Famous people who marked Rambouillet Territoires

Rambouillet Territoires has seen famous people pass by… Napoleon I, François I, Louis XVI, heads of foreign states and many more!

The Bonapartes

Napoleon

Napoleon I (1769-1821) had the castle and park of Rambouillet restored. He resides there, hunts there, holds the council of ministers there and rides there in a Venetian gondola!

In 1814, at the time of the fall of the Empire, Empress Marie-Louise stayed with her son, the King of Rome, at the castle. Finally, in June 1815, at the end of the Hundred Days, Napoleon, on his way to exile, spent one last night there.

Napoleon III (1808-1873) took possession of the Domaine, rented to individuals from 1832 to 1852. From 1854, he regularly came to hunt there in the company of the imperial family and numerous guests.

Robert Doisneau, a humanist in Raizeux

Robert Doisneau

Robert Doisneau is, without doubt, one of the most popular French photographers of the post-war period and one of the main representatives of humanist photography. His black and white photos have traveled the world, of the streets of post-war Paris, its suburbs and its inhabitants.

Robert Doisneau is buried with his wife in the Raizeux cemetery, near Rambouillet. His family (wine growers, plowmen and quarryman grandfather) came from this small village and occupied the Hameau de Cady for a long time. This is where Doisneau came to spend his summers when he was a child and teenager. It was even in Raizeux that he met the woman he would marry in 1934, Pierrette Chaumaison, who was also coming on vacation to visit a friend in the hamlet of Les Roches, not far away.

Raizeux represented his roots, his family and, beyond that, the rural heritage of France, this France of villages and countryside where time seems to have stopped, as in a photo. He returned there frequently until he was 80 years old.