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Y313: The Ascendancy of France 1610–1715

Depth study: Versailles and image-making — cost, criticism and image-making

  • 2 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on the cost and claimed benefits of Versailles, Colbert’s objections, its international standing, contemporary criticism, the fabrication of Louis XIV, the effectiveness of royal image-making and historians’ disagreements.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

How expensive was Versailles?

Process

How did Versailles affect France's international standing?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How expensive was Versailles?

    Model answer

    The royal building accounts record a total of the order of eighty million livres across the reign, a huge sum, but one modest beside the cost of the wars, so historians dispute how far the palace can be blamed for royal insolvency.

  2. 2

    What economic benefits were claimed for the building of Versailles?

    Model answer

    It employed tens of thousands of workers and soldiers, and it created and protected French luxury industries in mirrors, tapestry, silk, furniture and silverware whose products became exports and set European fashion.

  3. 3

    Why did Colbert object to the king's absorption in Versailles?

    Model answer

    He believed the money and attention would be better spent on Paris and on public works that displayed royal greatness to the nation, and he feared that a private pleasure house at Versailles would be an unworthy monument to the reign.

  4. 4

    How did Versailles affect France's international standing?

    Model answer

    Ambassadors were received in calculated splendour, embassies from Siam and Persia were staged as public theatre, and French court manners, language, fashion and architecture were imitated across Europe, with rulers from Vienna to Russia building their own versions.

  5. 5

    What criticisms were made of Versailles?

    Model answer

    Saint-Simon condemned it as an unhealthy site built at ruinous cost to gratify the king's wish to bury himself away from Paris, foreign and Huguenot pamphleteers presented its magnificence as the pomp of a tyrant paid for by starving peasants, and satirists mocked the sun imagery once the armies were defeated.

  6. 6

    What is meant by the fabrication of Louis XIV?

    Model answer

    The argument that the king's public image was systematically manufactured through medals, histories, engravings, statues, tapestries, ceremonies and buildings, so that the Louis XIV known to Europe was a deliberate construction requiring the same scrutiny as any other propaganda.

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