Castille Paris

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was a journalist and playwright based in Vienna, then working in Paris as the correspondent of the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse. In May and June 1895 he gave 37 rue Cambon as his address in his letters. In 1896 he published The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat), a pamphlet proposing a Jewish state, and he went on to found the Zionist movement, which campaigned for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.^[4][1]

In June 1895 Herzl wrote a long speech addressed to the wealthy Rothschild family, which he called the Address to the Rothschilds. On 17 July 1896, back in Paris, he wrote in his diary: "It was in one of the rooms I am now occupying at the Hotel Castille that I wrote The Jewish State (in the form of the Address to the Rothschilds)." On 24 September 1898, staying at the hotel again, he noted in his diary that he was writing a letter "in the same room and at the same table where I wrote The Jewish State." A white marble plaque on number 35 calls Herzl the founder of the Zionist movement and says he wrote L'État juif (The Jewish State) here in 1895.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Paris guidebooks of 1901 and 1910 list the Hôtel de Castille at 37 rue Cambon. Castille is the French spelling of Castile, a region of Spain. The hotel describes the building as an 18th-century mansion restored to its original appearance, with courtyard frescoes from the early 20th century, but gives no construction date or architect. Rue Cambon was laid out in 1719 and renamed in 1879 after Joseph Cambon (1756–1820), the French Revolutionary politician who created the register of the public debt.^{[6][7][8][14][9][10]}

In 2001 the hotel's website, castille.com, redirected to its page on the site of the French hotel group Accor, under Accor's Sofitel brand. On 2 February 2005 the Italian business paper MF Milano Finanza reported that the hotel had become Starhotels Castille, the 21st hotel in the Starhotels chain, with 107 rooms, 21 of them suites. Starhotels was founded in Italy in 1980 by Ferruccio Fabri. The restaurant was called Il Cortile in 2007 and L'Assaggio by 2011.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}