The Hôtel des Ambassadeurs is a large Belle Époque hotel just off the Parc des Sources, now converted to private residences, which served as one of the key buildings of the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. During that period it housed the German Armistice Commission, the body through which Nazi Germany exercised oversight of the collaborationist French state operating from the surrounding hotels. The building sits directly on the WWII historical circuit that Vichy has developed, and a commemorative marker records its wartime function.
As architecture, the building is representative of the grand hotel style that made Vichy so distinctive: tall, confident, ornate without being excessive, built to impress visitors who expected comfort and grandeur as a matter of course. The quality of this built environment is what made the city so useful to the wartime government — it offered ready-made ministerial premises of a standard that most provincial French cities could not have provided. Walking the streets around the Parc des Sources and the casino with this context in mind transforms the experience from a simple architectural appreciation into something considerably more complex.