User:Giano/Versailles: a brief history
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The Chateau of Versailles is a Baroque former royal palace located in what is now a suburb of Paris. Built mostly between 1661 and 1699, it is one the most, if not the most, famous and most emulated palaces in the world. Its title of chateau (strictly meaning castle), rather than palace,[1] is perhaps its only inclination to modesty. Versailles was mostly the creation of one man, built to extol his own glory, King Louis XIV of France. This was the King who once said of himself, "Since we are God's divine agent it is fitting that we should share in his wisdom as well as in his authority."
King Louis saw himself, and promoted himself, not just as sovereign of France, but as the "Sun King", almost a deity; in this he was supported by the divine right of kings. Thus, his residence was to become not just a royal palace, but a temple to his divine sovereignty. With this in mind, he expanded on a vast scale a hunting retreat of his father's, erected in 1661, to become a monument to himself. The King's architects, Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin Mansart, using a method of grand perspective first used by the ancient Egyptians in the format of their temples, created a series of ever decreasing courts (aligned with grand avenues and canals) to draw the eye into the holy of holies, its presence indicated by three great windows. However, this is not a chapel as one would expect [2] but the room of the Sun King, the room in which he dwelt. This, the glorification of the monarch, was the ethos and raison d'etre of Versailles. After Louis XIV's death, his successor and grandson, Louis XV, employed Ange-Jacques Gabriel from 1765 to 1771 to further embellish the chateau. However, in spite of Gabriel's huge classical wings, it is the mark and hand of Louis XIV which has remained indelibly upon the palace.
For almost a century Versailles was a symbol of monarchy and splendour. Monarchs all over Europe created their own versions, with varying rates of success. During the reigns of Louis XIV's successors, Versailles came to be seen, with some justification, as a symbol of excess and oppression. It became a place not for the monarch to impress his people, but a place for him to retreat from them. Yet the size of the chateau, and the traditional access the French were permitted to their Kings, made this impossible, as the excesses of Versailles and those who dwelt within its walls were all too visible. In 178?, the French people rebelled and dragged the occupants of Versailles away and killed them. Versailles as a symbol and temple devoted to divine monarchy was looted, vandalised and desecrated.
In the 19th century, a French monarch, Charles X, having seen the catastrophic results of his ancestors' excesses, had the words "a toutes whatever" stencilled above the cour d'honneur, in an effort to re-dedicate the palace and transform it into a national museum. The chateau's interior was drastically altered in an attempt to transform it into a museum extolling the glories of the people of France, rather than those of its former monarchs.
Today, massively restored, the chateau is once again undergoing a transformation, this time to restore it to the glory it displayed in the late 18th century, before its owners were so violently dispossessed.