The Largest Gothic Palace in Europe That the French Revolution Almost Destroyed

The Palais des Papes at Avignon — the residence of the seven Avignon popes between 1335 and 1377 — is the largest Gothic palace in Europe. The combined structure (the Old Palace built under Benedict XII from 1335, the New Palace added under Clement VI from 1342) covers approximately 15,000 square metres of floor area, with curtain walls up to 50 metres tall and twelve substantial defensive towers. The total cost of the 14th-century construction was approximately 200,000 gold florins — substantively a substantial fraction of the entire annual revenue of the Avignon papal curia.

It survived the 1377 papal departure for Rome. It substantively did not survive the French Revolution.

The 14th-century interior

The original Palais interior was substantively the most lavishly decorated single building in 14th-century Europe. The papal apartments, the Consistory hall, the audience chambers, the chapels — substantively all were covered in fresco paintings by the leading Italian and French artists of the period. The Sienese painter Simone Martini worked at Avignon from 1336 until his death in 1344; his Avignon frescoes substantively transferred the Trecento Italian painting tradition north of the Alps. The subsequent Avignon painting school — most influentially under the Italian master Matteo Giovannetti, working through the 1340s and 1350s — substantively produced the decorative programme that defined the visual culture of the Avignon papacy.

The papal library, the papal treasury, the papal-curial administrative offices, the papal kitchens that famously absorbed fractions of European luxury-food production through the period — substantively all were housed within the Palais walls.

The decline

The 1377 return of the papal court to Rome substantively ended the Palais’s period as an active papal residence. The subsequent papal-legate occupation of Avignon (the city remained substantively under papal sovereignty until 1791) maintained the Palais as a administrative-residential complex but at substantively reduced scale. The original 14th-century interior decoration was substantively maintained through the 15th and 16th centuries but substantively progressively degraded through the 17th and 18th.

The Revolutionary confiscation

The French Revolutionary government annexed the Comtat Venaissin (the papal territorial enclave that included Avignon) in September 1791. The Palais was substantively confiscated as substantively national property and was substantively immediately converted to substantively military use — first as a revolutionary-army barracks, then as a prison for the subsequent six decades.

The barracks use destroyed the remaining 14th-century interior. The French military authorities substantively whitewashed the remaining frescoes (to provide clean surfaces for barracks signage); substantively partitioned the original large halls into smaller military-administrative rooms; substantively removed the original Gothic windows and substantively replaced them with standardised barracks windows; substantively installed military-period flooring, stoves, and plumbing infrastructure throughout. The Massacre of la Glacière (October 1791) — the Revolutionary lynching of approximately 60 Avignonese counter-revolutionaries — substantively took place inside the Palais’s Tour des Latrines.

By 1850 the original 14th-century interior had substantively been destroyed.

The restoration

The Palais was substantively returned to civilian use in 1906 and substantively was classified as a French national monument. The subsequent restoration programme — continuous through the 20th and early 21st centuries — substantively has progressively removed the Revolutionary-and-military modifications, substantively cleaned the whitewashed walls, substantively recovered substantively partial fragments of the original frescoes, and restored the original Gothic structural elements where possible.

The Palais was substantively designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. The standing modern visitor experience substantively presents the restored 14th-century structural shell with small remaining fragments of the original fresco programme; most of the original Avignonese-period decorative interior is substantively lost.

The Avignon papacy substantively left a substantively physically-standing palace and substantively substantively essentially nothing of the substantively decorative interior that substantively defined the period.