Lutetia Hotel, French culture German WW2

The Lutetia hotel was one of Paris’ landmarks, a monument to the city’s cultural memory where art, history and luxury met. In Dec 1910 Lutetia was opened by Marguerite and Aristide Boucicaut, visionary founders of Le Bon Marché. They created a hotel to welcome the department store’s wealthy clientele and reflect the cosmopolitan Left Bank. The result was unlike any other in Paris: a fusion of Art Nouveau exuberance and nascent Art Deco restraint, its grand façade with sculptural reliefs.front entrance and facade Lutetia always attracted the elite, wealthy visitors, artists, intellectuals and writers who helped define C20th culture. James Joyce corrected proofs of Ulysses inside, Picasso, Matisse and André Gide were regulars and Josephine Baker gave jazz rhythm to its salons. A unique blend of high society and arty avant-garde! Author Jane Rogoyska focused on this fashionable grand hotel from 1933-45 in Hotel Exile. She wrote of the hotel’s war events before, in and after the German…