The Kings

Outside Paris: Versailles: A Brief History: The Kings

<< The Palace || Guided Tours >>

In 1682, the Château de Versailles was ready for Louis and his thousands of courtiers and government ministers to move in. Life inside this gilded heaven revolved around the Sun King’s every movement, from his ceremonial “Rising” and “Setting” in the royal bedchamber to his musical and theatrical performances in the royal gardens. He controlled his nobles like puppets, keeping them in line with a complex system of court etiquette and a never-ending schedule of feasts and entertainment. These were the country’s Golden Years of unmatched musical, theatrical and artistic glory. And, although the cost of maintaining Versailles occasionally caused a grumble among the nation’s taxpayers, no other French king has ever matched the power that Louis XIV had over his kingdom. As he so confidently declared, l’Etat, c’est moi (I am the State).

His successors at Versailles, Louis XV and Louis XVI, were considerably less ostentatious. They ruled from behind closed doors and spent most of their days within the private apartments, remodeled to suit their personal tastes. Most of the changes during Louis XV’s reign (such as the Petit Trianon) were designed to accommodate his mistress Madame de Pompadour, while the shy Louis XVI added an outdoor theater and rustic, lake-side house and dairy farm to entertain his demanding wife, Marie Antoinette.

On October 5, 1789, a revolutionary mob broke into the private apartments and forcibly escorted the royal couple back to Paris where they could keep an eye on them. It was the end of Versailles as the royal seat of power, and a year later the artworks and furnishing were auctioned off.

Napoleon was able to recover many of these lost treasures during his reign, but the château was falling into decline, and the town virtually deserted. The fate of Versailles was looking grim until the Restoration monarch Louis-Philippe used his own money to turn the château into a Museum of French History in 1830. It reappeared briefly in the limelight during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the French government fled Paris and chose Versailles as their base of operations, and again in 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles put an end to World War I. The French state continued developing the museum collections, and in the 1920s began the long process of restoring the château itself, with extensive restorations of the gardens, galleries, stables and original royal apartments. Versailles continues to play an important role in the French Republic, with one wing reserved for joint Parliamentary sessions, and the Grand Trianon transformed into prestigious quarters for presidential guests such as Queen Elizabeth II, Ronald Regan, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

null Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford (Random House, 1954; New York Review of Books, 2001) Athénaïs: The Life of Louis XIV’s Mistress, the Real Queen of France by Lisa Hilton (Little, Brown, 2002) André Le Nôtre: Gardener to the Sun King by Erik Orsenna (George Braziller, Inc., 2001) The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette by Chantal Thomas (Zone Books, 1999) Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

<< The Palace || Guided Tours >>