On 13 February 1820 the Duc de Berry, son of the future Charles X and heir to the throne of France, went to the Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra) in the Rue Richelieu to see a one-act opera, Le Rossignol, with music by Louis-Sébastien Lebrun, and two ballets, Le Carnaval de Venise and Les Noces de Gamache. At the interval he left the theatre by a side door opening on to the Rue Rameau to escort his wife Marie-Caroline to her carriage. At that precise moment a thirty-seven-year-old Parisian workman, a saddler by trade named Louvel who had vowed to exterminate the whole Bourbon dynasty, hurled himself at the prince and thrust a dagger into his chest. He did not die until half past six next morning.

The king, Louis XVIII, immediately ordered the cessation of all performances at the Opéra, and soon after, in deference to the archbishop of Paris, ordered the total destruction of the theatre. On the site of the theatre where Napoleon had attended the premières of Le Sueur's Ossian and Spontini's La Vestale (now named the Square Louvois) a memorial chapel was proposed, but all that was erected was a modest fountain. This fountain is today well known to scholars emerging for respite from the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque Nationale after a long day of musicological travail.

The construction of a new opera house was put in hand at once and completed in time for its opening sixteen months later on 16 August 1821. The site chosen for the new theatre was a little further north, in the Rue Le Peletier. It was close to the Salle Favart (where the Opéra-Comique now stands) but, significantly, it was on the other side of the Boulevard des Italiens, the ancient defensive rampart of Paris, in what is now the IXe Arrondissement.