Hello and bonjour!
It is October 2020
and I’m in the gardens of the Chateau de Saint Cloud,
a huge royal palace on the western edge of Paris.
It was famously once home to Marie Antoinette,
it’s where Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of France in 1804,
and in July 1870,
this is where Napoleon III signed the declaration of war against Prussia.
And I don’t want to spoil the end of the story but erm...
the chateau’s not here any more.
So what happened to it?
How does a place with so much history just disappear?
Is it possible that there was an absolutely enormous cock-up?
This is the story of how Paris lost a chateau.
This is the Gare Saint Lazare,
one of the biggest and busiest railway stations in Paris,
and today we’ve come here to do something that a lot of tourists do
when they want to go and see a chateau –
we’re going to catch a local train going to Versailles.
But once we’re on the train,
we’re going to do something that a lot of tourists don’t do,
and get off 5 stops early at Saint Cloud.
And side note
yes I know that says Saint Cloud,
bit of a weird name for a saint,
but apparently he was a real person
and not just a particularly holy cumulonimbus.
Saint-Cloud is a historically wealthy neighbourhood
that stands on a low ridge of hills to the west of Paris,
giving residents the kind of views that people are willing to pay a bit of cash for.
This was already true back in the 1500s when the Gondi banking family,
who had links to Florence and the Medicis and all that lot,
acquired a house here and started to expand it into a full-on palace.
And over the decades it goes through various owners and expansions and owners and expansions
until one day Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France,
decides that she rather likes the look of it.
So she pops back to Versailles,
finds her husband King Louis XVI and says:
Louis, you know we've now got two kids?
They're only going to get bigger
and they're going to need more space...
Go on, buy us this palace?
The purchase of Saint Cloud was one of the big reasons why Marie-Antoinette became unpopular
with the French people.
First of all it was an awful lot of public money for the Queen to be spending on herself.
And secondly, traditionalists (of which there were a lot in those days)
really didn’t like the idea of a strong independent Queen with her own private residence
away from the King;
that gave rise to various rumours.
The resentment built up,
and eventually this started the French Revolution.
(And ended Marie-Antoinette.)
Anyway a few years later when Napoleon comes to power
he makes Saint-Cloud his main residence
and it was here that he was proclaimed Emperor of France in 1804.
Which kind of starts a tradition
because skip forward to 1852
and his nephew Louis, Napoleon III, does the same thing.
Louis Napoleon then goes about trying to reassert French influence in Europe and beyond.
He famously rebuilds Paris with the help of Baron Haussman,
he improves French banking, agriculture and railways,
wins a couple of wars, and gains some territory.
Things are looking up for France!
What could possibly go wrong?
Over in Berlin, the capital of Prussia,
a man called Otto von Bismarck has had an idea.
Now then, Prussia’s great and all that,
but how about we join up with all the other German states
and make one big German country?
We could call it…
Germany!
But if Bismarck was going to fulfil his ambitions of ruling a united German superstate,
he was going to need to convince southern German states like Bavaria,
who if anything felt closer to catholic Austria than they did to protestant Prussia.
He also knew that France was strongly opposed to any of idea of a powerful and united Germany.
If only he could engineer some kind of major event that would solve both those problems...
So in July 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia,
right here at the Chateau de Saint Cloud.
And in case you haven’t worked it out yet,
it doesn’t go well for him.
To be fair if you look at what Napoleon said at the time,
it seems like he knew this was a bad idea,
but the French public demanded it.
They’d been whipped into a French nationalist frenzy by the Prussian provocations
and when nationalism takes the place of reason,
countries tend to make silly decisions.
By August the French Army,
which as a reminder was trying to invade Prussia,
is already being driven back into France by a Prussian Army that’s now supported by
combined German forces,
and on the 2nd of September the French are spanked at the Battle of Sedan,
Napoleon himself is captured and imprisoned,
surrenders and abdicates,
and the French empire collapses.
Seriously - if you’ve ever made a decision that backfired on you,
this story will make you feel better about yourself.
Because if you thought that was bad,
the Prussians are now free to stroll up to Paris,
surround it,
and put the city under siege.
And with the food supply cut off,
Parisian restaurants have to start serving things they find in the city
like horse, rat, zoo animals and family pets.
And if you thought that was bad,
by October the Prussians have taken up residence here at Saint Cloud,
Napoleon’s own house (!)
and they’ve started taking pot-shots at Parisian defences from the hills.
And if you thought THAT was bad...
when the French fought back,
a stray French shell hits the emperor’s bedroom,
and starts a fire.
The Prussians, who arguably could have tried to put it out,
can’t really be bothered, and in the end
the whole chateau goes up in flames.
All this within 3 months.
Imagine by the end of January next year the Queen has destroyed Buckingham Palace,
or Angela Merkel has burned the Reichstag,
or Donald Trump is shelling the White Hou…
actually I probably shouldn’t joke about that one.
Meanwhile, in a final insult,
Bismarck rides the wave of national pride back in Germany
and unites the country under his rule,
and as a bonus he also takes a large chunk of eastern France with him.
While there is something slightly tragi-comic about just how ridiculously badly its story ended,
the chateau was a big loss, historically and culturally.
So does any of it still exist?
Well, the main building is reduced to just its foundations,
but some of the outbuildings did survive
and one of them is kind of a big deal in the world of measuring things.
This is the Pavillon de Breteuil,
which was badly damaged in the fighting
but in its battered state
it was given to the newly formed International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
They went on to renovate the building
and it was here that they developed the international standards
for the metre and the kilogram, among other things.
So right here technically I'm standing on international soil.
Probably the closest I'll get to travelling at the moment!
Unfortunately because of all the important sciencey stuff that they’re doing here,
it’s not open to the public.
But there is one final site here that I think is worth a little visit.
I've come to a little corner of the park where there is,
believe it or not,
some genuine railway history.
(Erm, yeah, somehow I've managed to shoehorn a disused railway even into this video)
But right here, between the bassin des trois bouillons up there
and the bassin des chiens down there
on this patch of grass,
this was the site of the Chemin de Fer du Prince Impérial
the Imperial Prince's Railway
and it was built by Napoleon III for the Imperial Prince,
his 3-year-old son,
and it was - as far as we know -
the world's first model train set.
And if that’s not the kind of vital historical information that you watch this channel for
I don’t know what is.
If you’d like to visit Saint Cloud,
it’s a 20-minute train ride from Saint Lazare
and an adult single ticket costs 3€65.
The royal park itself is then a 10-minute walk away
and it’s a public space so entry is completely free.
For those of you with accessibility issues
you’ll have seen there are quite a few hills and staircases
and while there are wheelchair ramps
they’re not always in the obvious location.
You will be able to see most of the site, and it is worth coming,
it’s just not as good as it could be.
Anyway thank you all for watching
and I’ll see you soon.