Palace of Versailles

A palace built to govern

Louis XIII’s hunting lodge was a modest house of brick and stone. His son made it the stage of the monarchy. From 1661 the architects Louis Le Vau and later Jules Hardouin-Mansart wrapped and extended it, while André Le Nôtre laid out the gardens; the Hall of Mirrors was finished in 1684.

On 6 May 1682 Louis XIV moved the court and the government there. The great nobles were expected to live at Versailles, where favour, offices and pensions were handed out, and where the king’s day — from his rising to his going to bed — was a public ceremony. Apart from the first years of Louis XV’s reign, when the court went back to Paris (1715–1722), France was ruled from Versailles until 1789.

The Revolution at the gates

In May 1789 the Estates-General opened in the town, in the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs. On 20 June, finding their hall locked, the deputies of the Third Estate — by then calling themselves the National Assembly — gathered in a nearby tennis court and swore not to separate until France had a constitution.

On 5 October a crowd of Parisian women, angry at the price of bread, marched the 20 km to Versailles; the National Guard followed. Early the next morning the crowd broke into the palace. By the afternoon of the 6th Louis XVI and his family were on the road to Paris, escorted by thousands. The court never came back.

After the kings

Emptied of its court, the palace lost most of its furniture in the revolutionary sales of the 1790s. Louis-Philippe saved it by turning it into a museum of French history, opened in 1837. The Hall of Mirrors went on making history: the German Empire was proclaimed there in 1871, and the treaty that ended the First World War was signed there in 1919.