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Kaan Köprülü
Nov 24, 20246 min read

Palace of Versailles

The earliest document in which Versailles is mentioned is the Charter of the Abbey of Saint-Pere de Chartes, written before 1038. One of the signatories of this document was Hugo de Versailliis.


During these years, the village of Versailles had a small castle and a church in the center of the village and was under the control of a local lord. Since the village was located on the road from Paris to Dreux and Normandy, it was more prosperous than the average village of the time. However, the plague and the devastation of the Hundred Years' War caused the village to lose its importance. By 1575, Albert de Gondi of Florence, a prominent figure at the court of Henry II, had purchased the seigneurial seignorship of Versailles.


The village gained importance in the early 17th century when Gondi invited Louis XIII to hunt in the Versailles region. Louis XIII was pleased with the location and had a hunting lodge built here in 1624. Designed by Philibert Le Roy, it was almost like a chateau. Eight years later, Louis XIII took the senorship of Versailles from the Gondi family and expanded the chateau.


According to the vignette of Versailles on Jacques Gomboust's 1652 map of Paris, there was a “corps de logis” at the western end and an entrance courtyard flanked by secondary wings to the north and south. This structure, with towers on all four corners, was surrounded by a moat.



The chateau, ca. 1630-1640, as shown on Jacques Gomboust's map
The chateau, ca. 1630-1640, as shown on Jacques Gomboust's map

Louis XIV spent part of his childhood here. The design in the photograph has become the core of the palace.


Louis XIV, Louis XIII's successor, had a great interest in the palace because he spent his childhood here. He later settled here. In the following years, he made the palace more and more magnificent. From 1661 onwards, architect Louis Le Vau, landscape architect Andre Le Notre and painter-decorator Charles Le Brun began work on the renovation and expansion of the chateau. After the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, the palace was gradually moved to Versailles.


By moving the palace and the government to Versailles, Louis XIV hoped to take more control of the government under his own control and get away from Paris. The palace housed government offices as well as the homes of thousands of courtiers and their retinues. Louis required nobles of a certain subject and rank to spend a certain amount of time at Versailles each year. In this way, he hoped to prevent the nobility from expanding their influence in his own region. In this way, he also thought that there would be no opposition to the central monarchy.


The expansion of the chateau became synonymous with the absolutism of Louis XIV. In 1661, after the death of the head of government, Cardinal Mazarin, Louis declared himself prime minister. Also in 1661, after Nicolas Fouquet fell out of favor, Fouquet's estates were confiscated. Le Vau, Le Notre and Le Brun, who had worked at Vaux-le Vicomte (Fouquet's confiscated castle), were then used for construction at Versailles and elsewhere. After minor changes in 1662 and 1663, there were four different building campaigns, all coinciding with the wars of Louis XIV.


First Campaign


The first building campaign began with The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island, a festival held on May 7-13, 1664. On the surface, the festival was intended to honor the two queens of France, Anne of Austria and Maria Theresa. But in reality it was to honor Louise de La Valliere, the king's mistress. It is also considered to be the beginning of Louis's Revolutionary Wars against Spain. This first building campaign also included changes to the chateau and the gardens to accommodate the guests invited to the party.


Second Campaign


The second building campaign began with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the Revolutionary War. With this campaign, the chateau began to take on some of its present form. The most important change to the chateau was the enclosure of LE Vau around Louis XIII's hunting lodge. In this way, the chateau was surrounded from the north, west and south. Although Louis XIV considered demolishing the palace and replacing it with a monumental forecourt, Louis abandoned this idea because Le Vau's design allowed for the construction of galleries and staircases. The enclosure was therefore restructured and the scale of the new rooms was reduced.


One of the most important changes in the new building was the rooms for the king and queen. The king's room, the grand appartement du roi, occupied the northern part of the chateau, while the queen's room, the grand appartement de la reine, occupied the southern part of the chateau.


The western part of the enclosure was almost entirely devoted to a terrace, on which the Hall of Mirrors (Galerie des Glaces) was later built. On the ground floor of the northern part of the chateau was a bathing room with hot and cold running water and an octagonal bathtub. The king's brother and sister-in-law lived in apartments on the ground floor of the southern part of the chateau. Above the queen's room was the room for the king's children.


The rooms of the king and queen were suites of seven rooms. Each room was dedicated to one of the celestial bodies known at the time and associated with a Greco-Roman deity. The room's decorations, also designed by Le Brun, depict the king's heroic deeds and are allegorically represented by the actions of historical figures of antiquity (such as Augustus and Alexander the Great).


Third Campaign


With the signing of the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, which ended the Franco-Dutch War, the third campaign began. During these years, when Louis was shaping his relations with the high aristocracy, it became almost a necessity to accompany him wherever he went in order to curry favor with him. This went beyond the courtiers' accommodations inside Versailles. In addition, the royal family had expanded considerably with the legitimization of five children by Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV's mistress, which necessitated new apartments.


Under the direction of Chief Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the Palace of Versailles acquired much of its present appearance in the 1680s. Le Brun not only took care of the decoration of the new additions to the palace, but also collaborated with Le Notre in the landscaping of the palace garden. Louis XIV officially established his palace at Versailles in May 1682.


Hardouin-Mansart designed two new wings to solve Versailles' accommodation problem. The southern wing was built in 1679 for the Princes of the Blood (male descendants of the monarch). This 160-meter wing also contained rooms for servants and aristocrats. In 1684, construction began on the north wing, where the rooms for the top aristocrats would be located. Between the two wings, 175 new lodgings were built. Both wings were built in the Italianate style, creating a symmetrical appearance.


The buildings known as the Grand Commun, Orangerie, Grand Trianon, Petite and Grand Ecruie were also built during this phase. Mansart's Grand Commun was built between 1682 and 1684 on the site of the former village church of St. Julien in Versailles. Built in the shape of a gigantic rectangle, the Grand Commun provided 103 new lodgings for the king's household.


The Grand and Petit Evruie were among the largest outbuildings built during this period. These stables were located on both sides of the Avenur de Paris, opposite the Cour d'Armes in front of the main palace. These Neoclassical buildings designed by Hardouin-Mansart housed thousands of horses as well as 1,500 people working in the stables. The Grand Ecurie housed the king's hunting horses and hounds, while the Petit Ecurie housed the king's carriages and other means of transportation.


At the same time, much of the apartments of both the king and the queen were reconfigured. Louis no longer lived in the rooms of his apartments, but used them for state and ceremonial purposes. The area between the new “Hall of Mirrors” on the west side of the palace and the Ambassadors' Staircase on the east was used for entertainment and court festivities.


It was also during this building process that Louis chose for the new appartement du roi (the king's throne room) the set of eight rooms on the piano nobile behind the west facade of the Cour de Marbre, which had belonged to his father in the old chateau. In addition, to create an image of grandeur, the rooms behind the south facade facing the Cour de Marbre were reconstructed to form the three great vestibules and the Great Hall, which precedes the king's bedchamber. The queen continued to live in her own room, albeit with certain modifications. In 1680, Mars Hall, which had been used as the queen's guardroom, was converted into a dining room. Another vestibule just east of this new dining room was converted into a spare guardroom.


Fourth Campaign


Louis XIV launched his fourth and final building campaign shortly after the defeat of the Nine Years' War (War of the League of Augsburg). The fourth building campaign focused almost exclusively on the construction of the royal chapel, designed by Hardouin-Mansart and completed by Robert de Cotte and his team (the piety of Madame de Maintenon was undeniable). In 1701, the Chambre de l'Oeil de Boeuf (a type of window in Baroque architecture. It is also known as the “bull's eye”. The opening at the top of the Pantheon in Rome is an example) and the construction of the king's new bedroom. The removal of the king's bedroom and the antechamber resulted in a larger space.


With the completion of the chapel in 1710, almost all construction at Versailles ceased. Twenty-one years later, construction did not resume at Versailles until the reign of Louis XV.


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