The first structure was the Palais du Gouvernement, built in the eighteenth century as the residence of the French governor general of Saint-Domingue. After Haitian independence, it became the home of General Alexandre Petion, the country's first president. Visitors described a building of painted wood with black-and-white marble floors, tasteful furniture, and pleasantly cool apartments -- practical rather than grand. In front of the palace stood Petion's marble tomb. By 1850, the building had been rechristened the Imperial Palace, home to Emperor Faustin I and Empress Adelina. An American editor named John Bigelow visited that year and found a richly carved bronze clock representing Haiti's coat of arms -- a palm tree surmounted by the Phrygian cap -- and walls hung with portraits of the nation's heroes. The building survived coups and political upheaval for decades before the revolt of 1869 destroyed it entirely.

The replacement palace, completed in 1881, drew mixed reviews. National Geographic called it 'a rather ugly structure of glistening gray white, with apparently a good deal of corrugated iron about it,' though conceding it contained some fine rooms. This building met its end on August 8, 1912, when the ammunition stored within it exploded, killing President Leconte and hundreds of soldiers. The subsequent design competition produced a winning entry deemed too expensive to build, so the second-place plan -- by Robert Baussan, an architect who had studied under Le Corbusier and was the son of a Haitian senator -- was selected instead. Construction began in May 1914 with a budget of $350,000. Within a year, a mob stormed the half-finished palace, set it ablaze, and assassinated President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. U.S. forces then occupied the country and their naval engineers completed the building by 1920.

The finished palace was a striking exercise in French Renaissance architecture -- white-painted reinforced concrete, two stories tall, shaped like the letter E with three wings extending from the main facade. Ionic columns supported a pedimented portico beneath a central dome, flanked by matching domed pavilions at each end. American visitor John Dryden Kuser described it in 1920 as more than twice the size of the White House, with primary rooms measuring roughly forty feet square and huge columns rising to the ceiling in the main hall. For ninety years, Baussan's palace served as the seat of Haitian government -- surviving the Duvalier dictatorships, multiple coups, and cycles of political turmoil that would have been remarkable anywhere else but seemed almost routine in Port-au-Prince.

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck sixteen kilometers from Port-au-Prince. The second floor of the National Palace collapsed almost entirely, taking the attic with it. The columned central pavilion -- the main hall, the grand staircase -- was demolished. The image of the crumpled cupola became an international symbol of the devastation. President Rene Preval and his wife were at their private residence in another part of the city and survived. The ruins stood for two years before the Martelly administration ordered them demolished in 2012. President Jovenel Moise announced reconstruction plans in 2017, promising a modernized, earthquake-resistant interior behind the restored classical facade. As of 2026, not a single stone has been laid. The grounds remain the nominal seat of government, but gang warfare has forced the Presidential Council to operate mostly from the Prime Minister's Office. Armed groups have repeatedly fired on the palace grounds while government officials were present -- a fitting continuation of a site where power and destruction have always been inseparable.