Palais des Papes

The Palais des Papes does not hold a collection in the way an art museum does; the building itself, and the small fraction of its original decoration that survived the Revolution and the barracks years, is the artefact. What UNESCO's own assessment credits as the site's outstanding value is narrow and specific: Matteo Giovannetti's frescoes in the two chapels and the Grand Tinel, and the secular hunting scenes of the Stag Room, are what survive of a much larger 14th-century painted programme, everything else having been lost, whitewashed or destroyed when the palace spent a century and a half as barracks and prison rather than a residence. That is also the honest limit of what a visit delivers: most of the more than twenty rooms on the public route are empty stone halls whose furniture, tapestries and everyday fittings are gone for good, and the frescoed rooms are the exception rather than the rule.

The Avignon Papacy began as an emergency measure and lasted seven decades. Clement V, elected in 1305 amid conflict between the French crown and the papacy, never returned to Rome and settled the papal court at Avignon by 1309; his successor John XXII began converting the existing bishop's residence next to the cathedral into something fit for a papal court, and the ruins of the audience hall he commissioned still stand in the palace's courtyard. It was Benedict XII, elected in 1335, who built the first true palace: an austere, fortress-like structure directed by the architect Pierre Poisson, organised around the Pope's Tower that protected both the pontiff and the Church's treasury. Clement VI, his successor from 1342, had no interest in austerity. He brought in the architect Jean de Louvres and put roughly 600 workers on site simultaneously, an extraordinary commitment given that the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death were both under way in the same years, to build the Grand Tinel feast hall, the Great Chapel and his own private study, the frescoed Chambre du Cerf. Innocent VI and Urban V finished the remaining towers and galleries. In total six papal conclaves were held inside the palace between 1334 and 1394, electing Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V, Gregory XI and, after the papacy had formally returned to Rome, the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII.

UNESCO's own assessment of the site quotes the medieval chronicler Jean Froissart calling the completed palace the most well-fortified house in the world, and the scale supports the claim: the Trouillas Tower, built under Innocent VI and Urban V, rises 52 metres, among the tallest surviving medieval towers anywhere, and the whole complex is commonly described as the largest Gothic palace still standing in Europe. What made the palace more than a fortress was the decoration Clement VI commissioned inside it. He brought the Italian painter Matteo Giovannetti to Avignon specifically to work on the new building, and Giovannetti's frescoes in the Chapelle Saint-Jean, the Chapelle Saint-Martial and the Grand Tinel are what UNESCO's inscription singles out as carrying the site's outstanding value, alongside the secular hunting and forest scenes of the Stag Room, unusual for showing no religious subject at all in a papal building. The palace also held Europe's largest library at the time, drawing scholars including Petrarch to a city that, for a hundred years, functioned as a rival cultural capital to Rome.

Gregory XI moved the papacy back to Rome in 1377, and the move did not settle the question of who the real pope was. The Western Schism that followed in 1378 produced rival Avignon claimants, Clement VII and then Benedict XIII, who continued to use the palace as their seat until Benedict XIII was besieged there in the 1400s and the Avignon line collapsed. After the schism ended, the building's status fell steadily: it became the residence of the papal legates and vice-legates who continued to govern Avignon as a papal territory (the city and its surrounding Comtat Venaissin remained under direct papal sovereignty, separate from the kingdom of France, until the Revolution), and it never again held a pope.

The French Revolution was harder on the building than seven decades of Schism-era neglect had been. Avignon was annexed to France in 1791 and the palace was stripped and converted first for military use and then into a prison; it went on serving as a barracks into the 20th century, which is the direct reason so many of its rooms are seen today as bare stone rather than furnished apartments. The building was added to France's Historic Monuments list in 1840, one of the earliest protections of its kind, but restoration and the recovery of what remained of the painted decoration continued for decades after that listing rather than starting with it. It was only in the early 20th century that the palace reverted, in UNESCO's own phrase, to a use consistent with its dignity and its history: opened to the public as a monument rather than requisitioned for another purpose.

Since 1947 the Cour d'Honneur, the palace's main internal courtyard, has been the principal venue of the Festival d'Avignon, founded that September by the director Jean Vilar as a showcase for new and unknown theatre. The relationship between a medieval papal courtyard and a modern theatre festival has not always been smooth. During a 1968 performance by the choreographer Maurice Bejart, a member of the audience walked onto the stage to order the show stopped, and performers from a rival Off-festival production later rushed the same stage, forcing Bejart's dancers to work around them mid-performance. The 2003 festival was cancelled outright, not over content but over labour: entertainment-industry workers went on strike against proposed changes to their unemployment insurance, and roughly a hundred planned productions across that year's programme never went on. The Cour d'Honneur remains the festival's flagship stage today, which means the palace runs, every July, as both a monument open to daytime visitors and a working theatre by night.

The Palais des Papes was inscribed by UNESCO in 1995, not alone but as one element of the Historic Centre of Avignon alongside the Petit Palais (the former bishops' residence, begun 1317, a separate building from the unrelated Petit Palais art museum in Paris), the Romanesque Cathedral of Notre-Dame des Doms next door, and the surviving four arches of the Saint-Benezet bridge over the Rhone. UNESCO's own listing records an unusual split in ownership that has nothing to do with the palace's history as a single building: most of the palace belongs to the City of Avignon, but the north-west section, including the Chapel of Benedict XII and the Trouillas Tower, belongs instead to the Department of Vaucluse. The Cathedral belongs to the French state. A monument built by one institution, the medieval papacy, to be indivisible is today governed by three different public owners at once, coordinated through a management committee UNESCO's own documentation describes as still a work in progress.

Visitors consistently rate the Palace among Avignon's essential sights, driven by the scale of the building, the surviving frescoes in the Stag Room and the two chapels, and the multimedia guide included with entry. The most repeated practical complaint is that the building was stripped of its furniture centuries ago, so several rooms are experienced as vast empty stone halls rather than furnished interiors, which some visitors find atmospheric and others find underwhelming next to the entrance fee.