Vive la Revolution!

So this week we went to Versailles and the Panthéon...

I thought about doing a little “Sophie’s World” kind of thing through this blog on the French Revolution and my experiences here in Paris.

To talk about Versailles, I must explain a little about why it was built.

It was during the Ancien Régime, Louis XIV, le Roi-Soleil, ordered Versailles to be built in his father’s Louis XIII hunting lodge, where as a boy, he played and hunted there. It was a huge project, Louis Le Vau was the palace architect and André Le Nôtre was the landscape and garden architect.

In 1682 Versailles was ready, and Louis XIV decided that he would move there for good, and Versailles would be the official residence of the King of France.

All the most important nobles from the Second Estate moved there, and worked for the king, dressing him and watching him eat.

A lot of things happened during Louis XIV’s reign, it would take me too much time to explain it all; he died in 1715 from smallpox. His great-grandson Louis XV, le Bien Aimé succeeded him, and let’s just say he made a huge mess in French politics, getting France into war with Britain during the Seven Years War (aka French-Indian war in American), France was in debt, and by the time of his death in 1774 people hated him, and nobody cared he had died.

Louis XVI marks the “fall” of Versailles (after him no one would ever live in Versailles). In 1774 he became King of France, he was already married to Marie-Antoinette d’Autriche, as a form of alliance between France and Austria, which after would become one of the main reasons that the Revolution got to where it did.

The debt of France was so bad, and the monarchs kept spending money, while the population was starving and could barely pay their high taxes on basically everything such as on salt, land... Louis talked to his advisor, the Finance Minister of France, Jacques Necker, and they came into a conclusion to call the Estates-General in 1789. The Estates-General was an assembly with representatives from all estates, clergy (first estate), aristocracy (second estate), and everyone else (third estate).

Estates-General: Engraving by Isidore-Stanislaus Helman (1743-1806) following a sketch by Charles Monnet (1732-1808)

The meeting was at Versailles, and when the third estate realized that they wouldn’t get anything they wanted, since the clergy and the aristocracy always voted “against” them, 2 against 1, they kept insisting in a more aggressive way, the king did not like it, and after a break, the king ordered the guards to lock the doors to the place, not letting the third estate in.

The third estate was very mad at the king, and so they marched to a Tennis Court in Versailles (the city not the palace), very close to the palace, and they made an oath to stick together to write a constitution to France, and they would be called from then on, the National Assembly!

(And that was the scene that we saw at the Panthéon.)

Panthéon

The king did not like that one bit, but still joined them as their “leader”.

So now, I want to talk about the Panthéon and how much I enjoyed it.

That place is full of people who have been someone important to France at one point during the revolutions and so on. Rousseau for instance was a great philosopher whose books and ideas influenced the Revolution the most.

I was disappointed that the people that I wanted to see were not there anymore, such as Mirabeau (one of the first leaders of the third estate after the Tennis Court Oath), he was taken out of there and replaced by Marat (also a very important leader during the revolution, he was a Girondin, also taken away from the Panthéon and put into a cemetery...), I don’t know why, but I’m guessing because after the King tried to escape in 1791 and people found out he was working very closely with the king and queen in the beginning of the revolution, they called him an impostor, but he died in a normal way and not guillotined.

But just to know that this place was built to honor the revolution and the people who fought for it to me is good enough. I was very much happy about it.

Versailles was the same for me, I felt like I was living a bit during the Revolution, and even the years prior to it, but I wanted to see more of the palace, and not just the gardens. I wanted to see bathrooms, other rooms, secret rooms, and more stairs, the KITCHEN!!! But to be there and see the rooms of the King and Queen was very nice, and very enjoyable.

I hope to go back there in a month and see it all again. Sit by the garden and try to pretend it’s the 1780s...