The Romans were the first European travellers, building beautiful villas and palaces throughout their vast empire. These villas inspired Renaissance princes to build neo-classical villas, many of which later became private hotels. In the modern era, travel in Europe became popular with the advent of the Grand Tour. Flourishing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this phenomenon was popular among the young British elite, who often spent several years in Europe learning about language, architecture, geography and culture, with a great deal of time spent in more frivolous pursuits such as extensive drinking, gambling and intimate encounters. For accommodation in major cities they would rent apartments, but in smaller towns they made do with inns that were often harsh and dirty. Slowly, history shaped the humble inn into the gracious and grand hotels of Europe today.

Grand French hotels

Timeless luxury

France immediately conjures up images of beautiful historic buildings, art, fine food, elegant chateaux, cosy inns, refined manors and grand hotels. With its seductive lifestyle, France (and especially Paris) was the number one destination of the English gentry. As the road network improved tourists spent their leisure time on the coasts of Normandy, Brittany and the Mediterranean to escape the dreary winters.

Above: Le Moulin Rouge (1930) by Lucien Genin.

Paris is yearning

City of Love! City of Light! Paris awakens the hidden romantic in a traveller like no other city. A metropolis of grand boulevards and sublime architecture. Images of smoky cafes, wild dance halls, awesome monuments, superb cuisine, chic women and truly great hotels. In many ways Paris is a living film set, with the major roles played by some of the world’s most beautiful and influential people. Millions of visitors have relished their walk-on parts.

Paris has been a city for lovers of art and architecture, the pleasures of the table – and of the night! The British had been visiting Paris and Geneva on their way over the Alps to Italy and other parts of the sun-drenched Mediterranean long before the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars many would-be tourists stayed at home, but when the conflict ended there was a renewed influx of travellers, so much so that Byron himself was complaining of the increasing number of British tourists in Europe. Ironically, many were using his own travel writings and his epic poem, Childe Harold: a Pilgrimage, as their guides.

Above: The illuminated facade of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre – one of many buildings adding to the ambience of the ‘city of light.’

Across the seas

For Britons, the first leg of the journey was not exactly fun. “The sea runs high,”complained Charles Dickens in 1869, “we ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless passengers lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they were sorted out for the laundress…a mislaid headache somewhere in my stomach. It was a relief to disembark, if confronting, as local youths hounded the travellers for custom shouting the names of the various inns, including Le Meurice.”

In 1771 local postmaster, Charles-Augustin Meurice established the original Le Meurice – a Calais coach inn. Guests rested briefly there before a coach took them on to Paris. Since this journey could take 36 hours, Charles-Augustin built a second establishment in Paris to cater for the exhausted arrivals. Louis-Augustin took over the management after his father died, with Le Meurice moving to several locations in Paris before settling into a stunning private palace built in the Louis-XVIII style at 228 Rue de Rivoli (where it can be found today) facing the Tuileries Gardens between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre Museum.

So many Britons preferred Le Meurice that it became known as ‘the City of London’ – even Queen Victoria stayed there in 1855. The Le Meurice of this era offered lavish entertainment, with some dinners lasting from 8pm to the next morning.

Baron Haussmann’s makeover

The peace after Bonaparte’s defeat proved temporary, but more settled times came with the ascendancy in 1852 of Bonaparte’s nephew, Emperor Napoleon III. During his eighteen-year reign, the Second Empire, Paris was made new courtesy of civic planner Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann. He transformed the layout of Paris, replacing medieval slums with magnificent avenues, opening up public spaces and installing underground water and sewage systems.

Europe’s first grand hotel

Napoleon III wanted the world to celebrate his achievements, so ‘grand’ hotels were commissioned in time for the two Paris International Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867. Haussmann engaged Emile and Isaac Péreire to build a luxurious new hotel to cater for visitors of quality and influence. Designed by Alfred Armand, the Grand Hôtel du Louvre opened in 1855, just ahead of the Exhibition. With 700 deluxe suites, it was twice the size of any hotel in England and the largest in Europe.

Located on the Place du Palais Royal, this original Grand Hôtel du Louvre employed 1,250 staff, including guides and interpreters; it offered an information desk, a post office, a telegraph room and an exchange bureau.

In 1877 the owners of the department store next door, the Galleries du Louvre, bought the hotel and relocated to the other side of the square on Place André Malraux, where it can still be found today. Its many distinguished guests have included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who featured the hotel in several of his Sherlock Holmes stories. The impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro created some of his finest Paris landscapes from the window of his room.

Total grandeur

Napoleon III called for an even grander hotel on a site facing the acclaimed Paris Opera House designed by Charles Garnier. Though still lovely to this day, the Grand Hôtel du Louvre turned out to be a mere practice-run for the next project. Armand was again commissioned (with Rohault de Fleury) to design for the Péreire brothers.

The Grand Hotel (now the InterContinental Le Grand) opened in 1862 and embodied all that the Second Empire stood for in terms of French cultural and technological advancement. Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife, found the interiors so lavish that she told Emile Péreire at the opening that his new hotel felt “absolutely like home: I feel like I am at Compeigne or Fontainebleau.” Offenbach himself conducted the orchestra and no less a diva than Adelina Patti paid triumphant homage.

For the remainder of the nineteenth century, many of the world’s great and famous stayed at the Grand. It was from there in 1869 that JG Bennett, founder of the New York Herald Tribune, sent Stanley to Africa in search of Doctor Livingstone. In 1896, Sarah Bernhardt received press acclaim in the Salle des Fêtes, the hotel’s opulently decorated public room.

The hotel is well known for the iconic Cafe de la Paix, with its view of the Garnier Opera House, on whose terrace generations have sat and watched the world go by. After major renovations, the InterContinental Le Grand reopened in July 2006. The renovations were a great success, and the hotel is still as much a leading hotel in Paris as it was in 1862.

Empress Eugénie’s Paris hideaway

Napoleon III was overthrown in 1871 after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. He fled with Eugénie to live in England. Eugénie did, however, return to Paris every summer for over 20 years, staying at yet another new ‘grand’ hotel.

The Continental (1878), as it was originally known, was designed by Henri Blondel, who was famous for his lavish belle époque interiors, a style that was to dominate architecture in Europe until the outbreak of World War One. Now known as the Westin Paris, it remains one of the city’s most handsome hotels.

Below: At the Cafe de la Paix by Georges Croegaert, 1883.

Oscar Wilde’s Sad Demise

Empress Eugénie was not alone in losing access to all that had once been her exotic and privileged life. The notorious courtcase that saw Oscar Wilde imprisoned for two years for his controversial homosexual liaison with Lord Alfred Douglas left the great writer a broken man. By 1898, Wilde was wandering the streets of Paris under the false name of Sebastian Melmoth. He finally found refuge in the modest Hôtel d’Alsace on the aptly named Rue des Beaux Arts. Wilde’s final days amounted to battling bouts of hypochondria with genuine illness, occasional meetings with the few who would still speak to him, and afternoon sojourns in obscure cafes where untrustworthy youths might occasionally be roused into desultory repartee. Legend has it that Wilde died destitute, unloved and alone. But that is to allow history to neglect the kindheartedness of the patron of the Hôtel d’Alsace, Jean Dupoirier. Dupoirier paid for Wilde to recover his possessions from another hotel, overlooked the backlog orent amounting to hundreds of pounds, and saw to Wilde’s every need during his last, painful days. Of course, Wilde was to have the last word. At one point he complained that he was ‘dying above his means.’ Gazing helplessly up from his pillow, it is believed one of his last remarks concerned his favourite subject of ‘beauty.’ “Either this wallpaper goes,” Wilde supposedly complained, “or I go.” The wallpaper won. Today, those same premises house one of the most chic boutique establishments on the Left Bank – L’Hôtel. Discreet and luxurious, it is a favoured haunt of today’s avant-garde.

Below: A poster for the film L’Arroseur Arrose by the Lumiere brothers. In 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumiere invented the cinematographe, a machine that combined the functions of a camera and a projector, thereby allowing film to be projected on a screen. In the same year, they gave a demonstration of celluloid cinematograph film at the Hotel Scribe in Paris. This, the first public screening of a motion picture at which admisson was charged, is regarded as the birth of cinema.

Below: Auguste (left) and Louis Jean Lumiere in their laboratory at Lyon, France.

Introducing Fritz Gubler’s Great, Grand & Famous Hotels, presented by YoungHotelier.com

This book contains stories about great, grand and famous hotels sourced from history, legend and the occasional snippet of gossip. Take a peek inside and discover a treasure trove of famous or forgotten anecdotes. See the dramas unfold in lobbies, dining rooms, bars and ballrooms, or behind the closed doors of guest rooms and Presidential Suites. Marvel at those who made these hotels what they are, remember the great, grand and famous celebrity guests and meet the new breed of visionaries who are creating the great hotels of the future. Great, Grand & Famous Hotels, is a book for lovers of remarkable hotels.

Take a sneak preview of the book here (as an ebook): Great, Grand & Famous Hotels >>