Fontainebleau Palace was the scene of Napoleon's abdication on April 6, 1814. He signed the treaty granting him the island of Elba there.

Historical context

The Revolution had sold the palace's furniture; Napoleon refurnished it from 1804 and made it, with Saint-Cloud and Compiègne, one of the Empire's three residences. He liked this "house of centuries", vast enough to lodge a court and old enough to give his own a genealogy. He had his small apartment fitted out there, and a Throne Room — the only one in France preserved in its original state.

Pius VII was received there in November 1804, on the eve of the coronation. The same pope would be held prisoner there from June 1812 to January 1814 and would sign, exhausted, the Concordat of Fontainebleau that he retracted two months later: the palace was the place of the break with Rome before it was the place of the fall.

On 31 March 1814 the Emperor arrived from Troyes; Paris had just capitulated. On 4 April the marshals refused to march on the capital; on the 6th he signed an unconditional abdication. The treaty of 11 April left him the imperial title and the island of Elba. On the night of 12-13 April he swallowed a poison brought back from Russia, by then too old to kill him.

On 20 April, in the Cour du Cheval-Blanc, he took leave of the Old Guard and embraced the standard of the 1st Grenadiers. The courtyard has been called the Cour des Adieux ever since, and its horseshoe staircase remains the most reproduced setting of 1814.