A prodigious dream of stone, gold, greenery, water and light, an enchanted realm of harmony and majesty, Versailles was designed to manifest to the world the immortal glory of the French monarchy. Paradoxically, this place glittering with a thousand lights, like the earthly reflections of Olympus and the Apollonian imagination, is also a secret place, shrouded in legends, filled with shadows and mysteries, with its hidden lives, its opaque intrigues, its unavowable conciliabula, its hushed whispers in the corridors, its rustling of silk at dusk on the great terrace and its unusual rendezvous with history. How, for example, to understand the symbolism of the château and its grounds, the intertwining of the small apartments, the palace of royal love affairs, the myth of the Parc aux Cerfs, the affair of the Necklace, the encrypted correspondence between Fersen and Marie-Antoinette, the vices and disorders of the court, secret diplomacy, the Versailles of Napoleon 1st, Louis-Philippe and the Commune, the renewed splendor of the Gaullian Republic and the ghosts that are said to haunt the gardens of Trianon…

Under the direction of Jean-Christian Petitfils, renowned biographer of the four Bourbons who settled at Versailles, stayed there and transformed it, eighteen of the finest historians and heritage curators take another, often little-known look at this incomparable masterpiece of French history.

Under the direction of Jean-Christian Petitfils
with Editions Perrin, 2023
Dimensions: 14 x 21 cm
Number of pages: 304
ISBN : 9782262103088
Publication date: October 2023

French