Page 153 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

9 Empress Eugénie’s Chinese
Museum at the Château

of Fontainebleau

An Unusual Décor in the
“House of the Ages” 1

Vincent Droguet

In the course of 2014, the Château of Fontainebleau was visited by over 500,000
French and foreign visitors. It is not always easy to know the actual motivations of
our visitors, but one can legitimately suppose that many are attracted by the grand
Renaissance decorations and the image of King Francis I. But above all, for many
tourists Fontainebleau remains the château of Napoleon I, the place where the
improvised farewell ceremony to his guard was held on April 20, 1814 in the court -
yard subsequently called the “farewell courtyard”, an event that has become a major
episode of national legend.
Very few visitors, on the other hand, are aware that Fontainebleau was used by
French monarchs until the end of the Second Empire and that Emperor Napoleon
III and Empress Eugénie left a strong mark on this residence that they particularly
2
liked. Between 1852 and 1868, the imperial court visited Fontainebleau quite
regularly in the summer months, for periods ranging from two weeks to two months.
Among the sites set up by the imperial couple to make these stays more pleasant are
the theatre in the Louis XV wing, the restoration of which was completed in 2014,
the emperor’s smoking room, but also a suite of rooms that would be called “the
Empress’s salons and Chinese Museum” because of the Oriental collections that
Eugénie had installed there.
The little history of Fontainebleau’s Chinese Museum is intimately linked to the
“grand” military and diplomatic history of the Second Empire. In effect, the decision
taken in 1861 to install new rooms on the ground floor of the Large Pavilion was
based largely on Empress Eugénie’s wish to be able to display the Oriental objects
that had come into her possession after the China campaign of 1860 and the recep -
tion of Siamese ambassadors in June 1861. To understand the rather unusual
3
presence of these objects at Fontainebleau, we have to go back a few years and leave
the forest of Fontainebleau for the environs of Peking.
Naturally, I will not review the detailed circumstances of the capture and looting
of the Yuanmingyuan at the beginning of October 1860. The French, under the
command of General Cousin-Montauban, entered the walls of the palace on the
morning of October 7. The following days were marked by war trophies and looting.