Château de Madrid

The Château de Madrid in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, was built for the French royal court in the first half of the sixteenth century, during the Renaissance. Erected at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, it served as a royal suburban residence and became one of the principal Parisian palaces of its era, hosting members of the Valois and Bourbon dynasties and taking part in events that shaped late sixteenth-century French politics.

Work on the house began after an order from King Francis I, with construction started between 1527 and 1529. Building continued over several decades and the complex was finished under King Henry II, with completion dates reported around 1552 in some accounts and between 1568 and 1570 in a French account. The project began under Italian craftsmen and later passed to French masters, with management of the works changing in the middle of the century and again at the end of the 1550s.

In the later sixteenth century the palace was a favored Paris residence of King Charles IX and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The château figured in the political atmosphere that immediately preceded the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of summer 1572, an episode of mass violence that deeply affected French religious and political life. In the early seventeenth century Marguerite de Valois lived there after her return to favor, before August 1605, and King Louis XIII used the house during the 1610s. King Louis XIV did not visit the residence, and after Versailles became the royal seat the palace ceased to play a role in national politics.

During the mid-seventeenth century the site acquired a factory producing silk stockings, with foundation dates given as either 1656 or 1666, and the enterprise employed 79 journeymen by 1672. In the years of the Regency, a daughter of the Regent, Marie Louise Élisabeth d’Orléans, is recorded as having lived at the property. By the late eighteenth century the château had fallen into decay. An arrêt du Conseil signed by King Louis XVI in 1787 ordered sale for demolition. The property was assigned to demolition contractors on 27 March 1792, though some accounts give that adjudication as 27 March 1793. The purchaser, named Leroy, removed woodwork, lead and enamelled terracotta panels but did not complete clearance, and he relisted the estate for sale on 27 July 1792 without finding a buyer.

Under the Restoration the estate was divided into parcels and the building disappeared progressively from the landscape. Subsequent uses on the former grounds included a clinic and a stud farm. A restaurant erected in the area of the former service buildings was rebuilt in 1909 in a neo-Renaissance style and that structure was later converted into housing in the 1950s.