Page 107 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace
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historical connection convincing and marketable, at least in the   to luxury hotels after their previous use became untenable. The
 eyes of the sceptical tourist; and the loss of authenticity entailed   Hôtel du Palais at Biarritz is a case in point. The original palace
 in the necessary updating of the room’s amenities presents a very   was built in the mid-1850s as a seaside retreat for Napoleon III
 common dilemma in the appeal to heritage when providing high-  and the Empress Eugénie, whose guests included members of the
 class accommodation and services.   Spanish and Belgian royal families and of the Russian nobility, as
 To make effective capital out of great events that can be   well as Bismarck, who used his visits to Biarritz in the 1860s for
 represented as being directly entwined with its own history, a hotel   diplomatic negotiations with the Emperor as well as to conduct
 needs to be more than a staging post for passing trade. It needs to   an affair with the young wife of a Russian diplomat. After the fall
 be, in some sense, a destination in its own right, and in a situation   of the Second Empire the palace was sold off and became a hotel,
 whose ‘place-myth’ has the power to attract, keep and sustain the   attracting the sort of royal clientele from Europe and beyond that
 kinds of international gatherings, more or less formal in their   made Biarritz a resort with global reach in the late nineteenth
 organisation, which become for these purposes the negotiable   and early twentieth centuries; and it was, for example, one of the
 ‘stuff of history’. It needs to be located in, or to constitute of itself, a   locations for the Spanish King Alfonso xiii’s whirlwind courtship in
 fashionable haunt of ‘high society’, with the capacity for institutional   1906 of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Victoria Eugenia
 discretion that usually helps to sustain such a reputation. A hotel   of Battenberg, with lasting consequences for the dynastic histories
 may lay claim to being the location of a historic event on the   of Spain and Europe. This took place in the aftermath of a serious
 national or international stage: the signing of a peace treaty, the   fire three years earlier, which had destroyed much of the original
 site of a diplomatic encounter which precipitated war or formed   palace; but it does not seem to have compromised the hotel’s aura
 the basis for a significant change in the pattern of international   of authenticity, as was expressed by the nostalgic Second Empire
 alliances, the place where a national political alliance was cemented   Ball of 1922, at which the star participants included the Shah of
 or a key change of policy or alignment was agreed, or the site   Persia, and King Alfonso himself.
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 of a historic struggle between key personalities or factions. This   As this example illustrates, the history of the occupation and
 aspect of the historical relationship between tourism, politics and   use of such establishments is often convoluted. Meetings between
 diplomacy  has  seldom been  highlighted  either  by  historians  of   leaders of the great powers to negotiate the post-Second World
 tourism or by those dealing with international relations, but the   War settlements in 1945 illustrate this point. At Yalta, in the Crimea,
 hotel as suitable neutral territory for diplomatic encounters and   the discussions between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in the
 negotiations has had a significant part to play, not just as a passive   February took place in the White Livadia Palace, which had been
 backcloth to events, but also, it can be argued, as an organisation   built as the summer home of Tsar Nicholas II, housed members
 whose layout, conventions and timetables may have shaped events   of the Danish and British royal families for Alexander III’s silver
 in ways that might influence eventual outcomes.   wedding celebrations in 1891, was reconstructed in 1904 at Yalta’s
 Associations with great events on the international stage are   apogee as a fashionable resort on the ‘Russkaya Riviera’, and became
 most likely to be identified with hotels whose claims to historical   a workers’ sanatorium after the revolution of 1917. After Yalta, the
 importance are already strongly established through a reputation   palace became the summer seat of the president of the ussr until
 for  playing  host  to  royalty,  aristocrats  or  senior  politicians  of  1989, before its subsequent transformation into spa, holiday centre
 national or international standing. Such locations are likely to have   and museum, trading heavily on the lasting historical significance
 been royal or ducal palaces in the first instance, being converted   of the 1945 conference.
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 Fig. 3   Carved straight from white marble with no preliminary model – a technique known as
 Edouard-Marcel Sandoz’s statue of Peace, sculpted in 1914 at the artist’s new studio   direct carving – the sculpture was installed in the hotel foyer on 4 February 1915,
 in the Villa d’Alésia in Paris. It was designed to commemorate the peace treaty   several months after the outbreak of the First World War. A sculptor from Solothurn
 between Turkey and Italy signed in 1912 at the Beau-Rivage Palace, Lausanne.   named Bilderstein and João da Silva helped Sandoz to add the final touches.

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