Charles Girault (1851–1932) was a French architect of the Beaux-Arts tradition, best known for the great exhibition buildings of the Paris Exposition of 1900. Born in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, he studied under Honoré Daumet at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in 1880 won the Prix de Rome with a design for a children's hospital by the Mediterranean. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1902 and received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1920. His later career took him to Belgium, where King Leopold II commissioned several public works.
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For the 1900 Exposition he won the competition for the Petit Palais (1900), a trapezoid around a garden courtyard whose columns, porch and dome echo Les Invalides across the river; it now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts. At the neighbouring Grand Palais (1900) he oversaw the work of the three other architects. In Brussels he designed the Cinquantenaire Arcade (1905) for Leopold II, and at Tervuren the Royal Museum for Central Africa (AfricaMuseum) (1910), first built as a colonial museum for the king's Congo Free State and reopened after renovation in 2018.
