Versailles: the most powerful and filthiest palace in history

In 1623 this was a hunting lodge. Modest. Of brick and stone. Built by Louis XIII. When Louis XIV inherited the throne at age four, Versailles was just that lodge. But Louis XIV had an obsession. He had lived through the horror of the Fronde: the civil war of the nobles against the monarchy. As a child, he had to flee the Royal Palace of Paris in the middle of the night. Humiliated. Frightened. Powerless. He remembered it his entire life. And when he took real power at twenty-three, he decided he would never again depend on Paris. Nor on his nobles. Nor on his Parliament. He would cho…

The construction of Versailles took 37 years. From 1661 to 1710. Louis XIV was the only client. The only judge. The only one who mattered. Forty-three thousand workers at peak activity. Eleven million cubic meters of earth were moved just to design the gardens. To supply water to the fountains, they built an aqueduct of 163 arches. The Aqueduct of Maintenon. It still stands today. How much did it cost? In modern terms, some economists estimate more than 300 billion current dollars. But the human cost is more striking. The working conditions were brutal. Work at night by torchlight. …

When you enter the Hall of Mirrors, you will have the impulse to take out your phone and photograph everything. Before you do, stay a second without doing it. Look. Seventy-three meters of length. Seventeen meters high. 357 mirrors in 17 arches. Exactly the same 17 arches as the 17 windows on the opposite side. In 1684, mirrors were the most expensive luxury product in Europe. Venice had the monopoly on their manufacture. And guarded the production secret as a state secret. Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, literally stole Venetian craftsmen. He smuggled them into France. And Venice sen…

Versailles has 2,300 rooms. And at its height of glory, with 20,000 people living and working inside, there were exactly: No bathrooms. The concept of the private bathroom as we know it today did not exist. Nobles used chamber pots and spittoons in any corner. The corridors were used as emergency bathrooms. The gardens, especially the decorative bushes, were popular relief points. Palace workers threw waste out of the windows. The smell of Versailles was a combination of flower perfume, horse manure and human waste. The massive perfume used by the court was not a luxury. It was a pra…

Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles in 1770. She was fourteen years old. She was Archduchess of Austria. Daughter of Empress Maria Theresa. The marriage to the Dauphin of France, the future Louis XVI, was a political agreement between two empires. Nobody asked her opinion. At fourteen she was separated from everything she knew. Her family. Her language. Her culture. She entered France in a ritual called the remise: at the border, she was stripped of all her clothes, her servants, her Austrian belongings. She entered her new country naked. As a symbol. Everything Austrian stayed on …

The gardens of Versailles are not beautiful by accident. They are a declaration of power as calculated as the Hall of Mirrors. The designer was Andre Le Notre. His concept was simple and brutal: nature does not control man. Man controls nature. Trees pruned into perfect shapes. Parterres in exact geometric patterns. Fountains aligned with the sun. Everything subjected to a human will. The will of the King. The garden furthest from the palace demonstrated this most strongly: the central perspective goes directly from the window of the royal bedroom to the horizon. The King woke up, looke…

Louis XIV had several official mistresses. At Versailles they were not called mistresses. They were called maitresses-en-titre: officially recognized mistresses. It was not a secret. It was an institution. The official mistress had an apartment in the palace. She received visitors. She influenced appointments. She mediated with the King. It was a political position disguised as love. The most famous of Louis XIV's was Madame de Maintenon. She began as governess to the King's illegitimate children. She ended up marrying him in secret in 1683. With Louis XV, feminine influence at court w…

On October 5th, 1789, Paris was in crisis. There was no bread. The price of bread was four times a worker's daily wage. The hunger was literal. And while Paris was starving, there had been a banquet at Versailles. A banquet of royal officers where, according to news that reached Paris, someone had trampled the tricolor cockade. The symbol of the Revolution. Trampled. That rumor, true or not, was enough. Six thousand women began walking from Paris toward Versailles. Seventeen kilometers. In the rain. Armed with spears, pikes and whatever they could find. They arrived at night. They …

Louis XVI is the king who lost his head to the guillotine in 1793. But before that, he was a man utterly unsuited to the role that fell to him. Shy. Introverted. Socially awkward. He struggled to speak in public. He blushed easily. He sweated at banquets. His real passions were locksmithing and hunting. He had a locksmith's workshop in his private rooms. He made and repaired locks for hours. The most powerful man in France relaxed by fixing door mechanisms. He was also an enthusiastic reader. And passionate about cartography. When Benjamin Franklin came to court to negotiate French sup…

On June 28th 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The treaty that officially ended World War One. Four years, three months and ten days of war. Seventeen million dead. The leaders of the victorious countries met in the same room where, in 1871, Bismarck had proclaimed the German Empire. In the same hall. With the same symmetry of mirrors. But with the opposite result. The Treaty humiliated Germany absolutely. Total responsibility for the war. Economic reparations that would be impossible to pay. Loss of territories. The army limited to 100,000 men. The A…

Life at Versailles was not a permanent party. It was a ritual. Louis XIV turned the most private acts of his life into public acts of State. The lever: waking up. Each morning, dozens of nobles waited in the antechamber for the moment the King woke. They entered in turns by hierarchy. The one who handed him his shirt was an honor among the most powerful nobles in France. The one who tied his shoes. The one who held the mirror. Every gesture of the King was a role. Every role was a privilege. A privilege was power. Power was closeness to the King. Closeness to the King was access. Acce…

When the royal family was taken to Paris in October 1789, Versailles was left empty. Not for long. During the Revolution, the palace was looted. The garden sculptures, the furniture, the works of art, the chandeliers: sold, stolen, scattered. When the government decided the palace would not be demolished, it turned it into something radically different. In 1837, King Louis Philippe inaugurated it as the Museum of the History of France. The idea was to transform the seat of absolutism into a monument to the nation. All the important moments of French history gathered under one roof. Tod…