Court Moves to Versailles
Louis XIV moved his court and government to Versailles in May 1682, into a building site that stayed a building site for another thirty years. The core was his father's hunting lodge, a modest brick and stone house that he refused to demolish out of sentiment, so the palace was built around it. The scale is what everyone reports. Some 36,000 workers at the peak, marshes drained, a forest moved, hills levelled, and a water supply that never worked properly — the Seine was pumped uphill by the Machine de Marly, one of the largest mechanical installations in Europe, and the fountains still had to be turned on in sequence as the king walked past them. The Hall of Mirrors used 357 mirrors at a time when Venice guarded the technique as a state secret. The political purpose was explicit in Louis's own memoirs. Bringing the great nobility to live at court, and making their standing depend on proximity to the king's person, converted a class that had rebelled twice in his childhood into courtiers competing for the right to hand him his shirt. Attendance was compulsory in practice, and absence was noticed. Perhaps 3,000 to 10,000 people lived there, in conditions the memoirs describe as cold, cramped and filthy. It became the model that every European monarch copied badly and expensively. The cost is unknown, because Louis had the accounts burned. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were taken from it by a crowd in October 1789 and never returned.
- Year: 1682 CE
- Category: Political
