Le Royal Monceau - Raffles Paris

The Paris architects Louis Duhayon and Marcel Julien designed the hotel. Advertisements in Vogue and House & Garden announced its opening for June 1925 at 35, 37 and 39 avenue Hoche, with 250 rooms and 250 bathrooms, and in February 1926 House & Garden called it only six months old. The hotel's own history gives a later date: it says Pierre Bermond and André Junot founded Le Royal Monceau and opened it on August 1, 1928. Pierre Bermond, a lawyer and politician from Nice, owned one of the largest hotel groups in France.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

In February 1929 the German delegation to a Paris committee on war reparations, the payments Germany owed after the First World War, stayed at the Royal Monceau. Hjalmar Schacht, president of Germany's central bank, led the delegation. The New York Times reported that the Germans had moved in with sixty journalists and a battery of telegraph lines to Berlin.^[7][8]

After the liberation of Paris in 1944, the hotel became the Paris headquarters of the Alsos Mission, the American team sent to find out how far Germany had come toward building an atomic bomb. Colonel Boris Pash, the mission's commander, took a suite overlooking avenue Hoche in the fall of 1944 and kept it until the end of the war. In his 1969 memoir he wrote that he kept the mission's base in Paris partly because no other city could offer its scientists a hotel like the Royal Monceau.^[9][10]

In the summer of 1946 Ho Chi Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, stayed at the Royal Monceau during talks in France on Vietnam's future. His biographer Jean Lacouture writes that Ho Chi Minh held a reception at the hotel on June 25, 1946, and received a steady flow of visitors there. One was David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, which represented the Jewish community in Palestine, who was also staying at the hotel. Ben-Gurion escaped arrest on June 29, 1946, when British forces detained many Jewish leaders in Palestine, because he was in Paris.^[11][12][13]

The hotel's timeline says that Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir signed Israel's founding document at the hotel in 1948. Israel's Declaration of Independence was signed in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.^[5][14]

The French singer Michel Polnareff lived in room 128 from 1989 to 1992. Le Figaro reported that during that stay he wrote "Goodbye Marylou" for Marie-Louise, one of the hotel's switchboard operators. In 1990 Madonna spent three days at the hotel filming the video for her song "Justify My Love," directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.^{[15][16][17][18]}

In 2007 the businessman Alexandre Allard bought the hotel from Osmane Aïdi, founder of the Groupe Royal Monceau. The hotel closed for renovation in 2008, and from June 19 to 22 that year the auction house Cornette de Saint-Cyr sold its furniture and fittings in 2,360 lots. After two years of work, it reopened on October 18, 2010, with interiors by Philippe Starck and 149 rooms, under a Qatari owner and Raffles management.^[16][19][20]