Versailles: The Town a King Built to Rule France
A king grew tired of Paris and its unruly crowds, so he built a new capital from the ground up — and for over a century, the fate of France was decided in its halls.
In 1682, Louis XIV did something no French monarch had done before: he moved his entire court and government out of Paris and into a town he had willed into existence on an elevated plateau seventeen kilometers to the west. That town was Versailles, and from that moment until 1789, it functioned as the de facto capital of the Kingdom of France, even though Paris technically retained the official title.
The name itself likely traces back to the Latin word versare, meaning to turn over repeatedly — an old term for ploughed or cleared land. It is a fittingly humble root for a place that would become synonymous with royal grandeur, but the word first appears in medieval documents as early as 1038, long before any king dreamed of a palace there.
Versailles sits at 130 to 140 metres above sea level, a plateau ringed by wooded hills — the forests of Marly and Fausses-Reposes to the north, Satory and Meudon to the south. Unlike the tangled, organic streets of old Paris, Versailles was laid out as a rational, symmetrical grid, a strikingly modern design for its era. That grid later inspired Pierre Charles L'Enfant when he designed Washington, D.C.
For over a century, power flowed through Versailles almost continuously. Louis XIV reigned from there until his death in 1715. During the brief regency of Philippe d'Orléans, the court shifted back to Paris, but by 1722 young Louis XV had returned it to Versailles, where it remained until October 1789, when a Parisian mob forced Louis XVI and his family back to the capital — a moment that marked the beginning of the end for the ancien régime and made Versailles, in effect, the cradle of the French Revolution.
The town's diplomatic legacy runs just as deep as its political one. Versailles is historically associated with numerous treaties, among them the Treaty of Paris, which brought an end to the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. And after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles was signed within its own walls, on 28 June 1919, cementing the town's name permanently into the history of twentieth-century geopolitics.
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