Last Wednesday, February 18, during a meeting of the Office of the National Assembly, President Yaël Braun-Pivet announced that the project for a new reception pavilion at the Palais-Bourbon is suspended. To avoid the rejection of the building permit as it stands, the National Assembly withdrew the request submitted in June, pending the next municipal elections. “The building permit was submitted in June 2025, but it requires a modification of the protection and development plan (PSMV)” Yaël Braun-Pivet’s office told La Chaîne Parlementaire (LCP). The office therefore prefers to wait for the new majority of the VII town hall to make a request for modification of the PSMV.
The future reception pavilion arouses opposition from heritage defenders and certain elected officials. Sites & Monuments thus denounces the deterioration of the historic site. The current pavilion “modest, well integrated” would be replaced by a two-story glass building of 4,000 m², with a facade of four glass tubes, part of a larger program of works of around 53 million euros financed by the National Assembly.
If it sees the light of day, the new pavilion will have the same dimensions as the current one (ten meters high), built in 1888 by the architect Edmond de Joly. It will house the Palais-Bourbon boutique and a cafeteria with around fifty seats upstairs, with changing rooms and an auditorium. It must serve as a new welcome for the 170,000 annual visitors to the National Assembly, drawing inspiration from the examples of the European Parliament or the Reichstag in Berlin.
Guest of the Association of Parliamentary Press Journalists in July 2025, Yaël Braun-Pivet declared that “anyone who comes to the National Assembly one day knows that we welcome the public in deplorable conditions (…) not those worthy of a democracy”.
The National Assembly.
