Hôtel Saint-Maximin

The handsome baroque house across from the cathedral, with the ministers' cars outside, has the oldest connection in the city. In 963 Count Siegfried acquired the rock of the Bock, and its ruined Roman fort, from the abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier. The abbey never left. Like the other great monasteries of the region it kept a refuge inside the walls of Luxembourg — a town house where its monks could shelter if their abbey was threatened, and, more usefully in the eighteenth century, where the abbey did its business and showed its face in the capital. Two monks lived here permanently, and when the Habsburg rulers came to town, this is where they stayed.

The building you see was put up in 1751 by Abbot Willibrord Scheffer: three storeys, with the main door on the Rue Notre-Dame and the words Refugium Abbatiae S. Maximini over it. The two coats of arms on the wings are older, from the previous house of 1663, and belong to Abbot Maximinus von Gülich. The Revolution secularised it in 1802 and it passed into private hands, until in 1839 the German Confederation bought it as the residence of the governor of the fortress. When the Prussian garrison left in 1867, the government of the newly independent country moved in, and it has been the seat of government ever since — the Foreign Ministry until 2017, and since 2019 the Ministry of State, which is to say the Prime Minister's office. The main entrance has moved round to the Place de Clairefontaine.

The other great refuge in the city, that of the abbey of Orval, stands on the Rue du Saint-Esprit and now houses the City History Museum.