Four kings, one revolution and a treaty that redrew the world: the story behind the gold.
Versailles began as a swamp with good hunting. That it became the political center of Europe for a century, the model copied by every ambitious monarch from Potsdam to Saint Petersburg, is the work of one king's will and fifty years of construction.
Knowing the story transforms the visit. The Hall of Mirrors is impressive as decoration; as the room where German unification was proclaimed in 1871 and where the First World War formally ended in 1919, it becomes unforgettable.
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Book NowLouis XIII built a modest brick hunting lodge at Versailles in 1623. His son Louis XIV, scarred as a child by a noble uprising in Paris called the Fronde, resolved to move power away from the capital and its mobs. From 1661 he expanded the lodge relentlessly, employing the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the gardener André Le Nôtre.
In 1682 Louis made Versailles the official seat of government. Up to 10,000 courtiers, ministers and servants lived on site. Forcing the nobility to reside at court, competing for the honor of handing the king his shirt, was deliberate politics: aristocrats busy with etiquette were not raising armies in their provinces.
Life at Versailles ran on ceremony. The king's rising, the lever, and his going to bed, the coucher, were public performances with tickets of rank. The Hall of Mirrors, completed in 1684 with 357 mirrors at a time when mirrors cost more than paintings, existed to overwhelm ambassadors before negotiations began.
Louis XV and Louis XVI added private corners to escape the machine: the Petit Trianon, the opera house, hidden apartments behind the state rooms. The court's isolation from ordinary France grew in step with its refinement, a fact the 1780s would price in.
Marie Antoinette arrived from Austria at 14 to marry the future Louis XVI. Versailles etiquette suffocated her, and the Petit Trianon and her Hamlet became a private world where invitation lists ignored rank, which the excluded nobility never forgave.
On 5 October 1789, a crowd of Parisian market women marched on Versailles demanding bread. The next day the royal family was escorted to Paris, never to return as rulers. The palace's contents were auctioned by the Revolution; the buildings survived largely because no one could agree what to do with them.
Louis-Philippe saved the palace in 1837 by converting it into a museum dedicated to all the glories of France. History kept choosing the Hall of Mirrors: the German Empire was proclaimed there in 1871 after France's defeat, and the Allies deliberately chose the same room to sign the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919.
Today the estate is a UNESCO World Heritage Site welcoming around 8 million visitors a year, with restoration permanently underway. The Latona Fountain, the Royal Gate, torn down in the Revolution and rebuilt in 2008, and the replanted gardens mean today's visitor arguably sees Versailles closer to Louis XIV's vision than any generation since 1789.
Louis XIII built the first hunting lodge in 1623. Louis XIV transformed it into the palace we know between 1661 and 1710, with architects Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, painter Charles Le Brun and landscape designer André Le Nôtre.
Louis XIV wanted the seat of power away from Paris after the Fronde uprisings of his childhood, and a stage grand enough to control the nobility through court life. Versailles was both a residence and a political instrument.
The Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War was signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The room was chosen deliberately: the German Empire had been proclaimed in the same hall in 1871.
Yes, from her marriage in 1770 until the Revolution forced the royal family to Paris in October 1789. Her private domain, the Petit Trianon and the Queen's Hamlet, can be visited with a Passport or Trianon ticket.
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