[2][3] Since its completion in 1742, the palace has hosted a number of French monarchs such as Louis XV, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Joséphine, and Charles X.

Diverse archaeological excavations on Place du Château, the square facing the palace, have unearthed many remains of the Roman camp.

Much of the furniture and many of the works of art in the Palais were sold, and in 1793 the eight life-sized mural portraits of prince-bishops decorating the Salle des évêques (Bishops' Hall) were destroyed.

[19] Only the portrait of Armand Gaston, the builder of the palace, was later restored to its original place with a 1982 replica of Hyacinthe Rigaud's lost painting.

Between 1872 and 1884, until the opening of the Palais universitaire, it was used by the newly established Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität, the Imperial German version of the University of Strasbourg, as the seat of the faculties of law, philosophy, and sciences.

[29] After this, the palace again became the property of the city and was adapted to receive the municipal art collections that were being built up again by director Wilhelm von Bode after their total destruction during the Siege of Strasbourg (see below, Musée des beaux-arts).

[32] After the war, restoration measures were soon undertaken under the supervision of the architects Robert Danis (1879–1949)[33] and Bertrand Monnet (1910–1989),[34] but in 1947 a fire broke out and devastated a significant part of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts.

[22][38][23] Napoleon's second wife, Empress Marie Louise, spent her first nights on French soil in the palace, from 22 to 25 March 1810; she came from Austria like Marie-Antoinette.

On 8 May 1985, American President Ronald Reagan dined in the Palace and signed the official Strasbourg guestbook, on the occasion of his visit to the European Parliament.

[41][42] In December 1989, the Palais Rohan hosted the dinner parties of the heads of state of the European Council, including François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Giulio Andreotti and Felipe González.

The terrace before it, facing the quai des Bateliers, is closed at both ends by elaborate wrought-iron gates adorned with the coat of arms of the House of Rohan.

[48] The riverside façade is formed by the main residential bulk and the library wing on the west side, which offers a contrast in shape and design, notably through its single, very large window.

[49] The library wing was not part of the original 1727 plan but was conceived in 1733, after the cardinal bought up and demolished a row of houses on the current rue de Rohan.

The architect, Robert de Cotte, was thus able to distribute the interior spaces of the residential bulk on an even grander and also more practical plan, notably putting the main staircase to the left (east) of the apartment wing instead of the centre.

The upper part of the front section is crowned with statues representing allegories of faith such as "Religion" and "Eucharist", and personifications of Christian virtues such as "Mercy" and "Penance".

The wooden portal (oak) and the walls east and west of the gate are decorated with trophies and heraldic symbols relating to the House of Rohan and the episcopal polity.

Some works of art, including the overdoors from the Salle des évêques, part of the municipal collections, were destroyed with the museum situated in the Aubette when the Prussian Army shelled the city during the Siege of Strasbourg in 1870.

[21] In the 20th century and especially during the reconstruction following the bomb damage of August 1944, a great deal of effort went into locating the surviving missing objects and replacing the lost works with identical or similar pieces.

The set of eight 17th-century Italian busts of Roman emperors in the Salle des évêques belonged to the personal collection of Cardinal Mazarin.

The floor of the chapel is partly covered with a 1745[N 5] imitation of a Turkish carpet, woven in the Aubusson manufactory and bearing in its centre the coat of arms of Armand Gaston de Rohan.

[64] On display in most of the rooms are surviving works from Louis René de Rohan's vast collection of Japanese vases and Chinese pottery and lacquerware from the Ming and Qing dynasties, originally destined for the new castle in Saverne.

[66] A pair of large canvases with hunting dogs by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1742), now hanging in the Salle du synode, once hung in the Parisian hôtel particulier of Samuel-Jacques Bernard.

[66] The three paintings in the chapel are copies of works by Antonio da Correggio: Adoration of the Shepherds, Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Madeleine, and The Rest on the Return from Egypt.

[70] The other paintings on the walls belong to the Musée des beaux-arts, including Louis XV offrant la Paix à L'Europe ("Louis XV presenting Peace to Europe", 1737) by François Lemoyne, on display in the Garde-robe du prince-évêque,[71] and La déification d'Énée ("The Deification of Aeneas", 1749) by Jean II Restout, on display in the Chambre du prince-évêque.

The collections present an overview of European art from the 13th century to 1871, with considerable weight given to Italian as well as Flemish and Dutch paintings, with artists such as Hans Memling, Correggio, Anthony van Dyck, Giotto, Pieter de Hooch, Botticelli, Jacob Jordaens, and Tintoretto, among many others.

The collections of Upper Rhenish art until 1681 (Baldung, Hemmel, Stoskopff, Witz, and others) had been moved into the dedicated Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame in 1931.

[75] The collections had previously been in the Renaissance former municipal slaughterhouse Grandes Boucheries or Große Metzig, which now hosts the Musée historique de Strasbourg.

[76]) The Musée des arts décoratifs suffered in the World War II bombing raids of 1944 but the building has since been restored and the collections replenished.

[79] The museum displays finds from northern Alsace from the Paleolithic Era to the Merovingian dynasty, with a special focus on Argentoratum.