It’s clear why everyone (especially this morning) was clamoring to see Versailles. The palace is large and could undoubtedly be seen from quite a distance in the 100 years or so that it was used as a royal residence and court. As I said in my journal entry, the gold on the palace gates gleams in the sun and must have been otherworldly to visitors and citizens who sought favors from the king. 

Our guide’s information about the building of Versailles and Louis XIV’s extravagance in both the palace itself and the movement of the entire court a three-to-four-hour carriage ride from Paris was excellent. The chapel (£2.5 million) and the hall of mirrors (£800,000) are visible representations of the wastefulness of the French monarchs and support Paine’s critiques of hereditary monarchies as essentially accountable to no one. The cost of Louis XIV’s ostentatious rooms covered in the richest wall coverings, elaborate paintings, and expensive gold, while lavish, was probably dwarfed by the money spent on the elaborate parties he threw there four nights each week, which almost certainly totaled tens of millions of pounds over the course of his reign. 

Surprisingly, seeing Versailles made me somewhat sympathetic to Louis XVI. While he spent extravagantly on wars (including the American Revolution, in which the French supported the Americans against the English) and other wasteful items (such as Marie Antoinette’s Versailles French country village), he appears to be more of a symptom of the problem rather than the disease. As Paine points out, “It was not against Louis XVIth but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. . . . The Monarch and the Monarchy were distinct and separate things . . . .” 

Nonetheless, after seeing Versailles, I have a new understanding of why the Revolution happened when it did. Given the confluence of events in the years leading to the Revolution (the wastefulness of the monarchy over several generations and a weak monarch, the overtaxation of the poor and their lack of representation, inflation and rising food costs, and an increasingly powerful clergy), it would seem almost impossible for a revolution not to have taken place when it did in France.