Presentation of the Hotel d'Aumont:
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a property belonging to the Cousinot, a family of magistrates, was located on the present site of the administrative court of Paris. But it was in 1644 that Michel-Antoine Scarron, advisor to the king and uncle of the poet Paul Scarron, found the building he had acquired in 1619 too old, had it destroyed and replaced by the current hotel built on the plans of Le Vau. The construction was completed in 1648 and it was in this year that the son-in-law of Michel-Antoine Scarron, the Duke of Aumont, began to inhabit it. Having become Marshal of France, he acquired the hotel in 1656, enlarged it and had the main building transformed. At the end of this work in 1660, the whole property consists of four buildings around a courtyard of honour: one on the street, its two wings and, in the background, the main building. The two wings are composed of a ground floor with four arcades with attic. These wings, like the façade of the building on the street, are adorned with fairly massive and thick garlands and mascarons. On the garden side, the main main building is triple the length of the courtyard and has seventeen windows. The facade on this side is decorated with sashes, garlands, mascarons, wrought iron balconies with the monogram A.D., Antoine d'Aumont. The interior lounges are decorated with paintings by Simon Vouet and Le Brun. There remains the Le Brun lounge occupied today by the reading room of the library, which features the sculpted vault of the ceiling as well as the eight embedded paintings depicting the apotheosis of Romulus. The “Beam Room” is named after the painted beam and joist ceiling that was found in 1949 under the stucco that masked it and that likely predated the construction of the hotel. Later developments, from the early 18th century, remain «the new Cabinet» which is currently the office of the President of the Tribunal. This room has been restored identically thanks to the drawings of the woodwork found on the walls. We can still see a small room called the «oratory» whose woodwork was found under the layers of paint. The hotel belonged to the Aumont family until 1756. Several owners succeeded each other: Charles Sandrié, contractor of the king’s buildings, Pierre Terray, master of petitions from 1743 to 1749, then attorney general of the Court of Aids until 1780. The hotel was sold by his heirs in 1795. From 1802 to 1824, the building was rented to be the town hall of the 9th district of the time. Between 1824 and 1859, the Hotel d'Aumont was occupied by the Petit Institution, which housed residents of the Lycée Charlemagne. The interior fittings were then substantially modified to install dormitories, refectories and study rooms. The hotel underwent new transformations when it became the property of the Central Pharmacy of France in 1859, the garden then disappears under the hangars, shed, stalls that house laboratories, packing and shipping rooms, The panelled lounges are transformed into offices and shops. In 1938, the Hotel d'Aumont was bought by the City of Paris, which refurbished it and obtained its classification. The administrative tribunal moved there in 1959. It currently has three courtrooms, two of which are accessible by the porch at the back of the court on the left, while the third is level on the court and accessible to the handicapped.
Presentation of the Administrative Court of Paris:
It is difficult to understand the specificity of the administrative court of Paris without going back to the history of the institution to which it succeeded, the Conseil de Préfecture de la Seine. Like the other Prefecture Councils, that of the Seine was created by the law of 28 Pluviôse an VIII. If this identity of structure remained for nearly sixty years, the decree of 17 March 1863 was to mark the specificity of the Conseil de Préfecture de la Seine. Indeed, while all the other Prefecture Councils continued to be, at least in law, presided over by the prefect of each department, this decree endowed the Prefecture Council of the Seine with a President: thus appeared, in Paris, a structure that will not be taken over for the other Prefecture Councils until 1926. In addition, from 1863, the Conseil de Préfecture de la Seine will be subdivided into sections. The organization of this Council, as defined in 1863, was sufficiently innovative and marked by the desire to establish an independent first-degree administrative court to be taken up in its outline by the Tribunal administratif de Paris during its creation in 1953.The members of the Conseil de Préfecture de la Seine were part of a particular body, holder of a rank roughly equivalent to that of president of a provincial Prefecture Council. From the decree of September 6, 1926, a progressive movement of integration of this specific body and that of the other members of the prefecture councils was initiated, but it was not until 1963 that a single status was achieved. The law of 28 Pluviôse An VIII had set the number of members of the Conseil de Préfecture de la Seine at five. This figure subsequently varied greatly: in 1863, seven members including the president; in 1926, the president, two presidents of sections and ten councillors, including four government commissioners; in 1954, the president, three presidents of sections, eight councilors-rapporteurs and six government commissioners, for a total of eighteen magistrates; in 1966, the president, the vice president, seven section presidents, seven section vice presidents and twenty-nine councillors. Currently, the tribunal has a chairperson, a vice-chairperson, six section chairpersons (since the reduction in the number of sections due to the creation of the Melun Administrative Tribunal), twelve section vice-chairpersons and sixty-five councillors, of which 18 are public rapporteurs (former government commissioners). At the time of its creation, the Administrative Court of Paris was competent for the department of the Seine. Without changing geographical jurisdiction, it became, due to the reform of the Paris region in 1964, an interdepartmental court (Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Val de Marne, Seine-Saint-Denis). Then its geographical jurisdiction was amputated from the department of Val-de-Marne with the creation of the administrative court of Melun in 1996, then of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis with the creation of the administrative court of Cergy-Pontoise in 2000, and finally of the department of Hauts-Hauts-Denisde Seine with the transfer of the litigation from this department to the administrative court of Versailles since 1 September 2004. It is therefore again a unidepartemental court, its jurisdiction comprising the only department of Paris.