Ramboyu Palace

About

Château de Rambouillet begins in 1368, when Jean Bernier, adviser to Charles V, buys a manor and converts it into a fortified castle ringed by a moat. From the late fourteenth century, the Angennes family holds it for nearly three centuries, gradually turning it into a residence of pleasure. On 31 March 1547, François I, taken ill on a hunting trip and staying at Jacques d'Angennes's manor, dies inside the medieval tower still known today as the Tour François Ier. In the early eighteenth century, the comte de Toulouse, a natural son of Louis XIV, owns the château and puts architects Claude Desgots and Lassurance (Pierre Cailleteau) in charge of rebuilding it. His son, the duc de Penthièvre, commissions Hubert Robert from 1779 to lay out an English garden, within which architect Jean-Baptiste Paindebled builds the Chaumière aux coquillages, the shell cottage, between 1779 and 1781; its interior is lined with roughly 170,000 seashells. Louis XVI buys the château in 1783. In 1804 Napoleon takes possession and has nearly 40,000 trees planted across the grounds. On 2 August 1830, Charles X signs his abdication in the château's dining room. From 1896, beginning with Félix Faure, it serves as a summer hunting residence for presidents of the Republic, a role it holds until management passes to the Centre des monuments nationaux in 2009. From 15 to 17 November 1975, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing gathers the leaders of France, the United States, West Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom here for the first G6 summit, the meeting that leads to the founding of the G7 the following year. The château's historic gardens, classified a Jardin Remarquable, cover about 150 hectares, and the walled woodland of the wider national domain brings the full estate to close to 980 hectares.