Palace of Versailles: Louis XIV Moves the Court There (1682)

The Palace of Versailles became the official seat of the French court and government on 6 May 1682, when Louis XIV moved there from Paris and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Over two decades the king had transformed his father’s small hunting lodge into the largest and most splendid palace in Europe, with vast formal gardens and a dazzling Hall of Mirrors. For more than a century Versailles was the centre of political power in France, a stage for royal ceremony, and a model copied by rulers across the continent.

From hunting lodge to royal château

Versailles was originally a small village surrounded by forests and marshes, popular for hunting. In 1623–1624 Louis XIII built a simple hunting lodge there, and in 1631–1634 he had it rebuilt by the architect Philibert Le Roy as a modest château of brick and stone around a courtyard.

The young Louis XIV knew the place from childhood hunts. After he began his personal rule in 1661, he decided to make it his own. He was also determined not to be outshone by a subject. The model to surpass was the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built for his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. After Fouquet’s fall in 1661, the king took over Vaux’s creative team, the architect Louis Le Vau, the garden designer André Le Nôtre and the painter Charles Le Brun.

The building campaigns

Work at Versailles went on almost continuously for the rest of the reign, in several stages.

The first campaign (1661–1668) focused on the gardens and on making the old château suitable for festivities. In May 1664 Louis held a famous week-long fête, the Pleasures of the Enchanted Island, with plays, music and fireworks. Pierre Patel’s painting of about 1668 shows the château at the end of this period, still relatively compact but already set in grand avenues and gardens.

The second campaign (from 1668) wrapped the old château in a much larger stone building on the garden side, known as Le Vau’s “envelope”. Louis had decided not to demolish his father’s lodge, so the brick-and-stone courtyard survived at the heart of the palace, where it still stands as the Marble Court.

The third campaign (from 1678) was led by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who became the king’s chief architect. He replaced a garden terrace with the Hall of Mirrors and built the vast south and north wings, the stables facing the palace and the Orangery. As the palace grew, a new town grew up in front of it to house courtiers, servants and officials.

Later projects included the marble Grand Trianon, built in 1687 as a private retreat in the park, and the Royal Chapel, completed in 1710.

6 May 1682: the court moves

By 1682 the palace was still unfinished, but Louis decided that Versailles would become his permanent residence and the seat of government. On 6 May 1682 the court officially moved in. The royal family, the king’s ministers and councils, and thousands of courtiers and servants now lived or worked at Versailles.

Historians link the decision to several aims. Louis had never forgotten the Fronde, the revolts of his childhood when Paris rose against the crown. Living outside the capital put distance between the king and the Parisian crowds and law courts. Bringing the great nobles to court made it easier to watch them and kept them dependent on royal favour, pensions and offices, rather than on their own power in the provinces. Above all, Versailles was a statement: a palace that told France and Europe that the King of France was the greatest ruler of his age.

The Hall of Mirrors

The most famous room in the palace is the Hall of Mirrors (Galerie des Glaces), built by Hardouin-Mansart between 1678 and 1684. About 73 metres long, it has seventeen tall windows looking onto the gardens. Facing them are seventeen arches filled with 357 mirrors, a spectacular display at a time when large mirrors were rare and expensive. They were made by a French royal manufacture, partly to show that France could rival the glassmakers of Venice.

Charles Le Brun painted the vaulted ceiling with about thirty scenes celebrating the first eighteen years of the personal reign, from 1661 to the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678. The central scene shows the king taking up government himself, and others depict military victories, including the crossing of the Rhine in 1672 during the Franco-Dutch War. Originally the hall was furnished with solid silver furniture, which was melted down in 1689 to help pay for war.

The hall was used as a passage, a waiting area for courtiers and a setting for great receptions, such as the audience given to the ambassadors of the King of Siam in 1686.

The gardens and water

André Le Nôtre designed gardens on a vast scale, with terraces, parterres, groves, statues and long avenues laid out along a central axis running away from the palace. The Grand Canal, more than 1.6 km long, was dug between 1668 and 1679 and used for boating and naval displays.

The gardens needed enormous amounts of water for their fountains, but Versailles had none nearby. Engineers built reservoirs, ponds and pumps, and in 1684 the Machine de Marly began pumping water from the Seine up a hillside towards Versailles. A grand plan to divert the River Eure was abandoned after thousands of soldiers working on it fell ill. Even so, there was never enough water to run all the fountains at once; they were turned on as the king approached.

Life at court

Life at Versailles revolved around the king. His day was organised as a public ceremony, from the lever (rising) in the morning to the coucher (going to bed) at night. Courtiers competed for the privilege of handing him his shirt or holding a candle. Meals, Mass, walks in the gardens and evening entertainments known as appartements followed a strict routine.

Etiquette mattered because favour mattered. Access to the king could bring pensions, military commands, church posts and marriages for one’s children. The memoirist Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, who knew the late court well, described how Louis noticed who was present and who was absent, and how a word or a glance from the king could make or break a career.

Estimates of the number of people at court vary widely, but several thousand nobles, officials and servants lived in or around the palace at any time, with many more in the town. Life could be uncomfortable: apartments were often small and cold, and the palace was crowded and noisy. During these years the court was also shaken by scandals such as the Affair of the Poisons.

The cost

Building Versailles was immensely expensive. Thousands of workers were employed at peak periods, with accounts recording some tens of thousands in the mid-1680s, and many died in accidents or from disease. Historians estimate the total cost of building under Louis XIV in tens of millions of livres; turning this into modern money is very uncertain, and published comparisons vary enormously. What is clear is that the spending competed with the costs of war, and that critics at the time and later saw the palace as a symbol of royal extravagance.

After Louis XIV

After Louis died in 1715, the regent took the five-year-old Louis XV to Paris, but the king returned to Versailles in 1722. He added the Royal Opera, opened in 1770, and the Petit Trianon, built in the 1760s. Under Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette created a rustic hamlet in the park in the 1780s.

The revolution of 1789 ended Versailles as a royal residence. On 5–6 October 1789, in the Women’s March on Versailles, a crowd from Paris forced the royal family to move to the capital. Much of the furniture was later sold, but the building survived. In 1837 King Louis-Philippe opened a museum of French history in the palace, dedicated “to all the glories of France”.

Versailles continued to play a role in history. On 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors, and on 28 June 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the same room. In 1979 the Palace and Park of Versailles became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Timeline

• 1623–1624: Louis XIII builds a hunting lodge at Versailles.
• 1661: Louis XIV begins enlarging Versailles and its gardens.
• 1664, May: The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island festival.
• 1668: Le Vau begins the “envelope” around the old château.
• 1678: Hardouin-Mansart begins the Hall of Mirrors.
• 1682, 6 May: The court and government move to Versailles.
• 1684: The Hall of Mirrors is completed; the Machine de Marly begins operating.
• 1710: The Royal Chapel is completed.
• 1789, 6 October: The royal family is forced to leave for Paris.
• 1979: Versailles is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Why it matters

Versailles turned the image of absolute monarchy into stone, glass and gardens. It became the political heart of France for over a century, a model for royal palaces from Spain to Russia, and later a site where modern European history was made. Today it remains one of the most visited monuments in the world.