Hôtel Brighton

The rue de Rivoli was opened by order of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul. A decree of 9 October 1801 laid out the stretch along the Tuileries garden, from what is now no. 184 to rue Saint-Florentin, and on 26 April 1804 the street was named after Bonaparte's victory over the Austrians at Rivoli, in northern Italy, on 14 and 15 January 1797. The architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine gave the north side a single design of regular façades on a continuous arcade, and an arcade with a public gallery is still a legal requirement for every building on this stretch. Building went slowly, and in 1816 Fontaine was still complaining of abandoned walls and scaffolding left standing.^[1][2]

The hotel says the building went up in the early 19th century, that it was built by "Lord Egerton", that the name comes from Brighton, the English seaside town then in fashion with British travelers, and that English visitors on the Grand Tour, the long educational journey through Europe, stopped here. It gives no year and does not say which Lord Egerton it means.^[3][4]

English visitors were staying here by the 1840s. In November 1844 the actor William Charles Macready, in Paris for a season of English plays, had rooms engaged here, and Charles Dickens, passing through Paris, called at the hotel for him before he had arrived. Dickens came to stay two years later. He reached the Hôtel Brighton on the evening of Friday 20 November 1846 with his wife Catherine and their children, after five days on the road from Lausanne, and spent what he called "four mortal days" hunting for a house before moving on 26 November to 48 rue de Courcelles. He also worked at the hotel. When his friend John Forster wrote that the third monthly part of Dombey and Son, the novel Dickens was then publishing in installments, ran three pages too long, Dickens replied from the Brighton that he had cut about two and a half pages and left the rest to Forster.^[7][8][9]

In June 1850 he tried to return with the painter Daniel Maclise, found the hotel full, and took rooms at the Hôtel Windsor on the same street. In February 1855, planning a week in Paris with the novelist Wilkie Collins, he asked the actor Régnier of the Théâtre-Français to find them rooms elsewhere, because at the Brighton, he wrote, "they expect one to dine at home".^[8]

The hotel belongs to Esprit de France, a collection of hotels and historic houses founded in 1981 by Christophe Paluel-Marmont and owned by Compagnie Lebon, a family investment company with origins in 1835. The Brighton was on the collection's list of Paris hotels by 2001. The hotel's website said in 2013 that the lounge, the breakfast room and all of its rooms, then 61, had been restored in 2006, and in 2014 that the lounge and breakfast room had been refurbished in 2012. By late 2024 the architect Thibaut Picard had redecorated six rooms under the arcades, with wallpapers, headboards and fabrics made for them by Maison Martin Morel from 19th-century patterns in its archive.^{[10][11][12][5][6][13][14][15]}