From 1795 the five Directors lived and governed at the Luxembourg. It was there that Bonaparte, back victorious from Italy, was received on 10 December 1797 in the courtyard turned into an amphitheatre, beneath an altar of the Fatherland, before captured enemy flags. Barras congratulated him with anxious warmth; the twenty-eight-year-old general answered in a few dry sentences and left. Everyone understood that power now had a rival.
On the evening of 19 Brumaire, after the day at Saint-Cloud, the provisional Consulate installed itself at the Luxembourg. Bonaparte governed there for three months, with Sieyès and then Cambacérès and Lebrun, and had the Constitution of Year VIII drafted there. On 19 February 1800 he left the palace for the Tuileries: the move was a political act, from the house of the Directory to the house of kings.
The Luxembourg then became the seat of the conservative Senate, a chamber of notables charged with guaranteeing the Constitution. Chalgrin adapted it, fitting out the session hall and the grand staircase. The Senate ratified everything: the Consulate for life in 1802, the Empire in 1804, the decrees raising conscription.
Then it did the opposite. On 2 April 1814, prompted by Talleyrand, that same Senate voted to depose the Emperor, listing his violations of the Constitution. The chamber created to protect the regime abolished it in the palace where it had been born. The French Senate still sits there.
