In July 1559, after the accidental death of her husband, Henry II, Queen Catherine de' Medici decided to leave her residence of the Hôtel des Tournelles, at the eastern part of Paris, near the Bastille.

[2][missing long citation] Catherine commissioned a landscape architect from Florence, Bernard de Carnesse, to create an Italian Renaissance garden for the palace.

It was divided into rectangular compartments by six alleys, and the sections were planted with lawns, flower beds, and small clusters of five trees, called quinconces; and, more practically, with kitchen gardens and vineyards.

[3] It was further decorated with fountains, a labyrinth, a grotto, and faience images of plants and animals, made by Bernard Palissy, whom Catherine had tasked to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain.

Henry built a chamille, or covered arbor, the length of the garden, Another alley was planted with mulberry trees where he hoped to cultivate silkworms and start a silk industry in France.

On the north side of the gardens, his mother and the regent, Marie de' Medici, built stables and a riding school, the Manége, which survived until the French Revolution, when it was used as the meeting hall of the revolutionary parliament.

He immediately began transforming the Tuileries into a formal jardin à la française, a style he had first developed at Vaux-le-Vicomte and perfected at Versailles, based on symmetry, order and long perspectives.

He eliminated the street which separated the palace and the garden, and replaced it with a terrace looking down upon flowerbeds bordered by low boxwood hedges and filled with designs of flowers.

On the south side of the park, next to the Seine, he built a long terrace called the Terrasse du bord-de-l'eau, planted with trees, with a view of the river.

In 1667, at the request of the famous author of Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tales, Charles Perrault, the Tuileries Garden was opened to the public, with the exception of beggars, "lackeys" and soldiers.

In 1719, two large equestrian statuary groups, La Renommée and Mercure, by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox, were brought from the king's residence at Marly and placed at the west entrance of the garden.

Queen Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin were given a part of the garden for her private use, first at the west end of the Promenade Bord d'eaux, then at the edge of the Place Louis XV.

[13] The new revolutionary government, the National Convention, met in the Salle du Manège, the former riding academy in the northwest corner of the gardens, which was the largest meeting hall in the city.

After a hymn written for the occasion, Robespierre set fire to mannequins representing Atheism, Ambition, Egoism and False Simplicity, revealing a statue of Wisdom.

The National Convention assigned the renewal of the gardens to the painter Jacques-Louis David, and to his brother in law, the architect August Cheval de Saint-Hubert.

[15][14] Napoleon Bonaparte moved into the Tuileries Palace on 19 February 1800 as First Consul, and began making improvements to suit a consular and soon to be imperial residence.

He continued to use the garden for military parades and to celebrate special events, including the passage of his own wedding procession on 2 April 1810, when he married the Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria.

The Orangerie, originally used to keep citrus trees during the winter, was also made into a gallery, with the eastern wing devoted to the display of eight paintings of the Water Lilies series by Claude Monet.

[22] In 1946, after the end of World War II, many masterpieces from private collections were recovered in Germany by the French Commission for Art Recovery and the Monuments Men and they were brought to the Orangerie, in a program to restore them to owners or surviving family members.

In 1964–65, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture for President Charles de Gaulle, removed the 19th century statues which surrounded the Place du Carrousel and replaced them with contemporary sculptures by Aristide Maillol.

Another ensemble of three works by Daniel Dezeuze, Erik Dietman and Eugène Dodeigne, called Prière Toucher (Eng: Please Touch), was added at the same time.

[24] At the beginning of the 21st century, French landscape architects Pascal Cribier and Louis Benech have been working to restore some of the early features of the André Le Nôtre garden.

The central feature is the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, built to celebrate the victories of Napoleon, with bas-relief sculptures of his battles by Jean-Joseph Espercieux.

In 1815, following the Battle of Waterloo and Bourbon restoration, the horses were sent back to Venice and replaced in 1826 by a new group of sculpture, selected by Charles X, representing the triumph of peace.

On the west side of the moat are traces left by the fighting during the unsuccessful siege of Paris by Henry IV of France in 1590 during the French Wars of Religion.

The eastern part of the Grand Carré, surrounding the circular pond, was the private garden of the King under Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, separated from the rest of the Tuileries by a fence.

[33] The Terrace and Esplanade des Feuillants are parallel wide pathways that runs alongside the Rue de Rivoli on the north side of the garden.

[34] The architecture and the ornate grill of the gateway to the garden were crested beginning in 1757 by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the royal architect of Louis XV, and designer of the Place de La Concorde and its fountains, obelisk and surrounding buildings.

The terrace by the Seine is close to the old western gateway of Paris, the Porte de la Conference, which was built by Henry III of France in the 16th century, and was in place until 1720.

[35] The terrace in front of the Jeu de Paume displays a notable work of modern sculpture, Le Belle Constumé, by 20th century artist Jean Dubuffet.