Palace of Versailles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Palace of Versailles sits about 18 kilometres west of Paris, and roughly 15 million people pass through its gates, park, or gardens every single year. That number alone is staggering. But behind the crowds and the glittering Hall of Mirrors lies a story of calculated ambition, dynastic collapse, foreign occupation, and persistent reinvention that stretches across four centuries.

  It began as a hunting lodge that one courtier dismissed as unworthy of the simplest gentleman. It ended up as the de facto capital of France, the site where Germany proclaimed itself an empire, and the room where the First World War was officially closed. How did a wooded wetland outside Paris become the most influential royal residence ever built? And what does Versailles mean now, when the French Parliament still meets there to rewrite the nation's constitution?

• 2. A Lodge Scorned

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  In 1623, Louis XIII built a hunting lodge on a hill near a village called Versailles, roughly 12 miles west of Paris. His court considered the site, a wooded wetland, to be thoroughly beneath royal dignity. François de Bassompierre, one of his courtiers, wrote that the lodge "would not inspire vanity in even the simplest gentleman".

  From 1631 to 1634, architect Philibert Le Roy replaced the lodge with a proper château for Louis XIII. The king was possessive of the place in an unusual way: he forbade his queen, Anne of Austria, from staying there overnight. Even when a smallpox outbreak at his primary residence, the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, forced him to relocate to Versailles in 1641 with his three-year-old heir, Anne was still kept away.

  When Louis XIII died in 1643, the château was abandoned for the next decade. Anne became regent, moved the court back to Paris, and the policies she and her chief minister Cardinal Mazarin continued sparked the Fronde, a series of revolts against royal authority that ran from 1648 to 1653. The young Louis XIV watched that struggle for power over him play out at close range. After Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV resolved to rule alone, and he turned his attention back to his father's unloved château at Versailles.

• 3. The Fateful Banquet

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  On the 17th of August 1661, Louis XIV attended a festival hosted by Nicolas Fouquet, his Superintendent of Finances, at Fouquet's estate called the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. What Louis saw that evening changed the course of French architecture. Fouquet had assembled a trio of talents: Louis Le Vau as architect, André Le Nôtre as gardener, and Charles Le Brun as painter.

  The scale and richness of Vaux-le-Vicomte both impressed and alarmed Louis XIV. That September, Fouquet was imprisoned, partly because he had also built an island fortress and maintained a private army. Louis XIV then did something direct: he hired all three men who had made Fouquet's estate so dazzling, and set them to work on Versailles. He replaced Fouquet with Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a protégé of Mazarin and enemy of Fouquet, who managed the corps of artisans in royal employment and acted as intermediary between them and a king who personally directed and inspected the planning and construction.

• 4. Building the Capital

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  Work at Versailles in the 1660s concentrated mainly on the gardens. It was the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668 that pushed Louis XIV to commit to a full royal residence. He chose to encase his father's château on three sides rather than replace it entirely, and the result was a feature called the enveloppe. The new Italianate façade overlooking the gardens sat uneasily beside the preserved courtyard facade, a mix of styles that Colbert himself called a "patchwork".

  Le Vau died in 1670 before the tension was resolved, and his assistant François d'Orbay inherited the site. D'Orbay was also tasked with designing the city of Versailles itself, to house the king's expanding government. Land grants to courtiers for townhouses that resembled the palace began in 1671.

  The real transformation came after the Franco-Dutch War ended in French victory in 1678. Louis XIV appointed Jules Hardouin-Mansart as First Architect. Between 1678 and 1681, Mansart added the Hall of Mirrors, renovated the courtyard façade, created the Ministers' Wings, and built the pair of stables known as the Grande and Petite Écuries from 1679 to 1682. He also added two entirely new wings to house the court, one at the south from 1679 to 1681 and one at the north from 1685 to 1689.

  Wars repeatedly drained the treasury and slowed or stopped work. The Nine Years' War, which began in 1688, halted construction entirely until 1698. Poor harvests in 1693-94 and 1709-10 deepened France's crisis, and Louis XIV cancelled several of Mansart's planned projects. The palace chapel, Louis XIV's sixth, was the last major building he commissioned at Versailles; construction ran from 1699 to 1710.

• 5. Power, Protocol, and Visitors

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  Louis XIV first used Versailles to project power with a series of nighttime festivals in the gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674. Accounts of those events spread across Europe through print and engravings. By 1682 the court and government had officially moved to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France, though opinion among the French nobility had been mixed about the move.

  By 1687 the point was settled. Louis XIV used the palace to attract nobles away from their provincial power bases, offering prestige and royal patronage within a system of strict court etiquette. Versailles received the Doge of Genoa, Francesco Maria Imperiale Lercari, in 1685; an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686; and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715.

  During Christmas 1763, Mozart and his family dined with the king at Versailles. The seven-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played several works and later dedicated his first two harpsichord sonatas, published in 1764 in Paris, to Madame Victoria, daughter of Louis XV.

  In 1783, the palace hosted the signing of two of the three treaties of the Peace of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolutionary War. On the 3rd of September, Benjamin Franklin led the British and American delegates who signed the Treaty of Paris at a location in the city, granting the United States independence. The following day, Spain and France signed separate treaties with Britain at the Palace of Versailles itself.

• 6. Revolution and Aftermath

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  On the 14th of July 1789, the King and Queen were at the palace when word reached them of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris. They remained at Versailles as the Revolution spread. On the 5th of October 1789, a crowd of several thousand men and women, protesting the scarcity and high price of bread, marched from the markets of Paris to the palace. They seized weapons from the city armoury, besieged the palace, and the next day compelled the King, the royal family, and the National Constituent Assembly to return with them to Paris.

  The palace closed the moment the royal family left. In 1792, the new revolutionary government ordered all paintings and sculptures transferred to the Louvre. In 1793, the monarchy was abolished and all royal property in the palace was ordered sold at auction. The auction ran from the 25th of August 1793 to the 11th of August 1794, selling furnishings, mirrors, baths, and kitchen equipment in seventeen thousand lots. All fleurs-de-lys and royal emblems on the buildings were chiselled off.

  Napoleon, after becoming Emperor in 1804, considered making Versailles his residence but abandoned the idea over the cost of renovation. He used the subsidiary Grand Trianon as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, leaving the main palace untouched. It was not until Louis-Philippe came to power in 1830 that a serious new purpose was found for the building: a Museum of the History of France, dedicated to "all the glories of France", inaugurated on the 30th of June 1837.

• 7. Occupation, Treaties, Restoration

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  During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the German Army occupied the palace and turned parts of the Hall of Mirrors into a military hospital. On the 18th of January 1871, the creation of the German Empire, uniting Prussia with the surrounding German states under William I, was formally proclaimed in that same Hall of Mirrors. The German forces remained until March 1871.

  After the Germans left, the French government moved into the palace. The National Assembly held meetings in the Opera House. When the Paris Commune uprising in March 1871 prevented the government's return to the capital, the military operation that suppressed the Commune was directed from Versailles. Prisoners of the Commune were tried in military courts there.

  The next great occasion in the Hall of Mirrors came in June 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the First World War, was signed there after six months of negotiations.

  Between 1925 and 1928, the American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave $2,166,000, equivalent to about 38 million dollars in 2024, to restore and refurnish the palace. A later restoration initiative launched in 2003, called "Grand Versailles", began with the replanting of the gardens, which had lost over 10,000 trees when Cyclone Lothar struck on the 26th of December 1999. The restoration of the Hall of Mirrors under that programme was completed in 2006.

• 8. A Living Institution

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  The palace today is owned by the French state and managed as the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles, under the direction of the French Ministry of Culture, a status that has been in place since 1995. UNESCO designated the palace and park a World Heritage Site in 1979.

  The French Parliament, consisting of the Senate and the National Assembly, continues to meet in joint session at Versailles to amend the French Constitution. Constitutional congresses have been held there in June 1999, January 2000, March 2003, and March 2024, when the freedom of women to have recourse to abortion was enshrined in the constitution. In 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the Great Recession before a congress there, the first presidential address to a joint session since 1848.

  The grounds hosted the equestrian competition during the 2024 Summer Olympics. The palace's façade stretches 402 metres in length, its roof covers around 10 hectares, and the building contains 2,143 windows, 1,252 chimneys, and 67 staircases. The gardens that André Le Nôtre designed under Louis XIV became the model for the French formal garden style and were imitated in palaces from Stockholm to Nymphenburg to Schleissheim. The estate as a whole, including the park and gardens, covers 800 hectares as of June 2021.