The Palace French Movie

[Darios Uclaray]

Thepalace is owned by the government of France and since 1995 has been managed, under the direction of the French Ministry of Culture, by the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles.[2] About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.[3]

Louis XIII built a simple hunting lodge on the site of the Palace of Versailles in 1623. With his death came Louis XIV who expanded the chteau into the beginnings of a palace that went through several changes and phases from 1661 to 1715. It was a favorite residence for both kings, and in 1682, Louis XIV moved the seat of his court and government to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France. This state of affairs was continued by Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, who primarily made interior alterations to the palace, but in 1789 the royal family and capital of France returned to Paris. For the rest of the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents, and the population of the surrounding city plummeted.

Napoleon, following his coronation as Emperor, used the Grand Trianon as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, but did not use the main palace. Following the Bourbon Restoration, when the king was returned to the throne, he resided in Paris and it was not until the 1830s that meaningful repairs were made to the palace. A museum of French history was installed within it, replacing the courtiers apartments of the southern wing.

The palace and park were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979 for its importance as the center of power, art, and science in France during the 17th and 18th centuries.[4] The French Ministry of Culture has placed the palace, its gardens, and some of its subsidiary structures on its list of culturally significant monuments.

In 1623,[5][6] Louis XIII, king of France, built a hunting lodge on a hill in a favorite hunting ground, 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris,[7] and 16 kilometers (10 mi) from his primary residence, the Chteau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.[8] The site, near a village named Versailles,[a] was a wooded wetland that Louis XIII's court scorned as being generally unworthy of a king;[12] one of his courtiers, Franois de Bassompierre, wrote that the lodge "would not inspire vanity in even the simplest gentleman".[6][13] From 1631 to 1634, architect Philibert Le Roy replaced the lodge with a chteau for Louis XIII,[14][15] who forbade his queen, Anne of Austria, from staying there overnight,[16][17] even when an outbreak of smallpox at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1641 forced Louis XIII to relocate to Versailles with his three-year-old heir, the future Louis XIV.[16][18]

When Louis XIII died in 1643, Anne became Louis XIV's regent,[19] and Louis XIII's chteau was abandoned for the next decade. She moved the court back to Paris,[20] where Anne and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, continued Louis XIII's unpopular monetary practices. This led to the Fronde, a series of revolts against royal authority from 1648 to 1653 that masked a struggle between Mazarin and the princes of the blood, Louis XIV's extended family, for influence over him.[21] In the aftermath of the Fronde, Louis XIV became determined to rule alone.[22][23] Following Mazarin's death in 1661,[24] Louis XIV reformed his government to exclude his mother and the princes of the blood,[23] moved the court back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye,[25] and ordered the expansion of his father's chteau at Versailles into a palace.[16][26]

Louis XIV had hunted at Versailles in the 1650s,[15][18] but did not take any special interest in Versailles until 1661.[27] On 17 August 1661,[28] Louis XIV was a guest at a sumptuous festival hosted by Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, at his palatial residence, the Chteau de Vaux-le-Vicomte.[24][29] Louis XIV was impressed by the chteau and its gardens,[29][30] which were the work of Louis Le Vau, the court architect since 1654, Andr Le Ntre, the royal gardener since 1657, and Charles Le Brun,[15] a painter in royal service since 1647.[31] Vaux-le-Vicomte's scale and opulence led him to imprison Fouquet that September, as he had also built an island fortress and a private army.[29][32] But Louis XIV was also inspired by Vaux-le-Vicomte,[33] and he recruited its authors for his own projects.[34][35] Louis XIV replaced Fouquet with Jean-Baptiste Colbert,[23][30] a protg of Mazarin and enemy of Fouquet,[36] and charged him with managing the corps of artisans in royal employment.[37][38] Colbert acted as the intermediary between them and Louis XIV,[39] who personally directed and inspected the planning and construction of Versailles.[40][41][42]

Le Vau was succeeded at Versailles by his assistant, architect Franois d'Orbay.[59] Work at the palace during the 1670s focused on its interiors, as the palace was then nearing completion,[54][60] though d'Orbay expanded Le Vau's service wings and connected them to the chteau,[54] and built a pair of pavilions for government employees in the forecourt.[18][61] In 1670, d'Orbay was tasked by Louis XIV with designing a city, also called Versailles,[9] to house and service Louis XIV's growing government and court.[57][62] The granting of land to courtiers for the construction of townhouses that resembled the palace began in 1671.[57][63] The next year, the Franco-Dutch War began and funding for Versailles was cut until 1674,[64] when Louis XIV had work begun on the Ambassadors' Staircase [fr], a grand staircase for the reception of guests, and demolished the last of the village of Versailles.[65]

Louis XIV's successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI, largely left Versailles as they inherited it and focused on the palace's interiors. Louis XV's modifications began in the 1730s, with the completion of the Salon d'Hercule, a ballroom in the north wing, and the expansion of the king's private apartment,[83][84] which required the demolition of the Ambassadors' Staircase.[40] In 1748, Louis XV began construction of a palace theater, the Royal Opera of Versailles at the northernmost end of the palace,[85][86] but completion was delayed until 1770;[86][87] construction was interrupted in the 1740s by the War of the Austrian Succession and then again in 1756 with the start of the Seven Years' War.[85][87] These wars emptied the royal treasury and thereafter construction was mostly funded by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's favorite mistress. In 1771, Louis XV had the northern Ministers' Wing rebuilt in Neoclassical style by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, his court architect, as it was in the process of falling down. That work was also stopped by financial constraints, and it remained incomplete when Louis XV died in 1774. In 1784, Louis XVI briefly moved the royal family to the Chteau de Saint-Cloud ahead of more renovations to the Palace of Versailles, but construction could not begin because of financial difficulty and political crisis.[88] In 1789, the French Revolution swept the royal family and government out of Versailles forever.[54][89]

The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power.[90][91] Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674,[27] the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings.[92][93] As early as 1669,[47] but especially from 1678,[94] Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it.[95][96][97] The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682,[97] however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among the nobility of France.[13][98]

By 1687, however, it was evident to all that Versailles was the de facto capital of France,[71][99] and Louis XIV succeeded in attracting the nobility to Versailles to pursue prestige and royal patronage within a strict court etiquette,[91][96][100][b] thus eroding their traditional provincial power bases.[96][97][102] It was at the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV received the Doge of Genoa, Francesco Maria Imperiale Lercari in 1685,[103] an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686,[104] and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715.[105]

Louis XIV died at Versailles on 1 September 1715 and was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV,[78][106] then the duke of Anjou,[107] who was moved to the Chteau de Vincennes and then to Paris by Louis XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orlans.[106] Versailles was neglected until 1722,[18] when Philippe II removed the court to Versailles to escape the unpopularity of his regency,[108][109] and when Louis XV began his majority.[110] The 1715 move, however, broke the cultural power of Versailles,[111] and during the reign of Louis XVI, courtiers spent their leisure in Paris, not Versailles.[18]

During Christmas 1763, Mozart and his family visited Versailles and dined with the King. The 7-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played several works during his stay and later dedicated his first two harpsichord sonatas, published in 1764 in Paris, to Madame Victoria, daughter of Louis XV.[112]

In 1783, the palace was the site of the signing of the last two of the three treaties of the Peace of Paris (1783), which ended the American Revolutionary War. On 3 September, British and American delegates, led by Benjamin Franklin, signed the Treaty of Paris at the Htel d'York (now 56 Rue Jacob) in Paris, granting the United States independence. On 4 September, Spain and France signed separate treaties with Britain at the Palace of Versailles, formally ending the war.[113]

The King and Queen learned of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789, while they were at the palace, and remained isolated there as the Revolution in Paris spread. The growing anger in Paris led to the Women's March on Versailles on 5 October 1789. A crowd of several thousand men and women, protesting the high price and scarcity of bread, marched from the markets of Paris to Versailles. They took weapons from the city armory, besieged the palace, and compelled the King and royal family and the members of the National Constituent Assembly to return with them to Paris the following day.[114]

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