Aristocratic Decor, Before Heads Rolled, in a New Paris Museum

Hôtel de la Marine shows high style à la Louis and Marie, plus a visit to a Reign of Terror mass grave

T he new Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde in Paris was never a hotel, though it was originally a hot spot for the in-the-know among French aristocrats and elites. Now, it’s still not well known, but even country bumpkins from Vermont can — and should — experience the luxe lifestyle of Paris A-listers in the 1770s and 1780s, before “A” stood for “axe” and many a chapeau went missing a head.

The Marine isn’t a house museum, though people lived there in splendor from 1774 to around 1792. Rather, it housed the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, or the king’s furniture depository. The French kings had lots of palaces. Unlike American presidents, thank God, the French royals were seen as makers and arbiters of the best taste in home décor at a time when the rich considered themselves on display 24/7. Not every Pépé de Bière en Pac de Six could visit.

The Marine is now France’s newest decorative-arts museum, focusing on the art of living high off the hog during the glory days of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. It opened at the end of 2021 after a renovation involving the top museums and curators in France. It’s the zenith of visitor accessibility, too. Don’t expect to savor oysters from the Sèvres dinner settings, and you can’t pull the embroidered tapestry bells to call the servants. Elegant cord barriers and discreet guards keep the hoi polloi at bay but, honestly, the place is so perfectly done that no one will want to break the spell. We’re livin’ la vie exquise.

The Garde-Meuble was a decorative-arts depository as palace furnishings came and went, but it was also a design center that the rich and their decorators could visit for ideas. It was an exhibition space on the art of living. The French Crown Jewels were there, some on display, as well as other collections accumulated by the kings over the years. The intendant, or superintendent, of the Garde-Meuble lived there in an apartment fit for a Louis or François.

In 1789, during the early days of the French Revolution, the French navy’s administrative headquarters left Versailles for Paris, occupying a few rooms at the Garde-Meuble. By 1794, riffraff had picked the place clean right down to the gold and silver threads of the tapestries. The navy took the whole palace-size complex, occupying it until 2015, hence the name “Hôtel de la Marine.”

The Marine building itself was purpose-designed and built in the 1760s by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the king’s primary architect and a master of monumental expressions of majesty and power. The Place de la Concorde and, down the road, the Louvre were among the new royal developments in Paris, with the Garde-Meuble having a place of pride as a temple to royal taste. Even editing out the much-later Eiffel Tower, the view from the Marine balcony across official Paris impresses. Inside, a grand staircase with gilded moldings leads to the main apartments and halls.

In the mid 1790s, the French navy inherited a carcass of a building. Its eyes and dreams on the high seas, the navy treated the place with benign neglect.

Stratigraphic analysis uncovered about 80 percent of the original wall decor. Royal archives weren’t trashed during the revolutionary mayhem, though everything that was portable, down to the 1780s door handles, had disappeared. Replica tapestries and draperies were located in French museum collections. Where originals couldn’t be found, new ones were woven. There’s an acre of hand-painted silk on the walls. This had to be newly fabricated. During the renovation, there was not an unemployed gilder to be found in Paris.

Today’s visitors self-tour and need the audio tours. I hate audio tours since they’re usually packed with “lookey-see, there’s a bumble bee” prattle but the Marine has no labels. It’s designed for specialists, and I had a guidebook for its perfect examples of high-end furniture, textiles, and fireplaces, but it’s a lifestyle museum.

Actors voice Pierre Élisabeth de Fontanieu (1730–1784) and Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville-d’Avray (1732–1792), the two Garde-Meuble intendants. It’s annoying at first, but I rose above it. The disembodied voices provide good information on how the indoor plumbing worked — the place had functioning bathrooms — and the wonders of the mechanical dumbwaiter built into the dining-room buffet. Servants didn’t hover. They had ears and were notorious gossips and sometimes spies. Systems kept them as invisible as possible.

The audio guide is equipped with GPS, so I moved from room to room. Visitors see the intendant offices — they were working administrators and chief curators of the king’s furnishings — and into their personal apartments. After Fontanieu died, Thierry de Ville-d’Avray redid the intendant’s quarters to his own fit-for-a-king tastes, which made room for Louis XV’s personal desk, which he grabbed from storage. The MFA in Boston owns a chunk of his bedroom furniture, so the Marine was able to reconstitute it through period replicas from French collections. The painted silk wall coverings in the dining room display 139 different birds. The dinner service on the dining-room table is from 1792 and one of the last things to come to the Garde-Meuble.

It’s all a feast. Fireplaces in rare marble are enriched with gilded and silver-bronze details. Curtain tassels are sculptures in textile. Emblazoning the corner salon — a room for conversations and board games — are ceiling-to-floor tapestries depicting bulls, a camel, and tropics. Madame Thierry de Ville-d’Avray’s bedroom is done in shades of green. As in a forest, with many variations of green, none clash. All greens go together. Poppies, emblems of sleep, and rooster designs, signs of waking, are aplenty.

Fontanieu installed what’s called the Cabinet des Glaces, a small room next to his bedroom, “dedicated to his libertine activities,” I heard. There’s a day bed, mirrored walls and ceilings, and a lot of prancing Venuses, once buck-naked, painted on the mirrors. At some point, artists gave the goddess a modesty toga. In 1844, King Louie-Philippe had the mirrors installed in a room next to his bathroom in at the Château de Fontainebleau. Now, they’re back at the Marine.

Two massive, mirrored reception salons installed by the French navy in the 1840s are the only places for didactics. Videos are shown on the most elegant monitors I’ve ever seen exploring topics such as the abolition of slavery in France and feats of the navy. The Marine also is the home of galleries displaying part of the art collection of a Qatari sheikh. It’s a “windows on the world” collection covering multiple civilizations. The art, called the Al Thani Collection, has a 20-year lease on its galleries.

I had no complaints about my visit. On my last trip to Paris, I wrote about the Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris, a house museum dedicated to the late-19th century and owned and run by the Louvre. The furniture, silver, and textiles are lovely, but I commented on the proliferation of barriers, rolled-up carpets, and intrusive, glaring plexiglass cases. The curators used every device except trenches to keep visitors from a close look at the art except. The Marine struck the perfect note between access and security.

One day a peacock, the next day, a feather duster.

Thierry de Ville-d’Avray had barely finished redecorating the Garde-Meuble when the Ancien Régime stumbled into oblivion. On July 13, 1789, a mob on its way to the Bastille raided the Garde-Meuble’s collection of antique weapons. In 1793, Marie Antoinette’s death certificate was signed in what had been the intendant’s library. Both she and her husband, Louis XVI, lost their heads on what was then called the Place de la Révolution, in clear view from the Marine balcony. Close to the king, Thierry de Ville-d’Avray was arrested in 1792. Weeks later, he died with hundreds of others in the Abbaye prison massacre. Not long afterward, thieves stole the French Crown Jewels. The Reign of Terror was about to begin.

This leads me to a patch of open space in the 12th Arrondissement called Picpus. I visited after my time at the Hôtel de la Marine. Friends had told me about it. I never thought it would be a coda for my time among sumptuous furniture, porcelain, and hand-painted silk.

There, at Picpus, 1,306 guillotined bodies were buried in mass graves between June 14 and July 27, in 1794, each of the dead convicted of petty, contrived, or utterly concocted charges. An accelerated program of executions had led to an unusual case of NIMBYism and the lead guillotine’s placement on what was then the edge of Paris, to what was called the Place du Trône-Renversé, or Square of the Overturned Throne.

Each night, carts carried cadavers to trenches dug in the kitchen garden of a requisitioned convent called Picpus, after the French word for fleabite. In medieval times, monks based there had developed a salve to relieve bug-related itches.

Picpus is a five-acre site and one of only two private cemeteries in Paris. It’s behind walls in a residential neighborhood. There’s a small chapel in the back of which is open lawn and an allée of trees superintended by a flock of chickens.

The mass graves are now a grassy field. A freestanding stone archway is at its edge, big enough for only one person to pass. It creates a sense of ceremony — a somber one — as one enters to stand on graves of men and women age 16 to 85, murdered in a frenzy and in what we’d today call lawfare at its worst. The psychotic and radical Robespierre led the charge. The cascade of executions and bodies stopped only when he lost his head on July 27, his terrified cronies deciding better him than they.

There’s a handful of modest plaques, but otherwise it’s a simple, minimally landscaped space. Sixteen Discalced — i.e., shoeless — Carmelite nuns went to the guillotine singing the Marian home “Salve Regina.” Aristocrats, clerics, shopkeepers, housewives, artisans, and servants died. The first husband of soon-to-be Empress Josephine got the axe. The Marquis de Lafayette’s wife lost her grandmother, mother, and sister in the purge, each convicted of conspiracy. She and her husband, a hero of the American Revolution, are buried in proper graves steps away. They’ve got a hefty monument bedecked with an American flag. Their graves were filled with earth from Bunker Hill.

The names of the guillotined cover the walls of the nearby chapel. Picpus is still an active cemetery, though only for descendants of the dead from those weeks in 1794. The old square where the guillotine operated overtime has a monument, but it’s surrounded by shops and restaurants and zooming cars.

Picpus is the quiet, unadorned place to go to reflect on men turned evil by ideology, self-regard, and a lust for power.