The Peninsula Paris

Avenue Kléber, formerly avenue du Roi-de-Rome, was named in 1879 after Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753–1800), a French general. Avenue des Portugais, at the hotel's corner, was named in 1918 to remember Portugal's entry into the First World War on the side of the Allies.^[1]

The hotel stands on the site of the Palais de Castille, where the former Queen Isabella II of Spain lived and where her body lay in state in April 1904. Léonard Tauber and the architect Armand Sibien built the Hôtel Majestic there in 1906–1908, with about 400 rooms. It was due to open on 1 March 1908, and Le Figaro described it as newly built on 21 March.^[2][3][4][5]

In January 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, the British imperial war cabinet met at the Hôtel Majestic. On 18 May 1922 the art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff gave a supper at the hotel after the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Renard. Their guests included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev and Erik Satie.^[6][7][8]

The French state bought the building in 1936. During the German occupation it was the headquarters of the German military command in France. The writer Ernst Jünger, then an officer on its staff, had his office there. From 1946 to 1958 it was the first Paris headquarters of UNESCO, and it then became the Foreign Ministry's international conference centre. There, the US national security adviser Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho initialled the agreement ending the Vietnam War on 23 January 1973. The agreement was signed there on 27 January, with the US Secretary of State William Rogers signing for the United States.^{[5][9][10][11]}

The French state sold the building in 2007 to Qatari Diar, the property company of Qatar's sovereign fund, which in 2009 sold a 20% share to the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels group. After restoration it opened as The Peninsula Paris on 1 August 2014, the group's first hotel in Europe. The hotel says the Bar Kléber is the room where the 1973 Vietnam peace talks took place, and that George Gershwin composed An American in Paris in the building. Neither claim is documented.^[12][13][14]