The Palace of Versailles is a royal château in Versailles, Yvelines, in the Île-de-France region of France. When the château was built, Versailles was a country village; today, however, it is a suburb of Paris, some 20 kilometres southwest of the French capital. The court of Versailles was the centre of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in October 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution. Versailles is therefore famous not only as a building, but as well as a symbol of the system of absolute monarchy of the Ancien Régime.

Origins The earliest mention of the name of Versailles is found in a document which predates 1038, the Charter of the Saint-Père de Chartres Abbey,Guérard 1840, p. 125. in which one of the signatories was a certain Hugo de Versailliis (Hugues de Versailles), who was seigneur of Versailles.Guérard 1840, p. xiv.

During this period, the village of Versailles centred on a small castle and church, and the area was governed by a local lord. Its location on the road from Paris to Dreux and Normandy brought some prosperity to the village but, following an outbreak of the Plague and the Hundred Years' War, the village was largely destroyed, and its population sharply declined.Bluche, 1990; Thompson, 2006; Verlet, 1985. In 1575, Albert de Gondi, a naturalized Florentine who gained prominence at the court of Henry II, purchased the seigneury of Versailles.

Ancien Régime

Louis XIII In the early seventeenth century, Gondi invited Louis XIII on several hunting trips in the forests surrounding Versailles. Pleased with the location, Louis ordered the construction of a hunting lodge in 1624. Designed by Philibert Le Roy, the structure, a small château, was constructed of stone and red brick, with a based roof. Eight years later, Louis obtained the seigneury of Versailles from the Gondi family and began to make enlargements to the château.Batiffol, 1913; Bluche, 1991; Marie, 1968; Nolhac, 1901; Verlet, 1985

A vignette of Versailles from the 1652 Paris map of shows a traditional design: an entrance court with a corps de logis on the far western end, flanked by secondary wings on the north and south sides, and closed off by an entrance screen. Adjacent exterior towers were located at the four corners, with the entire structure surrounded by a moat. This was preceded by two service wings, creating a forecourt with a grilled entrance marked by two round towers. The vignette also shows a garden on the western side of the château with a fountain on the central axis and rectangular planted parterres to either side.Hazlehurst 1980, p. 60.

Louis XIV had played and hunted at the site as a boy.Versailles, The Dream of a King, directed by Paul Burgess, BBC TV With a few modifications, this structure would become the core of the new palace.

Louis XIV

Louis XIII's successor, Louis XIV, chose the royal hunting lodge at Versailles as his main residence, and over several decades expanded it into one of the largest palaces in the world.Félibien, 1703; Marie, 1972; Verlet, 1985. Beginning in 1661, the architect Louis Le Vau, landscape architect André Le Nôtre, and painter-decorator Charles Le Brun began a detailed renovation and expansion of the château. This was done to fulfill Louis XIV's desire to establish a new centre for the royal court. Following the Treaties of Nijmegen in 1678, he began to gradually move the court to Versailles. The court was officially established there on 6 May 1682.Berger 2008, p. 27.

By moving his court and government to Versailles, Louis XIV hoped to extract more control of the government from the nobility and to distance himself from the population of Paris. From February 10, 1671, on, he never spent a night in Paris, and during the subsequent 45 years, he visited his nominal capital only 18 times. In addition to whatever fear of the Parisian masses he harboured, he was motivated, according to historian Philip Mansel, by "his desire for more freedom with his mistresses, more space in which to drill troops and, above all, his growing love of country pleasures - hunting, riding, gardening, walking." All the power of the Kingdom of France now emanated from Versailles: there were government offices, as well as the homes of thousands of courtiers, their retinues, and all the attendant functionaries of court.Solnon, 1987. By requiring that nobles of a certain rank and position spend time each year at Versailles, Louis prevented them from developing their own regional power at the expense of his own and kept them from countering his efforts to centralise the French government in an absolute monarchy.Bluche, 1986, 1991; Bendix, 1978; Solnon, 1987. The meticulous and strict court etiquette that Louis established, which overwhelmed his heirs with its petty boredom, was epitomised in the elaborate ceremonies and exacting procedures that accompanied his rising in the morning, known as the Lever, divided into a petit lever for the most important and a grand lever for the whole court. Like other French court manners, much of the Versailles étiquette was quickly imitated in other European courts.Benichou, 1948; Bluche, 1991; Solnon 1987.

According to historian Philip Mansel, the king turned the palace into: an irresistible combination of marriage market, employment agency and entertainment capital of aristocratic Europe, boasting the best theater, opera, music, gambling, sex and (most important) hunting.Philip Mansel, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (2020) cited in Tim Blanning, Solar Power The Wall Street Journal, Oct 17–18, 2020, p. C9.

The expansion of the château became synonymous with the absolutism of Louis XIV.Bluche, 1986, 1991. In 1661, following the death of Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of the government, Louis had declared that he would be his own chief minister. The idea of establishing the court at Versailles was conceived to ensure that all of his advisors and provincial rulers would be kept close to him. He feared that they would rise up against him and start a revolt and believed that if he kept all of his potential threats near him, they would be powerless. After the disgrace of Nicolas Fouquet in 1661 – Louis claimed the Superintendent of Finances would not have been able to build his grand château at Vaux-le-Vicomte without having embezzled from the crown – Louis, after the confiscation of Fouquet's estate, employed the talents of Le Vau, Le Nôtre, and Le Brun, who all had worked on Vaux-le-Vicomte, for his building campaigns at Versailles and elsewhere. For Versailles, there were four distinct building campaigns (after minor alterations and enlargements had been executed on the château and the gardens in 1662–1663), all of which corresponded to Louis XIV's wars.Bluche, 1986, 1991; Verlet, 1985.

First building campaign

The first building campaign (1664–1668) commenced with The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island of 1664, a fête that was held between 7 and 13 May 1664. The fête was ostensibly given to celebrate the two queens of France – Anne of Austria, the queen mother, and Maria Theresa of Spain, Louis XIV's wife – but in reality honored the king's mistress, Louise de La Vallière. The celebration of The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island is often regarded as a prelude to the War of Devolution, which Louis waged against Spain. The first building campaign (1664–1668) involved alterations in the château and gardens to accommodate the 600 guests invited to the party.Nolhac, 1899, 1901; Marie, 1968; Verlet, 1985.

Second building campaign

The second building campaign (1669–1672) was inaugurated with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of Devolution. During this campaign, the château began to assume some of the appearance that it has today. The most important modification of the château was Le Vau's envelope of Louis XIII's hunting lodge. The enveloppe – often referred to as the château neuf to distinguish it from the older structure of Louis XIII – enclosed the hunting lodge on the north, west, and south. For a time between late 1668 and early 1669, when the ground floor of the enveloppe was being constructed, Louis XIV intended to completely demolish his father's palace and replace it with a monumental forecourt. Le Vau's design imagined a large extension of the enveloppe westwards, enabling huge galleries and staircases to be built. In June 1669 Louis XIV decided to keep his father's hunting lodge, so the architectural plans for the enveloppe had to be reconfigured and the scale of the new rooms reduced.Walton, 1986; p. 67-69

The new structure provided new lodgings for the King and members of his family. The main floor – the piano nobile – of the château neuf was given over entirely to two apartments: one for the King, and one for the Queen. The grand appartement du roi occupied the northern part of the château neuf and grand appartement de la reine occupied the southern part.

The western part of the enveloppe was given over almost entirely to a terrace, which was later enclosed with the construction of the Hall of Mirrors (Galerie des Glaces). The ground floor of the northern part of the château neuf was occupied by the appartement des bains, which included a sunken octagonal tub with hot and cold running water. The King's brother and sister-in-law, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine occupied apartments on the ground floor of the southern part of the château neuf. The upper story of the château neuf was reserved for private rooms for the king to the north and rooms for the King's children above the Queen's apartment to the south.Nolhac, 1901; Marie, 1972; Verlet, 1985.

Significant to the design and construction of the grands appartements is that the rooms of both apartments are of the same configuration and dimensions – a hitherto unprecedented feature in French palace design. It has been suggested that this parallel configuration was intentional as Louis XIV had intended to establish Maria Theresa as queen of Spain, and thus thereby establish a dual monarchy.Johnson, 1981. Louis XIV's rationale for the joining of the two kingdoms was seen largely as recompense for Philip IV's failure to pay his daughter Maria Theresa's dowry, which was among the terms to which Spain agreed with the promulgation of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended the war between France and Spain that began in 1635 during the Thirty Years' War. Louis XIV regarded his father-in-law's act as a breach of the treaty and consequently engaged in the War of Devolution.

Both the grand appartement du roi and the grand appartement de la reine formed a suite of seven enfilade rooms. Each room is dedicated to one of the then known celestial bodies and is personified by the appropriate Greco-Roman deity. The decoration of the rooms, which was conducted under Le Brun's direction depicted the "heroic actions of the king" and were represented in allegorical form by the actions of historical figures from the antique past (Alexander the Great, Augustus, Cyrus, etc.).Berger, 1985b, pp. 41–50 (Chapter 5: "The Planetary Rooms"); Félibien, 1674; Verlet, 1985.

Third building campaign

With the signing of the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, which ended the Franco-Dutch War, the third building campaign at Versailles began (1678–1684). The court had grown during the 1670s as Louis XIV re-shaped his relationship with the high aristocracy. To enjoy his favor it became indispensable to attend Louis wherever he went, placing a strain on the existing accommodation for courtiers at Versailles. The royal family had also grown sizeably, augmented by the legitimization of Louis' five children by his mistress Madame de Montespan between 1673 and 1681.Walton, 1986; p.92-93 As newly forged Princes of the Blood all of these children required suitable apartments at Versailles.