Section 3: Versailles

The palace of Versailles personified Louis XIV’s vision of one absolute monarch dominating all of France. Nine miles outside of Paris, Versailles started as his father, Louis XIII’s, hunting lodge. After his mother Queen Anne’s death, Louis XIV tired of Paris, with its sad memories of the Fronde (see Section 1) and of his beloved mother. He decided to expand Versailles into a semi-permanent court from which to rule France. Every detail of the palace was micromanaged by the king, who regularly visited the building site and demanded regular reports on progress. The palace featured a total of 1,840 rooms and some of the most famous architects, artists and gardeners in the world collaborated in its construction. Versailles was designed to be the most amazing place on Earth: “an art gallery; a year-round festival of music; a hunt and riding school… [being at Versailles] raised the status of musicians, writers and painters, and helped create new kinds of music, opera, ballets, and gardens.” French language and culture were already on the rise throughout Europe, but Versailles helped to cement its dominance for centuries to come. 

As a king supposedly appointed by God himself, Louis was on constant display, on a daily basis to his courtiers but also occasionally to the general public. His almost complete lack of privacy began the very day he was born. When his mother, Anne of Austria, went into labor on September 5, 1638 she was “surrounded by attendants, while witnesses watched her at every moment.” It’s safe to assume that Queen Anne resented the intrusion of over a dozen people during such a painful and intimate event, but “with the integrity of the [royal] succession at stake, witnesses ensured that the queen’s child was not substituted for another–a boy exchanged for a girl, or a living baby to take the place of one born dead.” 

One of the witnesses was a “prince of the blood”, Gaston the Duke of Orleans, whose place next in line to the crown was taken that night by a healthy, nine pound baby boy. Gaston “complained of his misfortune with thousands of tears” but the nation as a whole celebrated. His father, Louis XIII, praised the birth as a miracle after 22 years of marriage to Anne and several miscarriages. Like many royals, Louis XII and Anne had not married for love. In fact, they had only conceived their son by chance–Anne was in Paris coincidentally the same night that her husband had stayed at a female friend’s house too late to get to his personal residence safely, so he had to “go to the Louvre and share the bed of the queen”, one of the few women he normally avoided

At Versailles, Louis XIV’s life was regulated by a rigid schedule of public ritual. He got out of bed between 8-9 AM and spent an hour of elaborate ceremony preparing for the day. Courtiers who were lucky enough to be in favor were allowed to help or simply watch as the king washed, shaved, dressed and prayed. Each courtier had his own specific duty–one to put on the left shoe, another the right, etc. These were opportunities to remind the king of your existence, tell him a funny joke or story, and occasionally to ask for a personal favor. 

The king would then go to Mass, after which he would eat a quick breakfast, again served by specific courtiers, and then lead 2-3 hours of meetings with government ministers. Around 12:30, the king would go to Mass again, this time with his family, after which he would break for lunch. Afternoons were for a combination of work and exercise, usually a hunt or any other excuse to ride horses. As one historian put it: “He excelled at all sport and could hardly bear to be indoors; he spent hours each day hunting and shooting. The year before his death, he brought down 32 pheasants (a kind of bird) with 34 shots, a considerable feat with the primitive guns of those days.”

Evenings were for entertainment, usually dancing, games (especially billiards) and music. By 9PM, the king was ready for the elaborate ceremony of bedtime, where a different group of courtiers enacted the reverse of the morning routine. Even the king’s time on the commode (toilet) was accompanied by specific courtiers picked for that “honor”, always at the same designated time of evening. 

These elaborate and complex rituals all had a specific purpose. As one historian put it, Louis accustomed the nobility:

…to accept that their raison d’etre was to serve the state, rather than to lead their own lives on their faraway estates. Like moths to the flame, they were attracted to the beauty and grandeur of Versailles and the glamor of life in the presence of the Sun King. On the whole, they came to prefer life at Versailles to the point that they often neglected their own estates and rarely, if ever, saw their tenants [the peasants that worked their lands]. Louis, who was anxious to avoid the conditions that might lead to another Fronde, used protocol and rank to control and monitor them… By the end of Louis’s reign, some ten thousand people served at Versailles, of whom five thousand were commoners. The other five thousand were nobles who served in two ‘quarters’ or three-month sessions of service twice a year.

France had around 200,000 nobles, so the king made sure to select the most strategically important ones to serve in Versailles. The palace became the center of their lives. As Louis’s chief biographer puts it:

The court was a marketplace which helped channel the aggression and rivalries of the French nobility into the King’s service. In return for their love and loyalty, and obedience… Frenchmen who went to court, and were prepared to [sit and] wait in offices, obtained jobs, titles, honors, pensions. They also had opportunities to meet people and hear news: in other words, to network.

In addition to all the time nobles spent at Versailles, most also had military duties, fighting in Louis’s endless series of wars. Versailles therefore killed two birds with one stone–the most important/dangerous nobles were kept busy, either under his intense monitoring at Versailles or serving his armies and expanding France’s power. They had no time to build on the local power bases they had inherited from their much more independent-minded ancestors. Psychologically, a king who had experienced the chaos and fear of the Fronde at such a young age, also found comfort in the rigid formalities of Versailles, where everybody knew their place and the worst sin was not to be seen by the king on a regular basis.