Places, museums, monuments

A small island lost in the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean, St Helena was chosen by the British government as place to exile the deposed Emperor. “The island of St Helena is the ideal place to lock away such a character. In such a place, so far away, no scheming of any kind will […]

It was at Médan that Zola composed a large portion of Rougon-Macquart, natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. There he wrote, among others, Nana, Germinal and La Terre (The Earth).Acquired in 1878, thanks to the success of L'Assommoir, the Médan house permitted Zola to associate his name with a geographic […]

General Bonaparte married 'Josephine' on 9 March, 1796, in Paris at the Mairie of the 2nd arrondissement, in other words the Hôtel Mondragon, the present-day head office of the bank Paribas. And the salon where the ceremony took place has been preserved just as it was on that historic day.The Hôtel de Mondragon was built […]

Built in 1724 by Aubry, the hôtel de Brienne was bought in 1802 by Lucien Bonaparte who had it restored. It was Napoleon’s mother’s residence from 1806 to 1814. Its original decoration has been maintained in several rooms such as the Empire drawing-room and Letizia’s boudoir. Among the Empire collections, a few chairs of Marie […]

The Museo Napoleonico in Rome presents the collections of Count Giuseppe Primoli, the great-grandson of Joseph and of Lucien Bonaparte. Born in 1851 to Princess Charlotte Bonaparte and Count Primoli di Foglia, Giuseppe Primoli belonged to the Roman branch of the imperial family. He spent most of his youth in Paris, at Napoleon III's court […]

Honoré de Balzac lived in this house from 1840 to 1847. Of the eleven Parisian residences of the writer, it is the only one which exists today. This house is also a witness to that which made the village of Passy during the last century: a place of holiday for city dwellers yearning for the […]

The Navy Museum in Paris is one of the oldest and most prestigious collections of its type in the world. In 1678, Colbert commissioned the governors of the arsenals to have models made to a scale of 1/12 and 1/20of the ships of all five classes. Some of these models were sent to court, others […]

Bought and completed in 1790 by Mr. Lormier-Lagrave, this town mansion the Hôtel de Bourrienne was subsequently bequeathed to Lormier-Lagrave's daughter, Fortunée Hamelin, in 1792. Fortunée, a friend of Joséphine de Beauharnais, then commissioned Bélanger to decorate the house. However, heavily in debt, she was forced to sell it in 1801 to Louis Antoine Fauvelet […]

Elba is situated in the Tyrrhenian sea opposite Piombino from which it is separated by a canal a mere 10 miles long. This small island 14 miles long and 6 miles wide, is where Napoleon chose to retire when he abdicated for the first time. The Fontainebleau treaty granted him ownership and sovereignty of the […]

Of the property where Gustave Flaubert lived and worked from 1843 until his death, all that remains is this garden pavilion facing a factory-littered Rouen landscape. In the last century, however, Flaubert's house was situated in a particularly agreeable location, on a hillside overlooking the Seine, and a watercolour by Rochegrosse (on show in the […]