front entrance and facade
Lutetia always attracted the elite, wealthy visitors, artists, intellectuals and writers who helped define C20th culture. James Joyce corrected proofs of Ulysses inside, Picasso, Matisse and André Gide were regulars and Josephine Baker gave jazz rhythm to its salons. A unique blend of high society and arty avant-garde!
Author Jane Rogoyska focused on this fashionable grand hotel from 1933-45 in Hotel Exile. She wrote of the hotel’s war events before, in and after the German occupation of France. She wrote of the destruction of German & Austrian culture, once the Nazis seized power in 1933.
Germans forced into exile in France included many literary stars of Habsburg Vienna & Weimar Republic: Heinrich & Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Kerr, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel & Stefan Zweig and James Joyce. They escaped with their lives but mostly lost their livelihoods. In Paris they lived in solitude or in cheap hotels. They also faced the hostility of French bureaucracy against Germans.
In 1935, a millionaire genius of international communism Willi Münzenberg led the Lutetia Committee. Despite his leadership (supported by E.M Forster & Aldous Huxley), no German Popular Front emerged and alliance between communists & social democrats ended in Aug 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet pact. The leader of the French communists, Maurice Thorez welcomed Der Pakt as a stroke of genius on Stalin’s part that would avert another European war.
WW2 broke out later when many of the exiles had already managed to re-escape to U.S, UK or Switzerland and the German army occupied Paris. This hotel was soon controlled by Abwehr-German Military Intelligence Service (in 1940), a German organisation standing on the Nazi regime fringes. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jewish communist, joined the Foreign Legion to escape the bureaucrats who interned him. But eventually some exiles, inspired by Heinrich Mann, risked fighting back by forming Lutetia Committee of Germany’s Popular Front against Fascism. They met in the elegant Lutetia salons.
Colonel Friedrich Rudolph decided to requisition the French staff, as well as the hotel. The concierge, cooks, waiters and chambermaids continued to serve their German “guests” with their normal respect, and Manager Marcel Chappaz ensured everyone’s comfort. Abwehr commanders stayed until the end. They regrouped in Berlin, where Col Rudolph was gaoled re a July plot to assassinate Hitler.
Meanwhile the political deportees were registered in reception, where the hotel staff were assisted by boy scouts. Many of their patients were the true heroes of France’s war, all that remained of that small minority who had found the courage to fight back after the military debacle of 1940. The survivors returned in a terrible state, here described in vivid detail. Some were wasted with lice or contagious with typhus or TB. Some Lutetia’s staff died following contact with the first postwar guests who they said nothing.
Author Jane Rogoyska focused on this fashionable grand hotel from 1933-45 in Hotel Exile. She wrote of the hotel’s war events before, in and after the German occupation of France. She wrote of the destruction of German & Austrian culture, once the Nazis seized power in 1933.
Germans forced into exile in France included many literary stars of Habsburg Vienna & Weimar Republic: Heinrich & Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Kerr, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel & Stefan Zweig and James Joyce. They escaped with their lives but mostly lost their livelihoods. In Paris they lived in solitude or in cheap hotels. They also faced the hostility of French bureaucracy against Germans.
In 1935, a millionaire genius of international communism Willi Münzenberg led the Lutetia Committee. Despite his leadership (supported by E.M Forster & Aldous Huxley), no German Popular Front emerged and alliance between communists & social democrats ended in Aug 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet pact. The leader of the French communists, Maurice Thorez welcomed Der Pakt as a stroke of genius on Stalin’s part that would avert another European war.
WW2 broke out later when many of the exiles had already managed to re-escape to U.S, UK or Switzerland and the German army occupied Paris. This hotel was soon controlled by Abwehr-German Military Intelligence Service (in 1940), a German organisation standing on the Nazi regime fringes. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jewish communist, joined the Foreign Legion to escape the bureaucrats who interned him. But eventually some exiles, inspired by Heinrich Mann, risked fighting back by forming Lutetia Committee of Germany’s Popular Front against Fascism. They met in the elegant Lutetia salons.
Colonel Friedrich Rudolph decided to requisition the French staff, as well as the hotel. The concierge, cooks, waiters and chambermaids continued to serve their German “guests” with their normal respect, and Manager Marcel Chappaz ensured everyone’s comfort. Abwehr commanders stayed until the end. They regrouped in Berlin, where Col Rudolph was gaoled re a July plot to assassinate Hitler.
Meanwhile the political deportees were registered in reception, where the hotel staff were assisted by boy scouts. Many of their patients were the true heroes of France’s war, all that remained of that small minority who had found the courage to fight back after the military debacle of 1940. The survivors returned in a terrible state, here described in vivid detail. Some were wasted with lice or contagious with typhus or TB. Some Lutetia’s staff died following contact with the first postwar guests who they said nothing.
cocktails
Rogoyska’s thoroughly researched account, using secondary sources, is a little less convincing when she generalises about events beyond the hotel’s revolving doors. The Abwehr’s effectiveness in Occupied France was not notably hindered by the dominant role given to rival SS-SD. In any case, the hotel became a place of surveillance and control, not murders. In fact fear of being handed over to the Gestapo gave the Abwehr interrogators a very persuasive argument. Nor did the Gestapo’s brutality lead to an increase in volunteering for the French Resistance. All the Abwehr agents sent to England were either executed or used by MI5, and the deception sent to Rudolph’s Berlin mates was important re D-Day.
Rogoyska suggested that the care given to the deportees absolved the Lutetia from guilt over its wartime role. Or not. In 1955 Col. Rudolph paid a return visit to Paris, a place of happy memories, and cautiously entered the hotel where Manager Chappaz was on duty. He greeted the Colonel warmly and offered him lunch as a hotel guest.
After Liberation, it took on a humane role, serving as a reception centre for deportees and prisoners-of-war back in France. Families gathered searching for news about loved ones, and the name Lutetia started to reflect loss, reunion and remembrance. This era cemented its place in the nation’s collective memory, lending it rare gravity.
Postwar Lutetia re-earned its role as an ideal of Parisian life, remaining a favourite of visiting notables, artists and designers, and its brasserie became a fixture of St-Germain. But the faded interiors, once fresh and modern, had faded. In 2014, its owners closed the property.
What followed were ambitious restorations. Trusted to architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the 4-year project sought to restore Lutetia’s historic features while reinventing it for a new era of luxury. Frescoes hidden beneath layers of paint were uncovered and meticulously restored, marble floors were relaid, and spaces allowed more light. The number of rooms was reduced, creating larger, more comfortable suites with St-Germain views. Eucalyptus wood, Murano glass and Carrara marble glamourised the interiors.
view over Paris
When the hotel reopened in 2018, it became a legend reborn. The restored Bar Joséphine, with its shimmering frescoes and live jazz, once again became a magnet for Parisians and travellers alike. The brasserie reestablished the Lutetia as a culinary destination, balancing tradition with innovation. In keeping with contemporary hospitality trends, the creation of the Akasha Holistic Wellbeing Centre, with a long pool, hammam, sauna, spas & treatment rooms, brought serenity and modernity.
In Ap 2025, Lutetia joined the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. Now Mandarin Oriental Lutetia Paris retained its status as the Left Bank’s only officially designated Palace hotel, a recognition of its heritage and standards. And it gained from Mandarin’s global reach.
Lutetia is now a living history, a Parisian institution that witnessed C20th triumphs and traumas, and still embodying the Left Bank spirit. The hotel offers an immersion into Paris itself, so discover the city through its artistic and intellectual heritage: literary cafés, art galleries, Left Bank boutiques and museums. Thanks to Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska, 2026
music area
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6 comments:
A fascinating account of how the Lutetia evolved from a beacon of Belle Époque luxury into a sanctuary for exiles, a headquarters of occupation and a place of post-war reunion and grief
What a fascinating place, a cornucopia of history and art.
Certainly a checkered past with interesting history. Gorgeous architecture, Hels and expensive, interesting they have some rooms which are soundproof.
What an amazing history the Lutetia Hotel has. Despite being in Paris twice, I am not familiar with it and enjoyed learning about it in your post.
Remember Charles de Gaulle, holed up in the Lutetia in June 1940, as German forces bore down on Paris. De Gaulle had been a regular in the salon and dining room pre-war. He banked at the branch of the Banque de France across the road and rubbed shoulders in that prewar period with the Left Bank's literary demi-monde. The writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a regular guest, as was James Joyce, who played Irish ballads on the piano in the bar. The night I met friends in the Bar Josephine, named for the Franco-American performer Josephine Baker, young musicians were doing a very passable impression of the Quintette du Hot Club de France.
The Lutetia remained a favourite meeting place for literary Paris after the war. Many of the big publishing houses, notably Gallimard and Grasset, are nearby in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The hotel has also doubled as an office for academics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales just down the road. I remember, when I was a student there in the mid-1990s, the philosopher Jacques Derrida holding court in the Lutetia bar on more than one occasion.
roentare
I am not surprised the French hotel Lutetia became a headquarters for German Abwehr in 1940. The senior Germans and all their colleagues in authority in France wanted to be well placed geographically and well treated professionally in a beautiful hotel. What I was semi surprised by was the Lutetia owners and staff fell over backwards to make their German occupiers blissfully happy.
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