The Palace of Versailles (/vɛərˈsaɪ, vɜːrˈsaɪ/ vair-SY, vur-SY;[1] French: château de Versailles [ʃɑto d(ə) vɛʁsɑj] ) is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about 18 kilometres (11 mi) west of Paris, France.
The palace is owned by the government of France and since 1995 has been managed, under the direction of the French Ministry of Culture, by the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles.[2] About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.[3]
Louis XIII built a hunting lodge at Versailles in 1623. His successor, Louis XIV expanded the château into a palace that went through several expansions in phases from 1661 to 1715. It was a favourite residence for both kings, and in 1682, Louis XIV moved the seat of his court and government to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France. This state of affairs was continued by Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, who primarily made interior alterations to the palace, but in 1789 the royal family and French court returned to Paris. For the rest of the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents, and the population of the surrounding city plummeted.
Napoleon, following his coronation as Emperor, used the subsidiary palace, Grand Trianon, as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, but did not use the main palace. Following the Bourbon Restoration, when the king was returned to the throne, he resided in Paris and it was not until the 1830s that meaningful repairs were made to the palace. A museum of French history was installed within it, replacing the courtiers apartments of the southern wing.
The palace and park were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979 for its importance as the centre of power, art, and science in France during the 17th and 18th centuries.[4] The French Ministry of Culture has placed the palace, its gardens, and some of its subsidiary structures on its list of culturally significant monuments.
In 1623,[5][6] Louis XIII, king of France, built a hunting lodge on a hill in a favourite hunting ground, 19 kilometres (12 mi) west of Paris,[7] and 16 kilometres (10 mi) from his primary residence, the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.[8] The site, near a village named Versailles,[a] was a wooded wetland that Louis XIII's court scorned as being generally unworthy of a king;[12] one of his courtiers, François de Bassompierre, wrote that the lodge "would not inspire vanity in even the simplest gentleman".[6][13] From 1631 to 1634, architect Philibert Le Roy replaced the lodge with a château for Louis XIII,[14][15] who forbade his queen, Anne of Austria, from staying there overnight,[16][17] even when an outbreak of smallpox at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1641 forced Louis XIII to relocate to Versailles with his three-year-old heir, the future Louis XIV.[16][18]
When Louis XIII died in 1643, Anne became Louis XIV's regent,[19] and Louis XIII's château was abandoned for the next decade. She moved the court back to Paris,[20] where Anne and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, continued Louis XIII's unpopular monetary practices. This led to the Fronde, a series of revolts against royal authority from 1648 to 1653 that masked a struggle between Mazarin and the princes of the blood, Louis XIV's extended family, for influence over him.[21] In the aftermath of the Fronde, Louis XIV became determined to rule alone.[22][23] Following Mazarin's death in 1661,[24] Louis XIV reformed his government to exclude his mother and the princes of the blood,[23] moved the court back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye,[25] and ordered the expansion of his father's château at Versailles into a palace.[16][26]
Louis XIV had hunted at Versailles in the 1650s,[15][18] but did not take any special interest in Versailles until 1661.[27] On 17 August 1661,[28] Louis XIV was a guest at a sumptuous festival hosted by Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, at his palatial residence, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte.[24][29] Louis XIV was impressed by the château and its gardens,[29][30] which were the work of Louis Le Vau, the court architect since 1654, André Le Nôtre, the royal gardener since 1657, and Charles Le Brun,[15] a painter in royal service since 1647.[31] Vaux-le-Vicomte's scale and opulence led him to imprison Fouquet that September, as he had also built an island fortress and a private army.[29][32] But Louis XIV was also inspired by Vaux-le-Vicomte,[33] and he recruited its authors for his own projects.[34][35] Louis XIV replaced Fouquet with Jean-Baptiste Colbert,[23][30] a protégé of Mazarin and enemy of Fouquet,[36] and charged him with managing the corps of artisans in royal employment.[37][38] Colbert acted as the intermediary between them and Louis XIV,[39] who personally directed and inspected the planning and construction of Versailles.[40][41][42]
Work at Versailles was at first concentrated on gardens,[43][44] and through the 1660s, Le Vau only added two detached service wings and a forecourt to the château.[45][46] But in 1668–69,[47][48] as a response to the growth of the gardens,[49] and victory over Spain in the War of Devolution,[47][48] Louis XIV decided to turn Versailles into a full-scale royal residence.[45][50] He vacillated between replacing or incorporating his father's château, but settled on the latter by the end of the decade,[47][48][51] and from 1668 to 1671,[52] Louis XIII's château was encased on three sides in a feature dubbed the enveloppe.[48][53] This gave the château a new, Italianate façade overlooking the gardens, but preserved the courtyard façade,[54][55] resulting in a mix of styles and materials that dismayed Louis XIV[55] and that Colbert described as a "patchwork".[56] Attempts to homogenize the two façades failed, and in 1670 Le Vau died,[57] leaving the post of First Architect to the King vacant for the next seven years.[58]
Le Vau was succeeded at Versailles by his assistant, architect François d'Orbay.[59] Work at the palace during the 1670s focused on its interiors, as the palace was then nearing completion,[54][60] though d'Orbay expanded Le Vau's service wings and connected them to the château,[54] and built a pair of pavilions for government employees in the forecourt.[18][61] In 1670, d'Orbay was tasked by Louis XIV with designing a city, also called Versailles,[9] to house and service Louis XIV's growing government and court.[57][62] The granting of land to courtiers for the construction of townhouses that resembled the palace began in 1671.[57][63] The next year, the Franco-Dutch War began and funding for Versailles was cut until 1674,[64] when Louis XIV had work begun on the Ambassadors' Staircase, a grand staircase for the reception of guests, and demolished the last of the village of Versailles.[65]
Following the end of the Franco-Dutch War with French victory in 1678, Louis XIV appointed as First Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart,[25][66] an experienced architect in Louis XIV's confidence,[67] who would benefit from a restored budget and large workforce of former soldiers.[64][68] Mansart began his tenure with the addition from 1678 to 1681 of the Hall of Mirrors,[69] a renovation of the courtyard façade of Louis XIII's château,[70] and the expansion of d'Orbay's pavilions to create the Ministers' Wings in 1678–79.[71] Adjacent to the palace, Hardouin-Mansart built a pair of stables called the Grande and Petite Écuries from 1679 to 1682[72][73] and the Grand Commun, which housed the palace's servants and general kitchens, from 1682 to 1684.[74] Hardouin-Mansart also added two entirely new wings in Le Vau's Italianate style to house the court,[75] first at the south end of the palace from 1679 to 1681[76] and then at its north end from 1685 to 1689.[18]
War and the resulting diminished funding slowed construction at Versailles for the rest of the 17th century.[64] The Nine Years' War, which began in 1688, stopped work altogether until 1698.[68] Three years later, however, the even more expensive War of the Spanish Succession began and,[77] combined with poor harvests in 1693–94 and 1709–10,[78][79] plunged France into crisis.[79][80] Louis XIV thus slashed funding and cancelled some of the work Hardouin-Mansart had planned in the 1680s, such as the remodelling of the courtyard façade in the Italianate style. Louis XIV and Hardouin-Mansart focused on a permanent palace chapel,[64][81] the construction of which lasted from 1699 to 1710.[54][82]
Louis XIV's successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI, largely left Versailles as they inherited it and focused on the palace's interiors. Louis XV's modifications began in the 1730s, with the completion of the Salon d'Hercule, a ballroom in the north wing, and the expansion of the king's private apartment,[83][84] which required the demolition of the Ambassadors' Staircase.[40] In 1748, Louis XV began construction of a palace theatre, the Royal Opera of Versailles at the northernmost end of the palace,[85][86] but completion was delayed until 1770;[86][87] construction was interrupted in the 1740s by the War of the Austrian Succession and then again in 1756 with the start of the Seven Years' War.[85][87] These wars emptied the royal treasury and thereafter construction was mostly funded by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's favourite mistress. In 1771, Louis XV had the northern Ministers' Wing rebuilt in Neoclassical style by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, his court architect, as it was in the process of falling down. That work was also stopped by financial constraints, and it remained incomplete when Louis XV died in 1774. In 1784, Louis XVI briefly moved the royal family to the Château de Saint-Cloud ahead of more renovations to the Palace of Versailles, but construction could not begin because of financial difficulty and political crisis.[88] In 1789, the French Revolution swept the royal family and government out of Versailles forever.[54][89]
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The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power.[90][91] Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674,[27] the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings.[92][93] As early as 1669,[47] but especially from 1678,[94] Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it.[95][96][97] The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682,[97] however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among t