La Maison Champs-Élysées

In 1864 Anne Debelle, Duchess of Rivoli and Princess of Essling, bought the plot at 8 rue Jean-Goujon from Monsieur and Madame de Mortemart. She was the widow of François Victor Masséna, the younger son of Napoleon's marshal André Masséna, and the Grand Mistress of Empress Eugénie's household. Her mansion was begun that year and finished around 1866, with three floors and coach houses and stables at the back. Its architect was named Pellechet. The hotel's current website gives his first name as Auguste, while its 2011 website gave Jules.^[1][6][12]

After the duchess died in 1887, the house passed to her younger son, Victor Masséna, who had been a member of parliament under Napoleon III. Victor Masséna left it in 1910 to his son André Masséna, who sold it in 1913 to Princess Louise de Croÿ-Solre. The princess's son and three daughters sold it on 31 July 1919 to the Maison des Centraux, a company that graduates of the École Centrale, a Paris engineering school, had funded and set up for the purchase. The graduates' history of the house says that an eagle from Napoleon I's reign, above the Masséna coat of arms and the motto Fortis et fidelis, can still be seen at the foot of the main staircase. Before 1989 the building was enlarged several times, notably with three extra floors on the street side.^[1][12]

In 1921 the graduates turned the old courtyard into the Salle des Centraux, a square hall for about 450 people with arcades under a glass roof and frescoes by the painter Lucien Jonas. It held the graduates' banquets and was rented out for public events. On 29 October 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre gave his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" there, at an evening organized by the Club Maintenant, a lecture club run by Jacques Calmy and the essayist Marc Beigbeder. A press notice for the lecture gave the address as 8 rue Jean-Goujon, and the newspaper Combat reported overcrowding, heat and fainting. The hall was demolished in 1989, so the room where Sartre spoke no longer exists.^[3][4][5]

The writer and jazz trumpeter Boris Vian, an École Centrale graduate, organized two jazz events in the same hall: a talk on fifty years of jazz on 8 February 1947, and a jam session with dancing on 7 November 1947. Vian reportedly did not attend Sartre's lecture, but he turned the crush at the lecture into a comic scene in his novel L'Écume des jours. The hotel's Boris Vian Suite and Boris Vian meeting room carry his name.^[3][7][8]

From 1989 to 1991 the architecture firm Alexandre and Sandoz rebuilt the property with a hotel, a business center, offices and rooms for the graduates' association. The building reopened on 16 May 1991 as the Maison des Centraliens. That year the second-floor Salon d'Essling, now the Empire meeting room, was regilded with gold leaf. A subsidiary of the hotel group Accor ran the hotel from 1991 to 2010. In 2010, when Accor left, it was the Sofitel Paris Champs-Élysées, a four-star hotel with 40 rooms.^[1][2][8]

In 2010 the hotel was renamed La Maison Champs-Élysées, and it commissioned the fashion house Maison Martin Margiela to redesign a large part of it. By May 2011 it had 57 rooms, 17 of them new Couture rooms designed under the fashion house's direction. By the end of 2011 the hotel's website called it "the first hotel to be decorated by Martin Margiela." The graduates' association still has its offices in the building.^{[9][10][11][13]}