The Hôtel de la Marine is the colonnaded palace that closes the north side of the place de la Concorde, the one on the right as you look towards the rue Royale. For more than two centuries almost nobody could go in: first it was the store for the king’s furniture and jewels, then, from 1789 to 2015, the ministry of the Navy. It opened to the public in June 2021.
Before you buy your ticket you have to decide which one, because there are three routes here and they cost 9, 13 and 17 euros. And there is one detail no aggregator tells you and that can waste your trip: Tuesday afternoon, Thursday morning and the first evening of the month are reserved for groups.
Why did a palace built to keep the king’s furniture become the ministry of the Navy?
Let’s begin!
1. The Garde-Meuble, the store for the king’s furniture
From the square you see the facade in the photograph above: an arcaded portico on the ground floor, and above it a Corinthian colonnade the whole length of the building, closed at each end by carved pediments, with the balustrade on top and the flag. Ange-Jacques Gabriel designed it, and the building went up between 1758 and 1774, when the square was called place Louis XV.
It was not a palace for receptions: it was the seat of the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, the institution that conserved, restored and displayed the furniture, the tapestries, the parade weapons and the jewels of the Crown. A store, in practice, with the best of what the monarchy owned inside it, and with the apartment of the official who ran it.
Then came the Revolution: in 1789 the ministry of the Navy took possession of the building, and nothing was left of the Garde-Meuble. The ministry stayed until 2015, which explains the name the place still carries, and also why, if you look for «museum» on the map, you will not find it.
2. September 1792, the theft of the crown jewels
How much can be stolen before anybody notices?
On the night of 16 to 17 September 1792 a patrol heard singing inside the Garde-Meuble and discovered that the thieves had been at work for days. The haul was enormous: more than nine thousand precious stones, including the most famous diamonds of the Crown, the Régent, the Sancy and the great French Blue.
Two thirds of the jewels were recovered over the following two years, the Régent and the Sancy among them, and the Régent is at the Louvre today. Not the blue diamond: it reappeared twenty years later in London, recut into a smaller stone, and it is the gem now called the Hope. If you have read the story of that diamond’s «curse», it begins in this building.
3. The Intendant’s apartments, taken back to 1789
The main route is the one through the Intendant’s apartments, the rooms of the official who ran the Garde-Meuble: the last of them was Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville-d’Avray, killed on 2 September 1792 in the prison massacres, two weeks before the jewels he looked after were stolen. The rooms have been taken back to their late eighteenth-century state, with the panelling, the fabrics and the furniture remade from archive documents, and you visit them with le Confident, a headset that rebuilds the sounds of the house for you instead of reciting dates. If you expect museum labels, you will not find them here: you walk inside a house.
The work that made all this possible took four years and cost 132 million euros. It is the reason a building that was a ministry with corridors full of offices now lets you walk through it.
4. The state rooms and the loggia over the Concorde
The reception rooms are the part that makes everybody look up. In the photograph you see the gallery at the far end: a row of crystal chandeliers with candles, lit one behind the other under a ceiling of gilded stucco with medallions. Along the walls run the white and gold panelling and the mirrors, and under your feet a chequered parquet reflects the flames.
From here you step out onto the loggia, the balcony under the colonnade that looks onto the place de la Concorde. Join the queue to lean out, if there is one, because from up there the whole square can be read: the obelisk and the fountains at the centre, and beyond the river the Palais Bourbon, the dome of the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. From here you understand that the facade was not a decoration but a stage.
5. The desk on which the abolition of slavery was written
There is a flat writing table in pale wood, with curved legs and gilt bronze mounts, in the middle of a drawing room with red silk sofas and armchairs, gilded panelling, crystal chandeliers and an inlaid chest of drawers at the back. It is Victor Schœlcher’s desk, and it is not an ordinary piece of furniture.
In 1848 Schœlcher was under-secretary of state for the Colonies, appointed by the minister of the Navy François Arago, and his office was in this building. Here he prepared the text of the decree abolishing slavery, which the provisional government of the Second Republic adopted on 27 April 1848: nine articles, and some 248,500 people freed in the French colonies.
Cross the gilded rooms with this in your head: in the same palace, fifty-six years apart, the most spectacular theft in French history took place and one of the country’s best documents was written.
6. The covered courtyard, the most visibly new thing
In the courtyard of honour the openly contemporary piece of the visit passes over your head: a glass and steel roof designed for the restoration, made of thin rays converging towards a central point, with triangles of glass between them. From below it looks like a web stretched between the four sides of the palace.
Under that roof are the café and the restaurant, and it is the part of the building you enter without a ticket: if you are passing the Concorde and want to see something of the Hôtel de la Marine without paying, the courtyard is the answer.
7. Which of the three tickets to take
So, 9, 13 or 17 euros?
It depends on what you want to see, and the three routes do not contain one another. The 17 euro ticket covers the Intendant’s apartments and the state rooms: it is the one people come for, and it is the one the Paris Museum Pass covers. The 13 euro ticket is for the Al Thani Collection, the collection on deposit in the ground-floor galleries, whose display changes. The 9 euro one is the express route, the state rooms only.
The practical advice, if it is your first time: take the apartments route, which is the one that tells the house, and leave the Al Thani Collection alone, because it is a visit of its own and in a year it will be showing other pieces.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site hotel-de-la-marine.paris. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The route through the Intendant’s apartments and the state rooms costs 17 euros, 14 reduced. The Al Thani Collection costs 13 euros, 11.50 reduced. The express route through the state rooms only costs 9 euros, 7.50 reduced. Free admission. Under-18s with their family get in free, as do 18 to 25 year olds who are citizens or lawful residents of the European Union, disabled visitors and their companion, asylum seekers and teachers. On the first Sunday of the month, from November to March, entry is free without booking and while places last. Opening hours. The monument opens every day from 10:30 to 19:00, and on Friday until 21:30. The last entry is 45 minutes before closing. Closing days. It closes on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Watch out for groups. Tuesday afternoon, Thursday morning and the first evening of the month are reserved for group visits. Booking. It is not compulsory for individual visitors, but buying online saves you the queue at the ticket desk. Paris Museum Pass. It is accepted on the route through the Intendant’s apartments. Getting there. The entrance is at 2 place de la Concorde. The stop is Concorde, on lines 1, 8 and 12. How long it takes. The apartments with the state rooms need an hour and a half; the express route manages in forty minutes.
The exhibitions on, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Cross the square and the Tuileries garden and you reach the Louvre, where the Régent ended up, and the Musée des Arts décoratifs, which tells the story of the same furniture from another side. On the other bank of the Seine, opposite, is the Orangerie, and for the eighteenth century of private houses, to the north, the Musée Jacquemart-André and the Musée Cernuschi. If you are planning your Paris week, the full list is in the artworks to see in Paris.
Photo credits: facade by Jorge Láscar (CC BY 2.0); gilded gallery by Chatsam (CC BY-SA 4.0); Victor Schœlcher’s desk by Christian Pinatel de Salvator (CC BY-SA 4.0); the courtyard roof by DiscoA340 (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
