ART RESTORATION AND CONSERVATION
Versailles Having A Face Lift.
20 years will be spent restoring Versailles to its former glory.
By
John Henley
Historic buildings do not come much grander than the Chateau de Versailles. Neither do restoration projects: the one drawn up for Louis XIV's little exercise in 17th-century excess outside Paris will last for nearly 20 years and cost almost €400m (£274m). The Sun King's 700-room palace and 800-hectare (2,000-acre) garden are to be given a long-overdue facelift aimed at restoring their lost sparkle - recapturing their architectural purity and rendering them safe for the 10 million people who visit each year. "This is the first big restoration program for Versailles since the early 1800s, and the biggest such undertaking in France since the remodeling of the Louvre in the late 1900s," said the culture minister, Jean-Jacques Aillagon. "It is on a fitting scale for one of our country's most precious monuments." Frederic Didier, the chief architect of the Historic Monuments Commission, said comparisons with the Louvre project may be right "in terms of scale, but not of intention. There, we built a modern museum inside an ancient palace. Here, it's the palace itself that's the museum."
Photo: Chateau de
Versailles
Photo:
Palace of Versailles, front view
The mammoth restoration of
probably the world's most extraordinary classical folly, a near-mythical
symbol of Gallic glory, comes amid mounting criticism of the state of France's
major monuments. A recent report said one in five historic buildings,
including the Chateau de Chambord on the Loire, Amiens Cathedral and the Grand
Palais in Paris, was endangered - or already dangerous. The first phase of the
operation, due to last until 2009, will focus on making Versailles less
hazardous: the palace regularly comes close to blowing up when its huge,
ancient boiler overheats; the electricity system dates from the 1940s; and the
fire and burglar alarms are antiquated. Some 10 hectares of roof need redoing,
500 window frames need replacing, lavatory, cafe and restaurant facilities
must be modernized; and public access is to be improved by cutting the number
of entrances to two and simultaneously trebling the signposted tours around
the palace's never-ending corridors and galleries. Versailles, aptly described
by Voltaire as "a masterpiece of bad taste and magnificence", emerged over
decades, as Louis XIV - jealous of one of his minister's country pads at
Vaux-le-Vicomte - turned a royal hunting lodge into a home fit for a Sun King.
Louis moved in in 1682, along with most of the court and its entourage -
20,000 people in all. His five-year-old great grandson, Louis XV, succeeded
him 25 years later and, when he was old enough, gaily continued adding to the
palace's overblown grandeur.
Marie-Antoinette,
the wife of Louis XV's ill-fated grandson Louis XVI, famously acted out her
milkmaid fantasies in the toy farm she had built in the grounds. Abandoned
after the 1789 revolution, the chateau was rescued by Louis Philippe, also
known as the Citizen King, in the 1830s. Ceremonial state events were held
there and major treaties signed: Germany pronounced itself an empire in the
Hall of Mirrors in 1871, but later, in the same astonishing 73-metre-long
room, signed the 1919 treaty that ended the first world war.
Photo: An other view of
Chateau de Versailles
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