Hôtel de Crillon

What you're looking at right now is not a hotel in any ordinary sense. This neoclassical palace was designed in 1758 by royal architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, commissioned by Louis XV himself as one of two matching state buildings framing the square. A young Marie-Antoinette took piano lessons in a salon on the first floor, looking out over this very square. Years later, the guillotine stood just outside that same building. The irony is hard to swallow.

In 1778, Benjamin Franklin sat inside these walls and signed the first treaties between France and the United States, formally recognizing American independence. The Crillon family moved in from 1788, giving the building its name, and somehow managed to keep living here straight through the Revolution, while the square outside ran red.

When German forces arrived in June 1940, General Von Studnitz took over the hotel and summoned the police prefect to establish order. During the Liberation in August 1944, German soldiers fired from inside the building at French tanks, and a column collapsed onto a car, scarring the facade you see today.

The building reopened as a luxury hotel in 1909, and somewhere in its kitchens around 1929, a struggling young writer named George Orwell scrubbed pots and pans. He would later turn that humiliation into a celebrated book. Not every guest gets to check out a classic.