Fontainebleau began as a royal hunting residence in the forest southeast of Paris. A twelfth-century keep and the oval form of the oldest courtyard preserve evidence of the medieval château used by French kings. Francis I launched a fundamental rebuilding after 1528, keeping the old keep while surrounding it with Renaissance apartments, courts, galleries, and gardens. Italian artists including Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio worked with French craftspeople to create the School of Fontainebleau, whose stucco, fresco, woodwork, and ornamental designs strongly influenced art across northern Europe.

Successive Valois and Bourbon monarchs treated Fontainebleau as both residence and building site. Henry II and Catherine de' Medici expanded ceremonial rooms, Henry IV added wings, canals, and service areas, and Louis XIII was born there. Louis XIV continued works but increasingly favored Versailles. Court life depended on ministers, guards, artists, servants, laborers, and nearby communities, while the surrounding forest supported elite hunting and royal control of land. The château's apartments, chapels, theaters, staircases, gardens, and collections consequently represent overlapping campaigns rather than a single architectural design.

The French Revolution dispersed furnishings and converted the palace to state uses without destroying the entire complex. Napoleon I restored Fontainebleau as an imperial residence, refurnished apartments, created the surviving throne room, and altered decoration to express his dynasty. In April 1814 he signed an abdication there and bid farewell to his guard in the Horseshoe Staircase courtyard. Later monarchs carried out further renovation, while the Second Empire again used the château for court life. The national museum tradition developed after the fall of imperial rule.

Fontainebleau retains major medieval, Renaissance, Bourbon, Napoleonic, and nineteenth-century fabric, but its apparent completeness results from continuous adaptation and conservation. Rooms were redecorated, furnishings removed and reacquired, galleries repainted, roofs renewed, and lost finishes reconstructed from inventories and comparison. The famous Horseshoe Staircase is a seventeenth-century replacement of an earlier feature; Napoleon's rooms are authentic imperial ensembles with later conservation, not medieval spaces. Modern climate, fire, electrical, security, accessibility, and exhibition systems occupy the functioning museum. Gardens likewise reflect repeated redesign and restoration.

A public institution under France's Ministry of Culture administers the château and gardens, inscribed by UNESCO in 1981. Palace routes, apartments, events, and restoration areas have ticketed or changing access, while parts of the park may be open separately. Interpretation should use the layered fabric to explain monarchy, artistic exchange, imperial power, domestic labor, revolution, and state preservation. Fontainebleau is valuable precisely because sovereigns repeatedly transformed it. Identifying medieval remnants, Renaissance originals, Napoleonic refurnishing, nineteenth-century renovation, and modern conservation prevents the misleading impression of one intact royal moment.