Elysee Palace

The Elysee Palace stands in central Paris, built in 1722 for Louis Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Count of Evreux, to a design in the fashionable French Rococo style of Parisian aristocratic townhouses of the period. The building passed through a succession of notable owners over the following century, including Madame de Pompadour and, briefly, Napoleon Bonaparte, who signed his second abdication there in 1815, before the French state acquired it and it became the official residence of the President of the French Republic in 1848. Its layout follows the classic entre cour et jardin arrangement common to grand eighteenth-century Parisian townhouses, set back from the street behind a formal courtyard with private gardens extending behind the main building. The palace has been substantially renovated and adapted for state functions over the nearly two centuries it has served as the seat of French presidential power, while retaining much of its original eighteenth-century architectural character.