Comédie-Française, the House of Molière at the Palais-Royal since 1680

The Comédie-Française is a theatre company founded on 21 October 1680 by Louis XIV and settled since 1799 in the Salle Richelieu, at the Palais-Royal. The royal order merged Molière’s company, led by La Grange at the Hôtel Guénégaud, with that of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.

Molière, dead for seven years, remains its patron, and the house is known as the House of Molière: the armchair in which he was taken ill while playing The Imaginary Invalid stands in the peristyle. The company played on rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, at the Tuileries and then the Odéon, before being closed and imprisoned in 1793.

On 31 May 1799 it moved into the Salle Richelieu designed by Victor Louis. On 15 October 1812 Napoleon signed the Moscow decree that still governs it. After the fire of 1900 Julien Guadet rebuilt the hall, Albert Besnard painted its ceiling in 1913 and Olivier Debré its curtain in 1987.

On place Colette the Comédie-Française is still the only national theatre with a permanent troupe, under the motto Simul et singulis and the emblem of the beehive. The troupe plays in the Salle Richelieu and at the Studio-Théâtre in the Carrousel du Louvre, opened in 1996.