The court moves to Versailles
Louis XIV moves the court and government to the enlarged palace outside Paris. Everything is arranged around the king: the axes of the park, the state rooms, the ceremonies.
Versailles became the model for palaces all over Europe, including Drottningholm and Stockholm Palace.
Versailles began as a small hunting lodge that Louis XIII built in the 1620s and 1630s. His son Louis XIV had as a child lived through the Fronde, the revolts in which the citizens of Paris and great noblemen challenged royal power, and he never trusted the capital. After seeing the luxury of the finance minister Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1661, he took over Fouquet’s artists and began enlarging Versailles. First he had Louis Le Vau envelop the old château in a new building, and from 1678 Jules Hardouin-Mansart took over. He built the Hall of Mirrors and the long wings to the north and south. In May 1682 the king moved there with his court and government.
The palace became a vast machine. André Le Nôtre laid out the park with axes, terraces, bosquets and a great cross-shaped canal, and Charles Le Brun directed the interiors, with paintings glorifying the king as the sun god Apollo. The fountains needed more water than the site could supply, and water was pumped from the Seine by the so-called Machine de Marly. Thousands of workers and soldiers were employed on the building, and many died from accidents and disease. The nobility were expected to live at court, where the day was organised around the king’s rising, meals and retiring. To hand the king his shirt was an honour. In this way architecture turned the independent high nobility into courtiers under the king’s eye.
Versailles remained the centre of power in France until October 1789, when a crowd from Paris forced the royal family to move to the capital. In the 19th century the palace was turned into a museum of French history. The Hall of Mirrors then became a stage for European politics: the German Empire was proclaimed there in 1871, and the peace treaty after the First World War was signed there in 1919. For Sweden Versailles was a constant point of reference. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger visited the palace and wrote careful observations, and through the Swedish diplomat Daniel Cronström in Paris, drawings, engravings and news of French taste reached Stockholm. The gardens of Drottningholm and Stockholm Palace were shaped in that school, as was court life around the king.