On an early spring day the roofline of the Peninsula Paris looks much as it did on March 1st 1908, when Leonard Tauber’s Majestic Hotel opened its doors for the first time. The pink light of dawn plays across the masonry, giving it a golden glow and as the sun rises further a hint of silver begins to shimmer from the grey roof tiles. The Paris spring of 1908 was a time of optimism in Northern Europe. The Olympic Games were being held in London and the economy was recovering from the panic of 1907 that had cut the value of US stocks in half. A photograph from the same year captures the mood. A family stand on top of the Arc de Triomphe, the parents looking down Avenue Kléber toward the gleaming new Hotel Majestic. The future seems bright and the turrets on Tauber’s new rooftop have an air of confidence that suggests an era of prosperity was at hand.
The Majestic’s roof was one of Tauber’s most cherished projects. He had originally submitted plans for the construction of the Majestic on February 16 1906 and the detailed architectural drawings for his “hotel of hotels” reveal that he planned a complicated Mansard roof with three levels above the masonry line of the main structure.
The Mansard roof style had become an iconic part of the Parisian skyline during Haussmann’s renovation in the mid-19th century. The Mansard’s slope and decorative style was originally developed by the 16th century French architect Pierre Lescot and the finest examples of his work are to be found at the Lescot wing of the Palais de Louvre. Lescot’s innovation was popularised in France by Francois Mansart, a 17th century architect who made extensive use of the technique in his designs, giving rise to the term now used for the garret style roof, which is an adulteration of his name.
According to notes made by Tauber’s architect, Armand Sibien, the Mansard roof of the Peninsula Paris was inspired by Lescot’s work at the Louvre. This connection may explain why the Peninsula has more delicacy and elegance than most other examples of the style created by Haussmann, who “modernised” the grammar of Lescot’s and Mansart’s styles to create garrets with a more ponderous appearance. The curvature and decorative work at 19 Avenue Kléber is suggestive of an era of elegance and refinement, but Tauber’s desire to execute the roof in this way involved a fierce battle with the Parisian authorities.
The original plans for the Majestic caused consternation with officials from the outset. When Tauber filed his application with the prefect of the Seine he specified a building that would, once finished, be the largest on Avenue Kléber. He sought to build “a total area of 4649.39 square meters… standing in the front of Kléber Avenue, on a facade of 84.53m, on the left side of the rue Pauquet with a facade of 55.01metres, and at the end of rue La Pérouse with a facade of 84.53 metres”, as Tauber described his mammoth rectangle in a note to the Paris Marie on July 8th 1905.
The scale of Tauber’s monumental vision and the plans for its tall Mansard roof caused concern at the offices of the mayor and the Seine prefect. Both officials were concerned that Tauber’s building would condemn large portions of the surrounding streets to live in shadows for large portions of the day. Tauber had to issue repeated reassurances about the height at which the Majestic would top out.
“In every indentation of the roof for the hotel de voyageurs the establishment will have the same floor height and the same main lines of façade and the owners would follow the decision of the prefect of the Seine in case of disagreement,” Tauber wrote in a letter dated March 10th 1906. “We will not surpass the legal perimeter and we will follow the rules that the city of Paris has established when we construct the hotel.”
The city authorities were also concerned about the weight of Tauber’s hotel and its structural integrity – an issue that would come back to haunt The Peninsula’s renovation team. In 1906 Sibien was able to reassure them on this score, although he would not fare so well today. The architect had decided at an early stage to use a new technology in building the Majestic. François Hennebique had invented the technique of embedding metal bars into concrete to increase its tensile strength in 1879. The Belgian autodidact first coated iron beams in concrete to protect the ironwork from fire. Hennebique soon realised that his approach had enormous benefits in terms of improving the load bearing qualities of concrete. Thus was reinforced concrete born.
At the Majestic, Sibien used both aspects of Hennebique’s system, deploying reinforced concrete throughout the structure for tensile strength and coating metal load bearing beams in concrete as a fire retardant measure, an approach called the Hennebique Béton Armé system. The measures taken by Tauber and his builders reassured the city. Consequently the plans for the enormous garret that still surmounts the building were allowed to proceed.
Tauber insisted upon the Mansard structure so that the Majestic hotel could have a magnificent roof garden with views across the rooftops of Paris toward the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. In part this was a decision driven by Tauber’s passion for a new invention – the airplane.
France in the first decade of the 20th century was a city obsessed with flight and Paris was the epicentre of the nation’s new passion. Frenchmen made many of the most astonishing advances in early-20th century aviation. In the same month that the Majestic opened French aviator Léon Delagrange laid claim the world’s first passenger flight. His companion in the tiny biplane was Henri Farman, a painter, inventor, racing driver and aircraft designer who would make the first cross-country flight in Europe six months later, flying from Châlons to Reims in October, covering the 27 kilometres in 20 minutes.
Tauber watched Farman’s and Delagrange’s antics with delight, along with the test flights of Louis Blériot, who would become the first man to fly the English Channel in 1909. The founder of the Majestic envisioned that the roof garden of his grand voyageur hotel would become a grandstand for watching the birth of aviation, with decorative guests watching flights of derring-do by crack French aviators. An illustration in the Majestic’s brochure from 1910 shows precisely what Tauber had in mind. The roof terrace is awash in elegantly attired guests. In one corner a woman in picture hat and an Edwardian style dress and a man in a frock coat lean against the balustrade, their eyes fixed on a white biplane flying towards the distant peaks of Montmartre.
From the moment it opened the new Majestic hotel attracted an elegant crowd. One of the leading lights was Anatole France, who would be awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1921. Like other members of the city’s literary and cultural elite, France was drawn to the Majestic’s splendid public rooms, especially the grand terrace Kléber where travellers, socialites, artists and foreign royalty would gather for afternoon tea and early evening cocktails. France made sketches for his famous novels Les dieux ont soif and La Revolte des Anges at the Majestic and he was often seen there with his mistress, Léontine Lippmann, who is perhaps better known by her married name of Madame Arman de Caillavet.
Lippmann organised and hosted a fashionable literary salon, and was the basis for the character Madame Verdurin in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The salon met in an hôtel particulier at 12 Avenue Hoche and its members, including France, de Caillavet, Proust, Léon Blum and Raymond Poincaré (both would later be prime ministers of France with Poincaré also serving a term as president), Sarah Bernhardt, Lucien Guitry and Antoine Bourdelle would frequently adjourn to the Majestic to smoke and drink.
As the 20th century moved into its second decade the Majestic adopted a glamorous and stately routine. The day would begin with a dramatic burst of activity in the massive cuisine de l’hotel on the basement floor, where three ranks of stoves that stretched for almost the full length of the building would start to bake, boil and fry as breakfast orders streamed in from the restaurant above.
Staff in stiff white linen uniforms served guests who chose to eat in the Louis XVI style dining room where they could gaze on sculpted wooden panels featuring musical instruments, ribbons and grapevines. As they ate, they could read about Halley’s comet passing close to Earth, the first film release of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, starring Charles Ogle, the premiere in Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, the abolition of slavery in China and the opening of the Paris Motor Show, at which neon lighting was demonstrated for the first time, paving the way for illuminated signage.
By December Tauber’s 1910 breakfast reading would most likely have focused on the feats of aviator Georges Legagneux and Henry Farman. The former became the first person to fly an airplane higher than 10,000 feet, reaching an altitude of 10,499 feet in a Bleriot monoplane while over the Pau airfield near Paris. Meanwhile Farman set an endurance record by remaining in the air for 8 hours and 13 minutes, while flying above the Paris suburb of Étampes. The World Chess Championship that took place in Berlin from November 8 to December 8 would also have transfixed Tauber. The man who built the Majestic was an accomplished chess player and devoted much of his leisure time to the game. Tauber had beaten grandmaster Jean Taubenhaus in 1887 and the hotelier’s name appears in La Strategie, the magazine of the Fédération Française des Echecs (French Chess Federation), of which Tauber was president from 1908 until 1920.
The organisation Heritage des Echechs Francais credits Tauber with being the principal patron of French chess during the first half of the 20th century and he frequently played at Café de La Régence on the site of 161 rue Saint-Honoré, where the hotelier rubbed shoulders with some of the best chess players in Europe at tables where Karl Marx first met Frederich Engels in 1844. After the Majestic opened Tauber moved most of his chess activities to his own hotel, hosting several important tournaments including an unofficial chess Olympiad to coincide with the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris at which 54 players representing 18 countries played for the honour of a gold medal donated by the hotelier.
Tauber last played in La Regence’s famous championship tournament in 1896, when he came 11th out of 12 – he had placed as high as third in previous years. From then on he would only play fellow patrons of the tournament, although players from overseas would often be accommodated at the Majestic, giving Tauber the chance to occasionally entertain his guests with exhibition games. And thus the pace of the hotel ticked on. Guests leaving their breakfasts to promenade along the nearby Champs Elysee before returning for lunch in Dumas’s light and airy salle à manger or taking tea in one of the petits salons in the hotel’s galleried corridor where they could enjoy the floral décor of Bocquet.
“One has to be an art critic in order to detail the marvelous decorations and furniture in the Majestic’s salons,” declared the elaborate brochure Tauber published in 1910. “Nothing here is grand for the grandness sake and sunshine floods into the hall and plays among the leaves of the green plants. The architecture is in the pure Louis XVI style and we can admire beautiful marble fountains by Alavoine, and soft carpet d’Orient from the Dalsème collection.
A review of the hotel in 1910, published in the trade magazine Le bâtiment illustre described the scene with clarity.
“The architectural character possessed by this important building is exactly what one would hope for from this sort of construction,” wrote Le bâtiment illustre’s editor. “The hotel is of sober elegance and efficiently designed. How much we are disturbed at hotels like the Astoria where the entrance and the exit of cars are on the same road. At the Majestic, on the contrary, the architect uses the corner of Kléber Avenue and Pauquet road separately for the arrival and departure of voyagers and there is no traffic jam.”
The author proceeds to describe what visitors can expect once they disembark from their vehicles.
“The guests immediately find themselves in a magnificent hall that stretches along the rue de La Pérouse where they are served with afternoon tea until five clock,” he writes. “The style of this important part of the hotel is that of a rich vestibule without useless ornaments. The curves are decorated simply with consoles and a beautiful garland frames the ceiling. The richness of the diverse pieces is rationally proportional to their destination and the terrace that faces Avenue Kléber reminds people of that which is usually reserved only for the beautiful hotels of the Coté d’Azur.”
Tauber’s terrace was a work of art, rare in the Paris of 1910s and especially in a hotel. It made the Majestic a destination for Parisians as well as a memorable experience for guests and it would have made Tauber’s venture extremely successful, if history did not have other plans in mind. Within six years of the Majestic’s dinning rooms first serving croissant and confiture the hotel began to fill with a different kind of guest, and the aircraft that had so entranced Tauber were put to a far less charming purpose. War was at hand and the Majestic’s grand rooms would soon find themselves in the heart of the battle as they became a charnel house for injured officers from all sides of the conflict.