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Origin and history

The Château de Bois-Préau was born in the Middle Ages, when the land depended on the abbey of Saint-Denis. In 1696, the printers Frédéric Léonard and his son Frédéric-Pierre acquired the estate and built between 1697 and 1700 a house surrounded by gardens and pieces of water. The castle changed hands several times in the 18th century: embellished by Jean Garnier, master d'hotel of Queen Marie Leszczynska, then transformed by the Marquis de Prie before being inherited by Anne-Marie Julien, who stubbornly refused to sell it to Josephine de Beauharnais.

Josephine finally managed to acquire Bois-Préau in 1810, after the accidental death of Anne-Marie Julien. She housed her staff there, set up part of her library and natural history cabinet, and had the gardens redesigned by Louis-Martin Berthault. When he died in 1814, the estate moved to his son, Prince Eugene, and then to several successive owners, including banker Edward Rodrigues-Henriques, who partially renovated it in 1854-1855. The castle became a reception place for figures such as George Sand, Jacques Halévy and Georges Bizet.

In 1926, American patron Edward Tuck and his wife offered Bois-Préau to the French state as an annex to the Malmaison Museum. Since 1958, the castle has been home to a national museum dedicated to Napoleon, including his captivity to St. Helena and the Napoleonic legend. Closed for work in 2023, he prepared the reconstruction of the Longwood House salon and the exhibition of the Napoleonic box collection of Princess Marie Bonaparte.

The 16.1 hectare park, in English, preserves bicentennial trees like hazelnut trees in Byzantium, as well as sculptures, including a statue of Josephine by Gabriel Vital Dubray (1865). The museum regularly organizes temporary exhibitions, such as Eugene de Beauharnais, a European prince (2022-23) or 1769, Corsica at the birth of Napoleon (2023).

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