Le lit de Napoléon et de Louis XVIII à Saint-Cloud retrouvé

The recent identification in the reserve collections of the national monuments centre (Centre des monuments nationaux) of a gilded wooden bed of the Consulate period has offered the opportunity to look more closely at its history. The bed was probably made by the Jacob brothers in about 1799 for the Directors at the Luxembourg palace, with an identical bed which is held today in the bed chamber of the Emperor’s small apartments at the palace of Fontainebleau. The bed was installed, in 1802, in the Consul’s bed chamber at the palace of Saint-Cloud and remained in the apartments that open onto the Orangery when the Consul became the Emperor Napoleon 1. The bed was sent back to the state’s furniture repository, the Garde-Meuble, in 1815 but was brought out again in 1820, at Saint-Cloud, in order to compose a provisional bed chamber for the Comte d’Artois. The following year, this room became King Louis XVIII’s state reception bed chamber. This type of royal bedroom, not seen since the Revolution, was an unsuspected attempt by the restored Bourbon monarchy to re-establish the practice of state bedrooms of the Ancien Régime. But the function was too outdated at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the bedroom was transformed into a reception room from 1825. The bed was sent back to the Garde-Meuble and was then sold, probably during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was purchased by the Centre des Monuments nationaux in 1983.