Built for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, it was not intended to outlast the event; although the building was eventually preserved for some sixty years, it was widely criticized for its architectural style, its progressive dilapidation, and the poor acoustics of its main hall, which was soon deserted by orchestras.

From the mid-1860s onwards, the Chaillot hill underwent "earthworks and levelling" to provide a panoramic view of the 1867 Exposition Universelle facilities on the Rive Gauche (Left Bank), and to create the Champ-de-Mars park.

[10] The square, then still called "Place du Roi de Rome", was linked to the Pont d'Iéna by a granite staircase.

[10] The palace was designed by architects Gabriel Davioud and Jules Bourdais, inspired by the Giralda in Seville, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,[11] and, above all, by Baron Haussmann's 1864 project for a 10,000-person hall, the Orphéon, which was to have been built on the Place du Château d'Eau.

[19] Alongside this, the Palais du Trocadéro hosted the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and 1900, whose installations were mainly located on the Champ-de-Mars (the most notable being the Eiffel Tower, also initially built on a temporary basis).

On 15 April 1889, a supplement to Le Figaro noted: "If you want to get a good idea of the Exposition Universelle as a whole, the best way is to stand at the central point of the Trocadéro Palace, in the middle of the circular gallery overlooking the gilded statues of the five parts of the world.

[20] For the 1900 exhibition, the pavilions of the French colonies and protectorates were set up in the palace gardens,[20] and the Iéna bridge was "widened with wooden sidewalks"[21] (it was completely enlarged in 1935, from 14 to 35 meters).

Between 1878 and 1925, an Indochinese museum, the result of discoveries made by explorer Louis Delaporte, occupied a third of the palace's Passy wing; the objects on display were then transferred to the Musée Guimet, with the exception of 624 plaster casts from the temple of Angkor, which remained at Trocadéro, donated in 1936 to the Musée des Monuments Français, housed in the new Palais de Chaillot.

[nb 2][22] Unlike other Parisian monuments that were initially decried, but quickly accepted by elites and the general public (such as the Palais Garnier and the Eiffel Tower), the Trocadéro Palace was the subject of numerous and recurring criticisms in the decades following its construction: the disdain of architects and writers, a style deemed obsolete, and the faulty acoustics of the assembly hall.

[23] The press and other personalities mocked the building, such as the humorist Touchatout, who compared the statue overhanging the dome of the Assembly Hall to a "fly on the lid of a soup tureen", or Joris-Karl Huysmans, who referred to the palace as "the belly of a lying hydropic woman", while the writer André Billy declared "Down with the Trocadéro!"

Julien Green spoke of Moorish "abominations" and modernist architect Georges-Henri Pingusson enthused that the 1937 exhibition had "the merit of liberating one of the most beautiful sites in Paris by demolishing the central building that had both damaged and obstructed it".

Draughts from the galleries and acoustics in the main hall had also been a recurring problem since the building's construction, despite several attempts to remedy the situation.

In the autumn of 1933, Anatole de Monzie, Minister of Education, who was then overseeing the field of Culture, supported a project to build a Cité des musées in place of the palace, "centered on a vast esplanade both open and covered by a gigantic 190-meter-wide portico, punctuated by 23 columns".

[25] Eight projects were selected in January 1935, won by the Carlu-Boileau-Azéma trio, who planned to permanently camouflage the palace so as to preserve the wings (originally, the two towers were also to remain).

[29] They chose to "interweave" the wings of the old palace by "doubling them with a new gallery on the Seine side", but to demolish the auditorium and the two towers and replace them with a simple esplanade, on the "Eiffel Tower-École Militaire axis", while a "new theater hall [was] built under this square".

[30] The magazine La Nature noted in its issue for the second half of 1936: "A blow to the Trocadéro arcades: built to last for centuries, the old palace will have been demolished after fifty-seven years".

[11] The architects chose to play with polychrome colors, such as Pompeian red plaster under the porticoes and Jura marble on the columns of the vestibules at the head pavilions.

[37] Pierced by nine bay windows (a modern architectural technique at the time) directly illuminating the large stage, the hall was crowned by a dome, surmounted on the outside by a statue by Antonin Mercié, La Renommée, while below, a gallery of sculptures punctuated the façade.

[14] On 8 June 1878, a journalist from the weekly Le Monde artiste wrote of the first official concert presented in the hall: it was "truly grandiose [...], with a richness bordering on prodigality.

[40] In April 1920, Pierre Rameil, rapporteur for the Beaux-arts budget, announced the transformation of the Trocadéro into the Théâtre national populaire, directed by Firmin Gémier.

On the Place du Trocadéro side, a series of statues were planned for the gable wall, but their absence from the palace photographs suggests that they were never built.

La Renommée, by Mercié, is a statue of a "winged, draped and ringing woman", crowning the large dome of the Salle des Fêtes.

[23] While the general structure of the wings and certain underpinnings were preserved (notably the underground galleries designed by Viollet-le-Duc, which remain[43]), the ornaments were removed and relocated.

The Continents statues that once adorned the façade of the Palais du Trocadéro were reinstalled in 1985 on the Musée d'Orsay esplanade, along the rue de Lille.

[54] Contrary to a persistent legend, Isidore Bonheur's Les Taureaux, in front of Parc Georges-Brassens (15th arrondissement), did not come from the Trocadéro.Since the construction of the Trocadéro Palace and well afterwards, contemporaries have commented on the building's style, expressing astonishment, indignation or, on the contrary, praise: The Trocadéro Palace appears in Claude Autant-Lara's films Love Story (1943), Gigi (1949), A Very Long Engagement (2004), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), Diary of a Chambermaid (2015), Eiffel (2021), in the video game The Saboteur (2009) and in the animated film Ballerina (2016).