How luxury hotels such as Biarritz’s Hôtel du Palais have helped shape history | Martin Kettle

The venue for this weekend’s G7 summit played a pivotal role in Edwardian politics

Few hotels in the world can claim a more storied past than the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, where the G7 rich nation summiteers will sit in splendour to discuss world poverty this weekend. Guarded by hundreds of riot police, Emmanuel Macron and his guests will meet inside what the French newspaper Libération this week called their “gold bunker” – the ornate Second Empire hotel that stands on the beach at the heart of a luxury Atlantic coast resort town that is still, as Libé put it in the original Franglais, “une des capitales françaises du bling-bling”.

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