Contents

About the Book

Legend has it that, in a few busy weeks in July 1789, a despotic king, his freeloading wife, and a horde of over-privileged aristocrats, were displaced and then humanely dispatched.

In the ensuing years, we are told, France was heroically transformed into an idyll of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.

In fact, as Stephen Clarke argues in his informative and eye-opening account of the French Revolution, almost all of this is completely untrue.

In 1789 almost no one wanted to oust King Louis XVI, let alone guillotine him.

While the Bastille was being stormed by out-of-control Parisians, the true democrats were at work in Versailles creating a British-style constitutional monarchy.

The founding of the Republic in 1792 unleashed a reign of terror that caused about 300,000 violent deaths.

And people hailed today as revolutionary heroes were dangerous opportunists, whose espousal of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité did not stop them massacring political opponents and guillotining women for demanding equal rights.

Going back to original French sources, Stephen Clarke has uncovered the little-known and rarely told story of what was really happening in revolutionary France, as well as what went so tragically and bloodily wrong.

About the Author

Stephen Clarke lives in Paris, where he divides his time between writing and not writing.

His Merde novels have been bestsellers all over the world, including France. His non-fiction books include Talk to the Snail, an insider’s guide to understanding the French; How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did), an amused look at France’s continuing obsession with Napoleon; Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France, a biography of Edward VII; and 1000 Years of Annoying the French, which was a number one bestseller in Britain.

Research for The French Revolution and What Went Wrong took him deep into French archives in search of the actual words, thoughts and deeds of the revolutionaries and royalists of 1789. He has now re-emerged to ask modern Parisians why they have forgotten some of the true democratic heroes of the period, and opted to idolize certain maniacs.

Follow Stephen on @SClarkeWriter and www.stephenclarkewriter.com

Also available by Stephen Clarke

FICTION

A Year in the Merde

Merde Actually

Merde Happens

Dial M for Merde

A Brief History of the Future

The Merde Factor

Merde in Europe

NON-FICTION

Talk to the Snail: Ten Commandments for

Understanding the French

Paris Revealed

Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France

1,000 Years of Annoying the French

How the French Won Waterloo – or Think They Did

Le Château d’Hardelot, Souvenir Guide

EBOOK SHORT

Annoying the French Encore!

For more information on Stephen Clarke and his books, see his website at www.stephenclarkewriter.com or follow him on Twitter @sclarkewriter

INTRODUCTION (AND JUSTIFICATION)

I MUST START by stressing that I am not a French-style royalist. People who seriously hope that France will one day be ruled again by the descendants of Louis XVI or his relatives are usually so anti-democratic that they regard a British monarch as a dangerous leftie – and a heretical Protestant.

Many of these modern-day French monarchists also believe that anyone who can’t trace their ancestry back to Asterix the Gaul should be deported from France.

For obvious reasons, I am definitely not one of those.

Having said that, there is a lot of romantic nonsense talked and written about the French Revolution – mainly by the French themselves.

Listening to these revo-mantics, one would think that in the space of a few weeks in 1789, every powder-faced aristo was forced to donate his or her wealth to the starving masses; every lazy landowner was dispossessed in favour of a worthy producer of handmade goat’s cheese; and a despotic king and his free-loading wife were displaced (and then humanely dispatched) to make way for a benign bunch of philosophy-reading democrats who gave Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité to everyone in France.

But almost all of that is almost entirely false. And the aim of this book is to explain why.

Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité may have been the initial aims of the Revolution, but for several years the reality was more like Tyranny, Megalomania and Fratricide. And what the French rarely acknowledge, or even realize, is that guillotining royals and aristos was not at all what their revolutionaries originally intended. The fact is that even during the storming of the Bastille, almost no one in France was calling for King Louis XVI to be deposed, let alone decapitated.

The truth is that even before 14 July 1789, a revolution had taken place, and a new, egalitarian Constitution was being drafted by a more or less democratically elected parliament (if male-only suffrage can be called democratic). This Constitution overtly reaffirmed Louis XVI’s position as head of state. He was far from happy with some of the changes being imposed upon him, but he accepted them, and began to work with the new government on creating a reined-in, English-style monarchy.

What was more, once his wife Marie-Antoinette had been forced to stop spending the GDP on parties and necklaces, and the aristocrats were no longer able to tax their peasant tenants to death, Louis XVI was very popular with the average Français and Française. He was the star guest at the ceremony to mark the first anniversary of Bastille Day, during which a mass oath of allegiance was sworn to both king and nation.

Louis XVI’s attendance at the ceremony was heartily cheered by the Parisian crowds – the same people who had spent much of the previous summer rioting. Most ordinary citizens felt that, without the stalling tactics of the aristocrats, Louis would have given them fairer taxation and even a measure of political influence years earlier. This was why in 1790, the King was still seen by the general population as a potential benefactor, a figure of hope.

That same year, an author and former soldier called Antoine Rigobert Mopinot published a project to erect a statue of Louis XVI in Paris, ‘to transmit to future generations the happy revolution that has revitalized France under [his] reign’.fn1 Mopinot went on to assert that the new regime ‘ensures the continuing prestige and stability of the French throne, and gives the French nation complete freedom to observe its laws, with the support of royal power’. He was expressing the general view at the time that there was no contradiction between revolution and royalty. In 1792, Mopinot was still in possession of an unsevered neck, and was again pitching his project to the post-revolutionary parliament, so no one can have thought that his desire to celebrate Louis XVI’s continued existence was particularly subversive.

However, by 1793 this process of peaceful reform had come to a brutal end, and France was charging down the perilous path of civil war, dictatorship and mass public executions. It is estimated that 300,000 French men, women and children were killed by their compatriots, many of them in the most barbarous way imaginable (drowning and bayonetting were especially popular), during the ‘Terreur’ that followed the fall of the constitutional monarchy. And the tragic fact was that by the end of it all, the poorest and most oppressed sections of the population were left even worse off than they had been in 1789.

All of which suggests that something went disastrously wrong with France’s Revolution…

Chapter 1

CREATING EUROPE’S GRANDEST PALACE

I

IN THE MODERN French psyche, everything changed in 1789. So much so that Louis XVI’s reign, and that of every king before him, is known as the ‘Ancien Régime’ – the ‘Former Regime’.

This wasn’t a name Louis XVI chose for himself, obviously. He had no inkling that his regime was going to be ‘former’. It is a label coined after the Revolution, to describe what went before, and it is still used today when talking about pre-1789 France, even though the country has had plenty of different systems of government since. In the twenty-first century, France is governed by the so-called ‘Fifth Republic’, explicitly admitting that there have been at least four other Anciens Régimes.

‘Ancien’ has a second meaning – ancient. And the French monarchy certainly was that, arguably going back as far as Charlemagne in the eighth century. But the element that caused its downfall was newer. At the time of the Revolution, the class of all-powerful, over-privileged, complacent aristocrats who infuriated the French so much that ‘aristo’ is still an insult today had only existed for a couple of centuries at most. They had moulded themselves into a kind of glass ceiling that prevented any hope of social mobility for the ‘lower’ classes, and also formed a barrier between the King, Louis XVI, and his people. There had been aristocrats before that, of course, but they began to evolve into their mutant form sometime in the sixteenth century, in one specific location in France.

In purely physical terms, the most visible cause of resentment amongst poor French people before the Revolution was the mind-bogglingly immense palace of Versailles. It was an oasis of absurd luxury and scarcely believable excess situated 20 kilometres outside Paris, a flagrant symbol of the distance that the French monarchy and its courtiers had placed between themselves and ordinary people.

In the 1780s, a common sight in the impoverished suburbs and villages around Paris was a carriage-load of drunk aristocratic revellers, their wigs askew and their powdered noses in the air, driving back to Versailles after a night out on the town, just as dawn was breaking and the poor were embarking on another day’s underpaid, overtaxed toil.

By 1789, the palace of Versailles was on the wane, as was the town that had grown up around it to house the thousands of people whose ambition was to be received at court or just to make money out of the royals and their hangers-on. The glory days of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were over, and Versailles was a sordid shadow of the place that the Sun King, Louis XIV, had turned into a vast temple to his own glory, populated by thousands of his worshippers.

Louis XIV’s great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI had got rid of the worst excesses of royal etiquette, and was even trying to clamp down on his wife Marie-Antoinette’s notorious shopping habit. Even so, by the enforced end of Louis XVI’s reign, Versailles was still a sort of malignant growth on the body of France that large sections of the population wanted to amputate.

But who had created this microcosm of obscene privilege, and who had enabled it to become so bloated?

II

Before the sixteenth century, French kings did not have a settled court. They wandered constantly from château to château, keeping an eye on their properties and reminding the locals who was in charge by showing off their expensive armour and, just as importantly, by collecting taxes. The royal entourage consisted mainly of immediate family and a small army of soldiers, some of whom were there to guard the tax collectors.

This began to change under François I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547. François was a contemporary of England’s Henry VIII, and similar in looks and lifestyle. Even though they weren’t exactly of the ‘make love not war’ school (Henry invaded France, for example, and François grabbed chunks of Italy), they were Renaissance men and aspired to a life of leisure, culture and comfort. François I allowed more women into his entourage (not just as conversation partners, of course), so that his court became less military, more refined and more stylish.

He began to develop a royal life centred on dancing, feasting and generally showing off. There was still plenty of medieval jousting, and the King would risk serious injury by challenging knights to duels with lances, but these tournaments were mainly designed to emphasize that François was the alpha male at the head of a glittering court that outshone all other mortals.

This was the dawning of Louis XIV’s notion of the Sun King, an absolute monarch who ruled by divine right and was therefore worthy of being treated like a god. It was François I who decreed that the man of highest rank present at court should hand the King his shirt when he got out of bed every morning. The ritual was a bizarre mixture of honour and obligation, a system of enslaving members of the royal entourage that Louis XIV would expand into a whole lifestyle.

Under François I, it became a powerful social motivation amongst the aristocracy to be admitted into the King’s inner circle, and staying there required style, money and flattery. Anyone who failed to show enough deference, who spoke ill of the King or his family, or who simply didn’t cut the royal mustard, could be banished from court, meaning that their noble titles would count for nothing (except wealth and a pleasant château, of course).

The poet Jean Dupuys wrote a cautionary verse about this growing desire to be seen at François I’s court:

Given that the King was the focus of court life, it was natural that his minions should come to him and not vice versa, and so François became more sedentary, and built or expanded some of France’s finest châteaux as venues for his life of luxury: Amboise, Blois and Chambord on the Loire; Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the hunting forest west of Paris; and Fontainebleau to the south. He also renovated the Louvre, the royal palace in the centre of Paris, demolishing some of its darker medieval sections. As yet there was no Versailles.

This addiction to parties and palace-building, as well as costly wars against England, Italy and the Habsburg Empire, quickly emptied France’s coffers, so François doubled the tax on agricultural harvests (la taille, or cut, deriving from the notches on the counting sticks used before most of the population could read), and tripled the tax on salt (la gabelle, from an Italian word for a levy), both of which would loom large in 1789. He also introduced duties on moving goods from one French province to another, as well as reforming the tax-collection system so that he could get his hands on his subjects’ money more efficiently.

Even this wasn’t enough, though, and François I was forced to sell royal lands and some of his crown jewels. He also borrowed from French noblemen, at least one of whom, Jacques de Beaune, paid the ultimate price for asking to be reimbursed. De Beaune was the intendant des finances,fn1 the head of France’s treasury, and François I had him executed for corruption, even though poor Beaune proved his innocence at his trial.

In short, by using the nation’s purse as his personal entertainment budget, François I was laying down the foundations of the bloated court of Versailles, and perhaps of the Revolution itself. In 1548, just a year after François’s son Henri II inherited the throne, there was a minor uprising in the southwest of France over the salt tax. It began in the countryside, spread to Bordeaux, and only ended when Henri sent two armies to crush the rebellion and execute 140 people – not just the ringleaders, but also the local officials who had been slow to stem the first stirrings of revolt. The King’s aim was clear – his people had to understand that resistance to royal rule was useless.

III

Perhaps as an attempt to improve the social climate, 50 years later King Henri IV created a very new type of French monarchy, one that would not have been out of place in modern Scandinavia. If Henri IV had had a bicycle, he would have ridden it, Swedish-style, around the streets of Paris – carefully avoiding the open sewers, of course.

Politically, he was a moderate compared to later kings. Having switched religions several times himself, in 1594 he gave Protestants the right to worship freely – much to the fury of the Catholic establishment.

After mopping up a minor religious civil war (largely fomented by Spanish Catholics), Henri IV settled down to become a man of peace, which was a huge relief to his taxpayers. And when he did go into battle, he was a benign victor, ordering that successfully besieged cities should not be pillaged – a risky strategy because the right to rape, murder and rob had long been one of the perks of the combatant’s trade. As a result, Henri spent much of his reign trying to suppress violent gangs of frustrated, unemployed soldiers who terrorized the French countryside.

At court – mainly at the Louvre in Paris – Henri IV was so relaxed about etiquette that once, when his food taster forgot his job description and drank a whole glass of wine, Henri joked: ‘At least you could have drunk to my health.’ (A century later, at the height of Louis XIV’s tyrannical Versailles, the offender would probably have been banished to a trading post halfway up the Mississippi, with a quip about enjoying excess liquid.)

Henri IV was no saint, but he was no hypocrite either. When accused of being too fond of hunting, gambling, womanizing, banqueting and dancing, he replied: ‘As long as one doesn’t go too far, that should be said in praise rather than disapproval.’ And unlike later monarchs, his courtiers were under no obligation to lose to him at cards and dice, and he would often gamble away small fortunes.fn2

No one really disapproved of Henri IV’s frivolities, mainly because he was known to spend long hours with his ministers, and never to shirk work. The results of this dedication to duty were visible to every Parisian, because Henri oversaw extensive modernization of the city, including the construction of a major new river crossing, the Pont-Neuf.

He also promised to help the poor, saying that every family should have ‘une poule au pot’ – ‘a chicken for the pot’. To facilitate the transport of produce, he launched an ambitious scheme to connect France’s three coastlines – the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Channel. The plan included the 57-kilometre-long Canal du Briare, linking the Rivers Loire and Seine, a spectacular engineering project that gave work to some 18,000 men.

Conscious of his popularity, Henri IV would often venture outside his palace with only a minimal team of bodyguards. He would tour Paris on horseback or on foot, meeting and greeting his subjects, and enjoying the bustle of street life. He was as unlike the Sun King Louis XIV – or even modern French presidents – as can be imagined.

And this was precisely the reason why the Henri IV model of monarchy didn’t catch on in France. It was during one of his unprotected outings, riding in a carriage with only four guards, that Henri was stabbed through the right lung by a religious fanatic, and died before he could be rushed back the few hundred yards to the Louvre.

His assailant, François Ravaillac, took rather longer to die. He was given a gruesomely detailed death sentence:

Sadly for Ravaillac, he was a muscular man, and the execution took all day, including the time wasted while one of the exhausted horses was replaced.

But even this extreme punishment, watched by a large crowd of mesmerized Parisians, was no comfort to the royal family, and future French kings deemed it wiser to distance themselves from knife-wielding plebs. It is probably no coincidence that Henri IV’s successor, Louis XIII, began to convert a poky little castle in Versailles into a royal haven.

IV

In the early seventeenth century, no one could have imagined that Versailles would one day become Europe’s most glamorous palace, or provoke a revolution. Louis XIII’s first equerry, the Duc de Saint-Simon, described it as ‘the saddest and most ungracious of places, with no view, no water and no land, because it is all airless quicksand and marshes’. The only building of any size there was a castle, surrounded by stagnant ponds and accessible from the nearest village by a rutted track.

But this seems to have been exactly what Louis XIII loved about it. Becoming king in 1610 at the early age of eight, he seized power from his mother, the Regent, when he was 15, only for her to start a civil war against him. After her army was defeated, he was persuaded to reconcile the warring factions in France by accepting her back at court. With a disgruntled old queen on the rampage in his royal palaces at the Louvre, Fontainebleau and Saint-German-en-Laye, it was hardly surprising that he began to seek refuge elsewhere.

The young Louis XIII would often ride out from Paris to hunt in the forest close to the old castle, which belonged to the Archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi. At the end of a day chasing deer, rather than returning to the Louvre, Louis would impose his company on the lucky clergyman, along with a few friends and a small group of servants.

Louis became so fond of the place that in 1624 he bought 117 arpents (an arpent was a measure comprising 220 ‘king’s paces’, or 71.46 metres) of land from 16 landowners, on a small plateau outside the village of Versailles, where he built a modest hunting lodge for himself and a few male companions.

To counter rumours of ‘immoral’ male-only antics, Louis invited his mother Marie de Médicis and his wife Anne d’Autriche (despite her name she was a Spanish princess – it was her mother who was Austrian) to dine there in November 1626. The household was run so modestly that Louis served the meal himself. But he then spoilt the mood of mixed domesticity by sending both ladies back to their bedchambers in Paris. This was a men’s club, he said, and he preferred it that way: ‘A large number of women would spoil everything.’ Which did nothing to dispel the rumours about gay goings-on.

Of course, a modest hunting lodge to a French king was a palace to ordinary people. The first royal building there consisted of a main house with two small wings. According to a detailed inventory made in 1630, it had 26 rooms. The King’s apartments on the first floor consisted of a cabinet (his den), a bedroom, dressing room (which also contained his personal commode, the chaise percée) and a reception room.

All the King’s rooms were hung with tapestries. Those in his bedroom depicted the story of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, while the theme in his cabinet was goddesses. The furniture was relatively simple. There were two hard-backed wooden chairs, six silk-covered wooden stools, a large table, and a leather rug. Louis XIII wanted to sleep in royal comfort, however, so his bed was topped with three cotton-stuffed mattresses.

The cabinet had a sideboard, two chests, a table with two silver candelabras and a leather-topped writing desk. It wasn’t only a workroom, because its central feature was a billiard table. Here Louis also kept his chess and backgammon sets, his roulette wheel and other games such as a jeu de l’oie (a board game) and jonchets (pick-up sticks) – enough amusements for some exciting boys-only nights in the country.

The other rooms were mainly bedchambers for the King’s close male friends, all of them aristocrats, and simple monastic-like cells for the guards. There were also two rooms full of mattresses for last-minute guests.

The only woman allowed to spend any time there was the wife of the full-time concierge.

Louis XIII was so happy with his hideaway that he decided to opt for exclusive ownership of the whole area. In April 1632, he bought the archbishop’s property, which was listed in the sale agreement as ‘an old ruined château, several farm buildings, arable land, meadows, woods, chestnut groves, ponds and other outbuildings’. The price was 60,000 livres tournois, the equivalent of about 4,000 months of a worker’s salary, paid in pieces of 16 sous. Twenty sous made one livre, which meant that the archbishop came away with a heap of 75,000 coins, probably made of silver.

Louis also bought out other landowners in the area, and created gardens around his ‘lodge’, but he never raised Versailles above what a scornful contemporary referred to as ‘a small house of a gentleman living on ten to twelve thousand livres per year’. To give an idea of how disdainful this comment was, 12,000 livres represented about half the salary later paid to the lucky servant whose duty was to carry the chaise percée of the next monarch, Louis XIII’s son Louis XIV, in and out of his bedroom every morning. And it was this next Louis who decided to lift Versailles out of obscurity.

V

When Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643, he was only four years old. His father had died young, partly of the effects of Crohn’s disease, and partly of the 1,200 enemas and 250 laxative purges prescribed by his doctors to cure it. Louis XIV’s mother, Anne d’Autriche, had never approved of her husband’s Versailles bolthole, so at first the future Sun King was kept in the dark about it.

Louis XIV’s troubled childhood became decidedly dysfunctional when he was still only 12 and under his mother’s regency. First, parliament rebelled against the Crown, and a rebel army put up barricades in Paris, forcing the court to flee to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 20 kilometres west of the Louvre. Then two of Louis XIV’s cousins (and potential claimants to the throne), the Princes de Condé and de Conti, turned against him, and a sporadic civil war raged for three years.

At one point in the period of unrest known as ‘la Fronde’ (‘the Sling’, a mocking name given to the rebels who were likened to children flinging stones), Louis XIV and his mother were captured by a Parisian mob and held prisoner in the Palais-Royal. Luckily for the royal captives, seventeenth-century mobs were less fond of beheadings and lynchings than their eighteenth-century equivalents.

The years of rebellion only came to an end when Conti was imprisoned and the people got tired of Condé’s rebel army pillaging the countryside. So it wasn’t until 1653 that Louis XIV could finally settle down and begin evolving into a tyrannical, absolutist monarch.

Louis XIV was 15 when he emerged from his mother’s regency, and it was hardly surprising that he should look around for a way of keeping parliament, the Parisians and the nobles under the royal thumb. He knew that as things stood, any nobleman wanting to cause trouble just had to whip up the people of Paris to his cause. Louis XIV saw that he needed to domesticate the court, and crush any thoughts of revolution or dissent beneath the sheer weight of his power. He was to be the Roi Soleil, the Sun King – because no one dares to question the movements of the sun.fn3

Gradually, Louis XIV conceived the ingenious idea of moving himself permanently out of range of riotous mobs, while imprisoning his aristocrats (many of whom served in parliament) in luxury. The core of his idea was that he would make it obligatory to attend court, or at least so desirable that to stay away would feel like social exile. Once he had entrapped the nobles, a rigid code of etiquette would regiment their every move, and the dress code would be so outlandish that the richest aristos would have to bankrupt themselves to keep up. He would have aristocrats feeding him, dressing him, even wiping his bottom – and they would fight, or even pay, for the privilege of doing it.

It was a fiendish plan that would eventually bring down both the nobility and the monarchy, but for more than a century, it worked spectacularly well.

Louis XIV introduced phase one of his scheme by saying that he owed it to his family, the Bourbons,fn4 to build a new palace in their honour. The Louvre, Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Blois, Amboise and all the rest were very chic, but Louis wanted a home of his own. He also owed it to France to prove that it was the most powerful country in Europe, he said. This he would do by building the most fabulous palace that Europe had ever seen, with him as the most fabulous ruler.

By now the young Louis XIV had discovered his father’s hunting lodge in the forest of Versailles, and had begun using it as a love nest. When he was 22, he started an affair with a maid of honour in his brother’s household. The lucky girl was a teenager called Louise de la Vallière. Not that the affair was very flattering. At the outset, young Louise was meant to be a cover for the more passionate affair that the King was enjoying with his brother’s wife, Henrietta (who was, incidentally, the daughter of King Charles I of England). To make things even more complicated, Henrietta was said to be using Louis XIV to escape from the clutches of her own lover. Even before the royal court reached the peak (or trough) of its debauchery under Louis XV, sexual matters amongst courtiers were pretty torrid.

Unexpectedly, Louis XIV soon became attached to young Louise de la Vallière, and would ride out to Versailles once or twice a week for a romantic rendezvous. Typically though, these were not furtive midnight excursions. Louis would go to Versailles with a dozen or so close friends, all dressed in identical costumes as a sort of code – one that everyone quickly deciphered.

Louis XIV tired of Louise after four pregnancies in five years,fn5 but his affection for Versailles didn’t wane, and he began to put on lavish entertainments there, inviting France’s greatest comic playwright, Molière, to stage several plays, including the premiere of one of his most famous works, Tartuffe.

It was in the 1660s that Louis decided to turn his former love nest into a permanent home – and the gilded cage of all his courtiers. He set his architect, Louis Le Vau, the master of French classicism, to work, and seems to have given him a simple brief: ‘Make it VERY, VERY BIG.’

Le Vau offered Louis XIV two building plans: either demolish the old château and start again, or expand the existing buildings into the gardens at the rear. Like many homeowners, Louis chose extension over demolition, and in 1668, Le Vau’s workmen began turning the former hunting lodge into Europe’s largest palace, with 2,300 rooms.

The central area, which surrounded Louis XIII’s original château, consisted mainly of the King and Queen’s accommodation. Their apartments were built around a courtyard in which only the highest-ranking nobles and members of the royal family were allowed to park their carriages. There was also a chapel (which sounds intimate but was actually a vast, gold-and-marble cathedral), buildings in the forecourt for ministers, and long north and south wings, much of which were given over to cramped accommodation for those honoured with the right to reside in the palace – a convenient privilege when it came to changing costume several times a day for different ceremonies.

At the heart of the project was the Grand appartement for Louis XIV himself, a seven-room collection of generously sized salons. The most luxurious of these was the salon Apollon, or Apollo Room, with its painted ceiling depicting Louis as a sun god on his chariot. The four seasons, the hours (all of them feminine, reflecting the King’s favourite pastime), and the rest of the universe gravitated around him. Modesty was not one of his faults. Originally, the Apollo Room sported a 2.6-metre silver throne, but even Louis XIV eventually found this a bit extravagant, and in 1689 he had it and other pieces of silver furniture melted down to pay for a war against the League of Augsburg.

One of Louis XIV’s favourite salons in the apartment was his billiard room, the salon de Diane (dedicated to the goddess of hunting). The King was skilled with a billiard cue, and he had a balustrade constructed so that women could look down on the table and applaud his good shots. Inevitably, the salon de Diane became known as the ‘applause room’.

This Grand appartement was by no means a private space. Louis XIV lived most of his adult life as the star of a royal pantomime, and performed every bodily function except sexual intercourse in front of an audience. During the daytime, most of his salons would be awash with courtiers, visitors, advisors and attendants. The same went for the Queen’s apartment, a mirror image of his own – Louis and she would eat their evening meal before a carefully selected audience in the Queen’s antechamber, and the Queen even gave birth six times while courtiers looked on.

The most famous room in the new palace was the Grande galerie, since renamed the galerie des Glacesfn6 (the gallery of mirrors and not, as some French children mistakenly believe, the gallery of ice creams). This magnificent, 73-metre reception area stretched for almost the whole width of the new palace, its windows looking out over the gardens, a view that was reflected in the 357 mirrors on the opposite wall.

This was where courtiers and the public waited for a glimpse of the King, and where diplomats would be forced to parade on their way to a royal audience. Accordingly, the whole theme of the decor was Louis XIV’s genius and France’s prestige. The ceiling was conceived as a sort of arc de triomphe glorifying the Sun King, with paintings depicting his military victories (such as his personal command over the troops who captured Maastricht in 1673) and allegories representing his political achievements – ‘Order re-established in finances, 1662’, ‘Protection given to the arts, 1663’ and other such grandiose titles.

The mirrors themselves were a message to the world that France now surpassed even Venice in its skill at glassmaking. In the seventeenth century, huge faultless mirrors were the height of technological achievement. The equivalent today might be a gallery of gigantic 3-D movie screens showing films that celebrate France’s food, wine and nuclear power stations, with built-in odour-producing cells that allow visitors to smell the food and the radioactive emissions. In 1919 the galerie des Glaces, with its gold-encrusted statues and crystal chandeliers, was still considered intimidating enough to be chosen as the venue for the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, the agreement that was designed to scare the Germans off war forever. And the room is still used by modern French presidents to receive official guests, proving that Louis XIV’s notion of self-aggrandizement has never been surpassed.

By 1682 the palace was close enough to completionfn7 for Louis XIV to move the whole of his court and his government out from Paris to Versailles. In the meantime, he had been a very regular visitor to the building site – like every homeowner, he knew that builders take far too many breaks unless you keep an eye on them.

VI

Louis XIV also made sure that a whole new town grew up around the burgeoning palace. For a start, some 1,500 staff were to be accommodated in houses constructed on top of the old village of Versailles, after the previous residents – disposable rustics – had been evicted.

Louis gave away 500 free plots of land to his favourite aristocrats, and granted building permits to everyone else. He went as far as declaring that that houses in Versailles would be ‘insaisissables’, that is, they could not be seized by debtors or the courts. This was a great favour to the many noblemen and-women with gambling addictions, and especially to those who would be forced to overspend on clothes, wigs and the general expense of courtly life. Louis knew that they would need to borrow fortunes to be able to stay at court, and might then be harassed by creditors. Some would probably have to sell their Paris homes to finance their new lifestyles. But at least they could hang on to their Versailles house, even if they had borrowed money to build it and never repaid the loans.

Not that these new properties were entirely safe. Several aristocratic courtiers saw their new mansions demolished on Louis XIV’s orders to make way for two immense stable blocks and a huge Orangerie which, in 1686, caused the visiting ambassador of Siam to remark that: ‘The King’s fortune must be very big if he builds such a marvellous home for his orange trees.’

The ambassador was right – Louis XIV had ambitious plans for his plants. He commissioned his gardener, André le Nôtre, to impose a look of total artificiality on the 830 hectares of parkland, using angular lawns and flowerbeds, dancing fountains and a 1.6-kilometre-long cruciform lake. The palace grounds were to symbolize the triumph of Louis XIV over nature.

Like the galerie des Glaces, the gardens were designed to show off the best of French technology. The 2,000-odd fountains, waterfalls and water spouts were to be powered by hydraulic energy, using a large reservoir built above the level of the fountains, and connected to a network of buried pipes. Some of this water was pumped in from the River Seine, ten kilometres away.

Louis XIV followed every step of this huge gardening project, at one point sending a memo to Jean-Baptiste Colbert,fn8 the man in charge of executing Le Nôtre’s plans, telling him: ‘You must make the Versailles pumps work well, especially those at the top reservoir, so that when I arrive, they don’t break down all the time and upset me.’

When a 200-kilometre network of pipes, aqueducts and diverse watercourses was completed in the late 1680s, Versailles possessed the biggest water system in Europe. Not only did the château have running water, a rare commodity, but with one turn of a tap, simple gravity would produce spectacular displays of water jets in its gardens. It was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the city of Paris was less well supplied with water than the King’s private home. (Much later, Parisians would say the same thing about bread, and start rioting.)

The gardens took as long as the palace itself to complete, and at times mobilized more than a thousand workers, including whole regiments of soldiers who were drafted in to transport 150,000 plants and countless tons of fertile soil, turning the former ‘stinking ponds’ and boggy marshes into Europe’s most sophisticated green space.

Today, the grounds are still spectacular and often crowded with visitors, but they are uneventful compared to Louis XIV’s day. Then, there would have been masses of finely dressed courtiers strolling, loitering, eating or using the more secluded areas of shrubbery for various bodily functions. Louis himself watched over the gardens as keenly as he did the palace, and would walk there very regularly. The fountains were only in full spout when he was present – as he approached, the water features along his route would be turned on; as soon as he was out of sight of a particular fountain, it was to be switched off. When he was inside the château, only the fountains visible to him would be active. Again, the Sun King was showing that he controlled the elements.

Throughout his reign Louis XIV was constantly suggesting improvements to his grounds, the most outrageous of which was to create a ‘royal fleet’ of boats for his Grand Canal.

The Grand Canal, explicitly rivalling Venice’s waterway, was impressive enough on its own: its east–west ‘trunk’ was 1,650 metres long, and the north–south crossbar 1,000 metres. It was 60 metres wide. Seen from the windows of the galerie des Glaces, looking downhill across the gardens, it seems immense – to the modern eye, every bit as long as an airport runway. To seventeenth-century viewers, it would have been the hugest garden feature imaginable, stretching away almost to the horizon thanks to a trick of sloping perspective.

Along the central ‘trunk’ of the canal there were three large octagonal basins where Louis XIV’s garden fleet was moored. These boats included a dozen or so gondolas, four of them donated by the city of Venice and crewed by genuine Venetian gondoliers. There were also rowing barges up to 13 metres long, the largest being designed to hold the King, a small orchestra and a team of rowers. Louis XIV also commissioned several scale models of merchant vessels and warships big enough for a crew of a dozen men.

This miniature royal fleet even included a 13-metre galley complete with 32 cannons. It was a model of the large oar-powered ships used by the French navy until the middle of the eighteenth century, usually rowed by chained, branded convicts. To ensure complete authenticity, the galley in the gardens of Versailles was actually rowed by prisoners sent from Marseille.

Outside the realm of his gardens, Louis XIV’s naval policy was to expand France’s fleet of galleys, so much so that Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his Navy Minister, sent out a message to the country’s magistrates: ‘His Majesty desires to renew his stock of galleys and boost the number of galley slaves, so his intention is that you condemn the greatest possible number of convicts to them.’fn9 Although these prisoners were often guilty of relatively minor crimes, the galley was usually, in effect, a death sentence, thereby saving Louis the cost of building new prisons. The inclusion of a giant model galley in his new palace gardens, rowed by real prisoners, might well have been a none-too-subtle message to any courtiers or Versailles townspeople harbouring thoughts of rebellion.

Louis XIV’s pleasure boats were often built in the grounds at Versailles, being assembled from wooden parts pre-shaped at naval boatyards. As well as carpenters and wood carvers, the boats required upholsterers for the taffeta-covered seats, curtain makers for the gold and silver drapes, and painters to apply gold leaf and to colour in the royal standards that were carved into the wood. The palace’s boatyards were located in a village near the canal that housed boatbuilders, maintenance men and several dozen sailors, most of whom had been recruited in France’s ports. As the number of real gondoliers imported from Venice grew (to 13 in 1681), this inland harbour had more boats and inhabitants than some of France’s real fishing villages, and was christened la Petite Venise.

All the sailors, gondoliers and galley slaves would be mobilized for Louis XIV’s water festivals, when the Grand Canal would look like a miniature Mediterranean, a calm sea of gilded gondolas, ornately carved barges and sailing ships, with the wigs, silks and satins of their aristocratic passengers glowing in the light from torches and the flash of (blank) cannon fire, often accompanied by music written for the occasion, such as the Trumpet Concerto for Parties on the Canal of Versailles by Michel Richard Delalande.

On these occasions, the fleet’s movements would be choreographed by Louis XIV in person, but he was much more than an admiral. With his total mastery of the waters of Versailles, he was presenting himself as the source of life itself. It was exactly this kind of arrogance that would provoke the Revolution a century later.

What’s more, Louis XIV’s overt sovereignty over the elements extended beyond water. With his gigantic firework parties, he gave fire; by remodelling Versailles from a swamp-bound hunting lodge into Europe’s finest castle, shipping whole hillsides of soil to create its gardens, he had dominated the Earth; and of course as the Sun King, he symbolically provided light and a physical focus to French society.

Most crucially of all, though, Louis XIV also controlled time.

Chapter 2

ENSLAVING THE ARISTOCRACY

I

AT THE END of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV’s court consisted of about 10,000 people, almost all of them constantly clamouring for royal attention. The Italian writer Primi Visconti, who spent eight years at Louis XIV’s court, wrote that the spectacle of the King emerging from his palace for a tour of the grounds reminded him of ‘the queen bee when she goes out into the fields with her swarm’.

Some of these drones would be asking for a serious favour – the 1996 French film Ridicule, for example, tells the credible story of a young nobleman, with the wonderfully aristocratic name Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy, who has to jump through a succession of protocol hoops to beg Louis XIV for a grant so that he can drain the marshes on his land and save his peasant tenants from malaria.

More often, though, the petitioners would be jostling in the corridors of Versailles in the hope of obtaining an honour such as the right to hold the King’s candlestick while he went to bed – a job that they would be willing to pay for.

Performing the most menial tasks for the King and his courtiers were about 7,000 servants, all of them permanently guarded (or kept under control) by some 4,000 infantrymen and 4,000 cavalry. On an average day when Louis XIV was in residence, there might be a crowd of 15,000 people flowing around the palace and the grounds – all of them living according to the King’s timetable.

When the Duc de Saint-Simon wrote of Louis XIV that ‘with an almanac and a watch, one could, even at a distance of 300 kilometres, say exactly what he was doing’ he did not disapprove. He found this predictability and stability reassuring. At least you knew where you were with Louis XIV – literally. Just as the sun determines what time of day it is, the Sun King decided what all his courtiers and the members of the royal family – all his most credible rivals for power – were doing at any given time.