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The first chateaux The earliest mention of the village of Versailles is found in a document dated 1038. During this period, the village of Versailles centered on a small castle and church and the area was controlled by a local lord. The village's location on the road from Paris to Dreux and Normandy brought some prosperity to the village but following the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War, the village was largely destroyed and its population severely diminished. In 1575, Albert de Gondi, a Florentine, purchased the seigneury of Versailles. Gondi had arrived in France with Catherine de Medici and his family became influential in the French Parliament. In the early decades of the 17th century, Gondi invited Louis XIII on several hunting trips in the forests of Versailles. Following this initial introduction to the area, Louis XIII ordered the construction of a hunting chateaux in 1624. Designed by Philibert Le Roy, the structure was constructed of stone and red brick with a slate roof. Eight years later, in 1632, Louis obtained the seignury of Versailles from the Gondi family and began to make enlargements to the chateaux. Expansion under Louis XIV Louis's successor, Louis XIV, took a great interest in Versailles. Beginning in 1661, the architect, Louis Le Vau, and the landscape architect, André Le Nôtre, began a major upgrade of the chateaux. It was Louis XIV's hope to create a center for the royal court. Following the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, the court and French government began to be moved to Versailles. The court was officially established there on 6 May 1682. Louis's reasoning for moving the court and seat of the French government to Versailles was that he could effectively control everything single-handedly if it was in one place. All the power of France emanated from this centre: there were government offices here; as well as the homes of thousands of courtiers, their retinues and all the attendant functionaries of court. 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 centralize the French government in an absolute monarchy. Galerie des Glaces
Architecture The palace grew through a series of expansions wrapped around the original modest hunting lodge, which still remains at its heart. This led to a certain incongruity in the architecture, as the centrepiece of the palace is not in scale with its final dimensions. In 1661 Louis Le Vau made some additions which he developed further in 1668. In 1678 Mansart took over the work, the Galerie des Glaces, the chapel and the two wings being due to him. On 6 May 1682 Louis XIV took up residence in the château. Furnishings had been plundered from Louis's disgraced finance minister's Nicolas Fouquet splendid house at Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose grand success there was his undoing. Versailles is a key example of baroque palace architecture, and many of the finest craftsmen in Europe worked it for many years. The politics of display Versailles became the home of the French nobility and the location of the royal court - thus becoming the center of French government. Louis XIV himself lived there, and symbolically the central room of the long extensive symmetrical range of buildings was the King's Bedchamber (La Chambre du Roi), which itself was centered on the lavish and symbolic state bed, set behind a rich railing not unlike a communion rail. All the power of France emanated from this centre: there were government offices here; as well as the homes of thousands of courtiers, their retinues and all the attendant functionaries of court. 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 centralize the French government in an absolute monarchy. At various periods before Louis XIV established absolute rule, France like the Holy Roman Empire lacked central authority and was not the unified state it was to become during the proceeding centuries. During the Middle Ages some local nobles were at times more powerful than the French King and, although technically loyal to the King, they possessed their own provincial seats of power and government, culturally influential courts and armies loyal to them not the King and the right to levy their own taxes on their subjects. Some families were so powerful, they achieved international prominence and contracted marriage alliances with foreign royal houses to further their own political ambitions. Although nominally Kings of France, de facto royal power had at times been limited purely to the region around Paris. Court etiquette Life at the court was narrowly regulated by court etiquette. Etiquette became the means of social advancement for the court. King Louis XIV required everyone at the court to take ballet lessons . Louis XIV’s elaborate rules of etiquette included the following: Park and garden The grounds of Versailles contain one of the largest formal gardens ever created, with extensive parterres, fountains and canals, designed by André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre modified the original gardens by expanding them and giving them a sense of openness and scale. He created a plan centered around the central axis of the Grand Canal. The gardens are centered on the south front of the palace, which is set on a long terrace to give a grand view of the gardens. At the foot of the steps the Fountain of Latona is located. This fountain tells a story taken from Ovid's poem Metamorphoses. Next, is the Royal Avenue or the Tapis Vert. Surrounding this to the sides are the formal gardens. Beyond this is the Fountain of Apollo. This fountain symbolizes the rising regime of the Sun King. Beyond the Fountain lies the massive Grand Canal. Wide wide central axis rises on the far side. Even farther into the distance lie the dense woods of the King's hunting grounds. Outbuildings
Cost
War uses After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the palace was the main headquarters of the German army from 5 October 1870 until 13 March 1871, and hosted the opening of the Paris Peace Conference on 18 January 1919. The ravages of war and neglect over the centuries left their mark on the palace and its huge bushes. Modern French governments of the post-World War II era have sought to repair these damages. They have on the whole been successful, but some of the more costly items, such as the vast array of fountains, have yet to be put back completely in service. As spectacular as they might seem now, they were even more extensive in the 18th century. The 18th-century waterworks at Marly— the machine de Marly that fed the fountains— was probably the biggest mechanical system of its time. The water came in from afar on monumental stone aqueducts, which have long ago fallen in disrepair or been torn down. Post-royal: the monument-museum After the Revolution the paintings and sculpture, like the crown jewels, were consigned to the new Musée du Louvre as part of the cultural patrimony of France. Other contents went to serve a new and moral public role: books and medals went to the Bibliothèque Nationale, clocks and scientific instruments (Louis XVI was a connoisseur of science) to the École des Arts et Métiers. Versailles was still the most richly-appointed royal palace of Europe until a long series of auction sales on the premises, which unrolled for months during the Revolution, emptying Versailles slowly of every shred of amenity, at derisory prices, mostly to professional brocanteurs. The immediate purpose was to raise desperately-needed funds for the armies of the people, but the long-range strategy was to ensure that there was no Versailles for any king ever to come back to. The strategy has worked. Though Versailles was declared an imperial palace, Napoleon never spent a summer's night there. Versailles remained both royal and unused through the Restoration. In 1830, the politic Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" declared the château a museum dedicated to "all the glories of France," raising it for the first time above a Bourbon dynastic monument. At the same time, boiseries from the private apartments of princes and courtiers were removed and found their way, without provenance, into the incipient art market in Paris and London for such panelling. What remained were 120 rooms, the modern "Galeries Historiques".* The curator Pierre de Nohlac began the conservation of the palace in the 1880s until the 1930s, which is considered a significant contribution to the great modern interest in Versailles. In the 1960s, Pierre Verlet, the greatest writer on the history of French furniture managed to get some royal furnishings returned from the museums and ministries and ambassadors' residences where they had become scattered from the central warehouses of the Mobilier National. He conceived the bold scheme of refurnishing Versailles, and the refurnished royal Appartements that tourists view today are due to Verlet's successful initiative, in which textiles were even rewoven to refurbish the state beds. Buildings inspired by Versailles As the centralizing organization of modern national government formulated by Richelieu was perfected by Louis XIV and his advisors, other European states hastened to copy it. As they followed the French model in administration and particularly in military affairs (which is why most of our government and military vocabulary, such as bureau, personnel, and materiel are still French), most princes had to construct new buildings to house the new bureaucracies. Because government in those days was still centered on the household of the prince, Versailles ignited a competitive spate of building palaces in fountain-filled gardens among the power elite of Europe. Ironically, the most direct homage to Versailles was at the end of the age of feudal governments, at the end of the nineteenth century. Ludwig II of Bavaria, a constitutional monarch further constrained by doctors because of his incipient insanity, commissioned a nearly identical copy of Versailles, Herrenchiemsee, to be built on an island on the bucolic Chiemsee lake in the countryside of Bavaria. His funds ran out too soon but the central portion was finished, along with its hall of mirrors, and formal French gardens were planted around it. But during the Baroque period the great palaces and their dependencies housed working governments. When Peter I of Russia structured a new, Western-style government for Russia, he visited Versailles in a "Grand Embassy" and later decided to build a residence in the outskirts of Saint Petersburg he had the Peterhof complex of buildings in gardens and parks built. Efforts in England, where power during the period increasingly centered in Parliament and particularly in politically powerful nobles rather than in the monarch, were more limited. They included renovations at Hampton Court, and the all-but-royal Chatsworth. The direct British answer to Versailles is Blenheim Palace, built as a national monument for Louis' nemesis, the Duke of Marlborough. In the courts of Germany, several Versailles-like palaces were constructed, including Wilhelmshöhe at Kassel, Schloss Augustusburg in Brühl, Ludwigsburg, Herrenhausen, Schloss Schleissheim and the Residenz in Würzburg. Many others still stand, tiny and often exquisite little palaces that once ruled their postage-stamp principalities. In Sweden, there is Drottningholm; in Austria Schönbrunn, and in Hungary Eszterháza, the administrative center of the vast estates of a princely family rather than that of a monarch. In Italy, there are the "would-be Versailles" include Caserta Palace, the Ducal Palace of Colorno and the Palazzina di Stupinigi. In the Iberian peninsula two competitors for Versailles stand out: La Granja near Madrid, and Queluz in Portugal. Poland, with an elected king normally controlled by Russia, Prussia, or Austria, had few opportunities for royal construction, and really nothing along the lines of Versailles was possible. However, the kings of Poland did construct Łazienki, essentially an exceptionally large pavilion like those built by French courtiers as weekend residences away from Versailles. The most developed baroque palace complex there, the Branicki palace, was built by a powerful noble, not a king. See also Further reading | |||||||||||||||
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