Palace of Versailles

The Palace of Versailles is the former royal residence of the kings of France, about 16 kilometres south-west of Paris. Louis XIV turned his father's hunting lodge into an immense palace to glorify the monarchy, and from 1682 until 1789 the king, the court and the government of the Kingdom of France lived there, apart from a break during the Regency. A masterpiece of French classical architecture with roughly 2,300 rooms and a vast formal park, it shaped palace building across Europe and later witnessed some of the defining moments of modern European history.

The name Versailles first appears in a charter of 1038. Louis XIII bought land there between 1623 and 1632 and put up a modest hunting lodge of brick and stone on a hill above marshy ground, replaced between 1631 and 1634 by a small château. His courtiers thought it unworthy of a king.

After his father's death in 1643, Louis XIV grew up amid the revolts of the Fronde, which left him determined to rule alone. In 1661, after attending a lavish festival at the château of his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, he had Fouquet arrested and hired the team who had created that house: the architect Louis Le Vau, the gardener André Le Nôtre and the painter Charles Le Brun. Work at first focused on the gardens, but in 1668 the king decided to make Versailles a full royal residence. Le Vau wrapped his father's château on three sides in a new stone envelope with Italianate façades. A new town was laid out from 1670 to house officials and courtiers.

From 1678 the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart enlarged the palace on a huge scale, adding the Hall of Mirrors, with 578 mirrors facing 17 windows and a ceiling by Le Brun celebrating the king's victories, as well as two great wings, the ministers' wings, stables and service buildings. The court moved there in 1682, and by 1687 Versailles was in practice the capital of France. Nobles came to seek favour within a strict etiquette, which historians see as a way of weakening their power in the provinces. The king received embassies from Siam in 1686 and Persia in 1715. Wars and bad harvests slowed building, and the last major work of the reign was the royal chapel, finished in 1710. On 1 September 1715 Louis XIV died at Versailles.

Louis XV returned the court to Versailles in 1722 after the Regency and changed mainly the interiors, adding private apartments and the Royal Opera, opened in 1770 for the wedding of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In 1783 treaties signed at the palace between Britain, France and Spain helped close the American Revolutionary War.

The French Revolution ended the palace's royal life. On 5 October 1789 several thousand Parisians, angry at the price and scarcity of bread, marched to Versailles, besieged the palace and the next day forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The palace was closed, its art sent to the Louvre, and its furnishings sold at auction in some 17,000 lots in 1793 and 1794. Napoleon and the restored Bourbon kings considered living there but found the cost too great. Instead, King Louis Philippe turned much of it into a museum of French history, inaugurated in 1837.

During the Franco-Prussian War the German general staff occupied the palace, and on 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors. The French government then moved in, directed the suppression of the Paris Commune from Versailles, and parliament met there until it returned to Paris. In June 1919 the same hall saw the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War.

Restoration began in 1892 under the curator Pierre de Nolhac and was later supported by large gifts from John D. Rockefeller Jr. Since the 1950s the aim has been to return the palace as closely as possible to its state in 1789, including buying back original furniture. Breton militants bombed part of the palace in 1978, and a storm in December 1999 brought down more than 10,000 trees in the gardens. UNESCO listed the palace and park as a World Heritage Site in 1979. Owned by the state, it is one of Europe's most visited sites, and the French parliament still meets there in joint session on special occasions.