Romance Is At The Heart of The Hotel Napoleon in Paris, City of Love
By Karen Rubin, Travel Features

Romance is at the heart of the Hotel Napoleon in Paris, the City of Love. Romance is in its genes.

The Hotel Napoleon, just steps away from the Arc D’Triomphe off the Place d’Etoile in Paris’ fashionable 8th Arrondisement, began with a love story that continues to this day.

Built on the site of the former Tolstoy family mansion in Art Deco style in 1928 by architect Henri Porteau, shortly after its opening, it was bought by Alexander Pavlovitch Kliaguine, a wealthy businessman from Russia, as a wedding present for his bride. A young Parisian student of literature, they had met at a salon, and fell in love at first sight. Kliaguine wanted to provide his bride a place to entertain Parisian high society (she later became the Baroness de Baubigny) and both resided there all their lives.

To this day, the Hotel Napoléon Paris is owned by the Kliaguine family, and a new generation Kliaguine, now the general manager, still lives in the hotel with his family. Indeed, the hotel, a member of Historic Hotels Worldwide, was named to its The 2022 Top 25 Historic Hotels Worldwide Most Romantic Hotels

And as Kliaguine had promised his bride, the Hotel Napoleon became a popular gathering place for Paris’ social elite and illustrious artistic and literary expatriates (“The Lost Generation”): F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Orson Welles, Errol Flynn (who nicknamed the Napoleon “The Place”), Miles Davis, Josephine Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, who signed its Golden Book.

This all prompts images of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” (where a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight), and the Algonquin Hotel in New York (famous for its Algonquin Round Table of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits) to dance in my mind.

The hotel has appeared in movies, such as Jean Gabin’s 1930’s movies and even had a star turn in, Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), where the character played by Jean Gabin, one of French cinema’s greatest stars, declares he is staying at The Napoléon, “as always”.

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