Palace of Versailles

The Château de Versailles — often called the Court of Versailles, or simply Versailles — is a royal château, outside the gates of which the village of Versailles, France, has grown to become a full-fledged city.

Post-royal: the monument-museum

At the Revolution the paintings and sculpture, like the crown jewels, were consigned to the new Musée du Louvre as part of the cultural patrimony of France. Other contents went to serve a new and moral public role: books and medals went to the Bibliothèque Nationale, clocks and scientific instruments (Louis XVI was a connoisseur of science) to the École des Arts et Métiers. Versailles was still the most richly-appointed royal palace of Europe, however, until a long series of auction sales on the premises unrolled for months during the Revolution, emptying Versailles slowly of every shred of amenity, at derisory prices, mostly to professional brocanteurs. The immediate purpose was to raise desperately-needed funds for the armies of the people, but the long-range strategy was to ensure that there was no Versailles for any king ever to come back to. The strategy has worked. Though Versailles was declared an Imperial palace, Napoleon never spent a summer's night there.

Related Topics:
Musée du Louvre - Bibliothèque Nationale

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Versailles remained both royal and unused through the Restauration. In 1830, the politic Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" declared the chäteau a museum dedicated to "all the glories of France," raising it for the first time above a Bourbon dynastic monument. At the same time, boiseries from the private apartments of princes and courtiers were removed and found their way, without provenance, into the incipient art market in Paris and London for such panelling. What remained were 120 rooms, the modern "Galeries Historiques".http://www.insecula.com/us/musee/M0037.html

Related Topics:
Restauration - Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" - Boiseries

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In the 1960s, Pierre Verlet, the greatest writer on the history of French furniture managed to get some royal furnishings returned from the museums and ministries and ambassadors' residences where they had become scattered from the central warehouses of the Mobilier National. He conceived the bold scheme of refurnishing Versailles, and the refurnished royal Appartements that tourists view today are due to Verlet's successful initiative, in which textiles were even rewoven to refurbish the state beds.

Related Topics:
Pierre Verlet - French furniture

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Today, the wise visitor is standing at the entrance to the Grands appartements du Roi at 8:30, not to spend hours in line. By 11 AM the state rooms are as crushed as a Métro rush hour. Tour guides rally their groups with a handkerchief on a stick for visibility in the mob and project simultaneous commentaries. In the summer months, the royal appartements close at 5:30 PM, and the most knowledgeable visitor arrives shortly before 5, pays a reduced price, and is the last to leave.

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