Palais Héraud

Palais Héraud stands in the heart of the Old Town, Vieux Nice, among narrow streets and historic buildings. It went up in 1757 for Barthélémy Héraud, one of the local nobles. Louis XIV ordered Nice's fortifications demolished in 1705. The cleared ground became Villa Nova in 1717, a quarter laid out on Turin's model. There the nobility raised its palais, apartment houses where a family kept one floor and rented out the rest. Italian was the official language then, and palazzo simply meant building. Palaces, churches and chapels of the same era fill the surrounding streets.

It fills an entire block around an interior garden and presents an austere face. A monumental entrance porch breaks that austerity, and a double-helix staircase rises inside. Its two spirals wind around each other like a strand of DNA. After the Hérauds came the Lascaris Vintimille, and then, through marriage, the Malausséna. François Malausséna was the last Sardinian syndic of Nice and then its first French mayor, from 1860 to 1870. The property later passed to the Raiberti family. Baron Flaminius Raiberti of that line served as deputy, president of the chamber, senator and minister under the Third Republic.

Since 1794 the building has doubled as a maison commune, a communal house for the city. Napoleon Bonaparte stayed here in 1796, newly married to Joséphine de Beauharnais and commanding the Army of Italy. On 31 March of that year he gave a speech to rouse his troops before the Italian campaign.