The story
The Palais Bourbon is primarily a working parliament, the seat of France's National Assembly on the left bank of the Seine, but its library holds one of the great painted ceilings of French Romanticism. Over eight years, finishing in 1847, Eugène Delacroix and his assistants covered the five domes and two half-domes of the long reading room with about four hundred square metres of painting.
Delacroix arranged his subjects the way booksellers of his day sorted their stock. Legislation fills the central dome, flanked by philosophy and theology, with science and poetry at the two ends. Each dome rests on four pendentives showing famous figures of its field, among them the young Achilles taught by the centaur Chiron, and the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. At either end the half-domes set war against peace, Attila and his hordes trampling Italy and the arts, facing Orpheus bringing the arts of peace to the Greeks.
The palace keeps no museum hours. Visits are free and booked ahead, with groups invited by a deputy or, since 2022, on individual tours of about an hour and a half. The library itself, built by the architect Jules de Joly and in use since 1835, still serves the deputies, and its holdings include a manuscript of the trial of Joan of Arc and the Codex Borbonicus, an Aztec calendar from the early sixteenth century.
