Visiting the Château of Versailles

Visit the Château at the end of the day when crowds have usually left.

Visitez le Château en fin de journée, quand la foule est souvent repartie.

PHOTO IN TOURIST SEASON

One is now obliged to purchase a more expensive entry fee that includes earphones (raising the fee from 12 to 15€). The text is beautifully spoken -- but it  gives no sense of the changes explain building such a palace, of the people for whom grounds and château were merely the grandiose setting for their intrigues, pride and passions.

Let's start with the economic upheaval that led to a much stronger kingship, to the nobility's relative decline and so the rationale for this palace, other than the Sun King's caprice.

New revenues' impact  

A map used to illustrate the search for spices, 16th century

The first impact of the great explorations of the end of the 15th century was to bring luxuries that temporarily strengthened ruling elites. In particular, seizing huge quantities of silver and gold from South America explains the power of Spain from the 16th to the end of the 17th century. As well, the Europe-wide inflation that treasure brought helped peasants' gain the means to buy their freedom and encouraged the relative decline of nobles, who sold that labor away.

 Breugal, The Storm (detail, 1568)

As well, building and supplying ships and feeding mules and merchants meant more local production. The humdrum activities of producing more oats and cabbages, saddles, sails, barrels, ropes, nails etc. explain the explosion of new production. That change lies behind the more centralized states of western Europe (England, France, Spain and Portugal), as rulers had the means to finance greater power -- and the motive to keep new sources of revenue in their hands and not let rising entrepreneurs challenge them. Of course this was not new -- trade routes and local production had been developing since the year 1000 at least -- but exploration's economic results made nascent capitalism grow much more quickly. That explains the dramatic changes of the time: stronger kingship as said, and the ideological challenge to the traditional order that the many forms of Protestantism represent.

Massacre during the 16th-century religious wars (detail, private collection)

Those explosive transformations lie behind peasant, urban and noble revolts in the first part of the 17th century. Anecdote: Louis XIV (the Sun King), age 12, was awoken at midnight and obliged to feign sleep as the Louvre as underclass Parisians invaded the Louvre. Later, he and the royal family fled from Paris.

Young Louis woken up, by Michel Loiret (1931)

He remembered that drama for the rest or his life. It was the immediate reason for creating Versailles as a place to entice nobles to stay -- away from their lands, revolt would be much more difficult.

Nobles at Versailles -- literally "paying court"
 

Making these nobles dependent on royal hand-outs: posts in State and Church, army commissions, the right to oversee prestigious new businesses... (mirrors, tapestries, the East India trade... 

Imagine these favors' importance for an indebted aristocracy. Imagine also the debt that came from living in Versailles (holding one's rank with carriage, horses and servants), the elaborate court dress that one was obliged to change four times a day,wigs, losses at cards -- to increase nobles' dependence still further, the king encouraged gambling.

And understand that all of this was pointless if the king did not know a noble was there, that is, if he did not see one personally.

How could that happen? The simplest way was by being in the front row of the courtiers he would pass on his way to morning mass.

When you enter the Château, the first space you will find is a hall that overlooks the chapel. That is where the courtiers would gather to greet the king.

Imagine the jostling. 

Mass at the Royal Chapel 

There courtiers would "turn toward the king who turns toward God" (Bossuet's famous statement).
Bossuet: celebrated theologian who promoted the divine right of kings.

Chapel ceiling: God the Father in his glory, by Coypel (1716)

Impressive, ornate and cold, the chapel is the place to mull over one of Louis's most disastrous decisions -- to stamp out Protestantism.

So that his subjects would see him as God's representative, they had to be Catholic (as he defined Catholicism). So Protestants could either convert or accept that dragoons would be billeted in their homes -- and a "dragonnade" still means soldiers' molesting civilians on authorities' command. Another possibility, though if caught men were faced with the galleys and women with life imprisonment: flight from the kingdom. Many succeeded. They took their skills and capital and their flight disrupted the French economy. One can make the case that repercussions linger still.

Dragonnade, by Michel Leloir (1931)  Leloir illustrated events that had retained their hold on memories.

People with French names whose families are long-time residents of other countries are usually those Protestants' descendants.  

After the chapel you'll pass two salons: imagine the card games and intrigues.

Anecdote: during cards in one of these salons (in 1680) the king sent a courtier to warn a former mistress (the Countess of Soissons) that her visits to a witch and poisoner made her arrest imminent. She instantly left the room and an hour later was on her way to the frontier. She was never allowed to return to France.

La Voisin, witch and poisoner (1680)

That incident was part of a scandal that shook the Court. When the royal favorite  (the gorgeous Marquise de Montespan), was suspected of engaging in black masses with the witch to regain the king's affection, Louis canceled a police investigation that concerned 300 other witches and poisoners -- the only time he backtracked. 

That Affaire des poisons sheds light on the underside of one of France's greatest reigns. As well, it reveals one of women's few "career opportunities". They made up an overwhelming majority of the suspects: poisoning requires ruse, not strength. 

You come now to the most spectacular part of the excursion -- the Hall of Mirrors: please scroll down.