Episode notes
Versailles began as a small brick hunting lodge in a swampy forest, built in 1623 by Louis XIII and mocked by nobles as a puny house of cards. The turning point came in 1661, when finance minister Nicolas Fouquet threw a lavish festival at his new chateau, Vaux-le-Vicomte. Louis XIV had him arrested and imprisoned for life, then hired his architect Louis Le Vau, gardener André Le Nôtre, and painter Charles Le Brun to transform his father's lodge. Scarred by the Fronde, when armed nobles broke into the royal palace and stood over the young king's bed, Louis made Versailles the de facto capital by 1682 and required nobles seeking favor to live there under his eye.
The palace grew to more than 2,300 rooms, and wars kept interrupting the work: in 1689 Louis melted down the silver furniture to pay soldiers while famine gripped France. Under Louis XV, construction leaned on money from Madame du Barry. In October 1789 thousands of Parisian market women marched 12 miles, seized weapons, and forced Louis XVI and the royal family back to Paris for good. Louis Philippe later saved the empty palace as the Museum of the History of France, Germany proclaimed its new empire in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871, and a defeated Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in the same room in 1919.
- The enfilade layout that turned every approach to the king into a public performance
- Nobles competing to hold the king's shirt during his morning waking ceremony
- Freezing attic rooms, filthy stairwells, and the ruinous cost of dressing for court
- John D. Rockefeller's $2.1 million gift in the 1920s to stop the palace from falling apart
- The French parliament meeting there in March 2024 to write abortion rights into the constitution