The Majestic Hotel, Paris

The Majestic Hotel, Paris

Few hotels have been more prominent in international affairs than the Majestic on the avenue Kléber in Paris. Purchased during World War One by Henry Devenish Harben, a wealthy British liberal, the Majestic accommodated British delegates at the 1919 peace conferences, artists and writers in the 1920s, France’s War Ministry in the 1930s, and the German high command during World War Two. The entrance ticket shown is that of Alan Ogilvie, a young intelligence officer at the time of the 1919 peace conferences, and later Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. After World War Two, the Majestic served as the headquarters of UNESCO, launched in November 1945 at a conference in London, until that organisation moved to its present purpose-built Parisian premises in the late 1950s. The vacant Majestic was acquired by the French Foreign Ministry and relaunched as an international conference centre, in which capacity it hosted the convention that established the OECD in December, the protracted negotiations that eventually brought an end to the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, and those between Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge leaders in the early 1990s. In 2008, the building was sold to a major international hospitality and hotel company and, following an expensive refurbishment, re-opened in 2014 as the Peninsula Hotel.

The Hong Kong Heritage Project