explore the 1,500 rooms and immerse themselves in the art. Château de Fontainebleau is an ancient royal and imperial residence that has been inhabited by sovereigns, kings and emperors since the Middle Ages, and has preserved traces of its architecture, its decor and its furnishings. Château de Fontainebleau can be considered as a kind of summary of the history of France from the Medieval period to the 19th or 20th century. Napoleon called Fontainebleau the true home of kings, and I think it is that special. It's beautiful, it's amazing. You see all of French history in one, but you also see the rise and fall of kings, how fragile a monarchy can be.